BOO KS
III
delicate, oblique, and high praise of the earlier Eliot can be found
in
Abinger Harvest,
introduced Cavafy to English readers in his 1923
Pharos and Pharillon.
Like Eliot, Cavafy makes living poetry out of
the present but also out of the past, which he
presently
sees. I suppose,
too, that being an Alexandrian Greek is something like being an Anglo–
American-something archaistically 'precious' and more royalist than
the king. Unlike Eliot, Cavafy abstains from anything approaching 'phi–
losophy' or generalizing abstract perspective (the sort found in "Burnt
Norton") ; but even here they are not so far apart as either is from,
say, Rexroth: Eliot's metaphysical training has chiefly had the salutary
effect of making him philosophically diffident, as a sense of humor
keeps a poet from being unintentionally comic.
Like Eliot, Cavafy is at once a poet who seems, in contrast to the
epic 'greats,' both limited and minor; but the emphasis should substan–
tially fall on "seems": These poets are not minor as Gray and Collins
and Bryant (poets whom I respect) are minor. For extent and grand
style, they substitute implication.
Trying out Cavafy's poems on many kinds of persons has convinced
me of his having a range unpredictable of a poet so, at first and second
sight, special.
Cuius cuique.
The patently contemporary poems are for
the ,most part poems of homosexual experience. In a fashion alien to
English and American poetry-and to Proust and Gide-they are,
however, neither self-flagellating nor defiantly assertive nor mawkish.
They accept, record, interpret; and they are usually translatable into
normal terms of sex, love, and union: the more so, it would appear be–
cause they attempt no disguise of their origin.
Another group of Cavafy's poems reinterpret, with scrupulous taste,
passages from Homer: I think especially of "The Horses of Achilles"
and "Ithaka" (a distinct improvement on Tennyson's "Ulysses," of
which, vestigially, it cannot but remind an English reader).
Most to my own taste-and, happily for it, most abundant-are
poems Byzantine in both time and space: post-Christian and Easternly
H ellenic. As Mavrogordato's really helpful notes make clear, Cavafy
was an assimilating and interpreting reader of Byzantine histori ans,
secular and ecclesiastical-of Philostratus'
Lives of the Sophists
and the
Letters of Julian the Apostate. His is the world of Gibbon's
Decline and
Fall;
but, in place of Gibbon's one-sidedly rationalistic irony, Cavafy's
irony is objectively empathic. Dear to him are the juxtapositions-in
J erusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria-of 'pagans,' neo-pagans like Julian,
H ebrews of varying zeal and orthodoxy, and Orthodox Christians. A
fine poem is "Myres: Alexandria, A.D. 340," a dramatic monologue
