Konstantinos P. Cavafy

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (Alexandria, 1863-1933), known in English as Constantine P. Cavafy, was a Greek poet, journalist and civil servant. Writing in modern Greek, he shaped a style that mixed learned and everyday forms, and he is now regarded as one of the most distinguished Greek poets of the twentieth century and an important figure in Western poetry as a whole.

His father was a merchant who traded Egyptian cotton and English cloth. After the sudden death of the father in 1870, the family spent several years in England, moving between Liverpool and London. When a financial crisis dissolved the family business, they returned to Alexandria, where they never regained their former standing. During the 1882 disturbances and bombardment of the city, the family moved for a time to Constantinople. According to the sources, it was there that he had his first homosexual relationships, with one of his cousins.

Back in Alexandria he worked for thirty years as a clerk in the Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. Because of his Greek citizenship he was never given a permanent post, and he supplemented this income with work on the stock exchange. He never wanted to publish a book. He had two small pamphlets printed, one in 1904 with twelve poems and another in 1910 with twenty-seven, and gave out loose sheets to those he thought capable of understanding him. His reputation grew first among Greek readers and then abroad, largely thanks to E. M. Forster, who met him in 1917 and helped introduce his work to English readers.

His canon consists of 154 poems, which he revised for years until he considered them finished. He was drawn to history, but not to its great victories; he preferred moments of decline, such as the Hellenistic world, Byzantium and the coexistence of pagan and Christian culture. From myths he kept mostly the names and rebuilt the situations in his own way. In his poems on desire, furtive love, guilt and the passing of time, he keeps a restrained irony and a free verse that avoids rhetoric.

He died of cancer of the larynx in Alexandria in 1933, on his seventieth birthday. His poetry is now taught in Greece and in universities around the world. In Spain he influenced Jaime Gil de Biedma and the Novísimos poets, while T. S. Eliot and Marguerite Yourcenar were among those who helped make him known beyond Greece.