LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      The Poet-Historian

      “OUTSIDE HIS POETRY Cavafy does not exist.” Today, seventy-five years after the death of “the Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece), the judgment passed in 1946 by his fellow poet George Seferis—which must have seemed rather harsh at the time, when the Constantine Cavafy who had existed in flesh and blood was still a living memory for many people—seems only to gain in validity. That flesh-and-blood existence was, after all, fairly unremarkable: a middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious life, no great fame or recognition until relatively late in life (and even then, hardly great), a private life of homosexual encounters kept so discreet that even today its content, as much as there was content, remains largely unknown to us. All this—the ordinariness,

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