Constantine Cavafy was an exceptionally timid man. Even to meet admirers of his poetry caused him distress: he would postpone seeing them with desperate excuses. In his daily life he was often accused of insincerity; but Seferis, having noted the fact, goes on to say: ‘as a poet he appears to have been condemned to the truth, his truth, on pain of death’. That is what distinguishes the witness borne by a poet in its purest form: the necessity at whatever cost of delivering the truth as he knows it. Much of Cavafy's most important verse – on persons, events and situations in that Hellenistic and Byzantine world which had very nearly dropped out of history – may seem to bear upon the predicaments of his age in a very oblique fashion. Yet to him could be applied the precept of Emily Dickinson: ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’. The message is given in code, but having been mastered it presents a view of Cavafy's people, of their actualities in the light of the past, which is moving and direct. Cavafy writes in a spare, prosaic style: the very flatness of expression, the un-musicality even, are the signs of a painful effort to be sincere. In the contemplation of history he could find the right understanding of the modern world and of his place in it.