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Cavafy the poet-historian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

David Ricks
David Ricks*
Affiliation:
Centre for Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek, University of Birmingham
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Extract

This article’s title is a sweeping one, but this is in fact a discussion of just two poems by Cavafy — and both of those on mythological subjects. The aim is, in a small way, to bridge the gap between myth and history in Cavafy’s poetry; the title hints that this is by way of a respectful response to D.N. Maronitis’ valuable survey, ‘C.P. Cavafy: a poet-reader’ (Maronitis 1983a). It is also, of course, an adaptation of the term which Cavafy is said to have used of himself, . As a recent discussion has pointed out, this could mean ‘poet-historian’ or ‘historical poet’ (Beaton 1983); here I shall be mining the term with this particular emphasis: that Cavafy was a reader of history as well as of poetry, and that his poems bear the traces of historical texts. This may sound like news from nowhere; but I believe that I have something new to say about these two poems, which one has grown used to categorizing automatically as ‘mythological’. They are Amoxia (1901) and ‘Amoxia (1904) (Cavafy 1981: 1. 102, 109-110).

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 12 , 1988 , pp. 169 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1988

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