Abstract
The great Alexandrian Greek poet Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) continues to fascinate us with the deft, evocative way in which he interweaves ancient Hellenic history with some very modern concerns: sexuality, identity, time, writing. In this lecture, Daniel Mendelsohn traces the evolution of Cavafy's poetic art from his early work as an inexperienced acolyte of Baudelaire and the Parnassians to his inimitable and distinctive mature work of the 1920s and 1930s. In these masterpieces, Eros and loss - death, separation, forgetting - are inextricably and memorably intertwined, creating both a deeply haunted past (archaic, classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine) and an invigorating, even modernist modernism. For Cavafy, placing desire beyond the reach of the present is what makes writing poetry possible.
