Word: alexandria
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...literary schema then being developed by his contemporaries--Joyce, Pound, Yeats--as well as by Eliot himself. But while the use of "a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity," as Eliot explained his term, was setting the literati of America and the British Isles on fire, in far-off Alexandria, Egypt, a poet who is just now receiving the recognition due a major literary figure was fashioning his own "mythical method." Constantine P. Cavafy, the poet of "Greeks in exile," had begun to construct his corporate poetic statement a dozen years before Eliot's review, and in isolation from...
...life. Liddell has carefully scrutinized all previous sources in an effort to weed out fancy from fact, and the result is a thoughtful, sympathetic and above all scholarly rendition of a life. Launching his study with a discussion of the Cavafy genealogy, Liddell traces the poet's boyhood in Alexandria, London and Constantinople; his return to Alexandria as a young man; and his attempts to conceal his homosexuality from the Alexandrian society in which his family moved--despite their displacement from the upper-class Greek community to a state of near-impoverishment. The book is to a certain extent...
...SAKE of those of us with less prior exposure to Cavafy, the authoritativeness hailed by Keeley is occasionally supplanted by enlightening as well as entertaining sketches of the poet. Liddell's chapter on "Reading and Working Life" is considerably enlivened by the reminiscences of a colleague in Alexandria's Irrigation Office, where Cavafy worked for years. The co-worker remembers...
...their imaginations." But Cavafy, in relative literary isolation, "was the first of these to project a coherent poetic image of the mythical city that shaped his vision"--what Keeley terms "the Alexandrian mode." Keeley shows how Cavafy's development of his "myth in progress" paralleled his personal acceptance of Alexandria in literal and metaphorical terms--and how the mythical city increasingly shut out the real one below Cavafy's apartment window. Thus, imagination and memory became the primary agents of poetic re-creation, giving the real city importance as a "catalyst" for the synthesis of a poetic myth...
This development also occurs in Cavafy's historical poetry, which focuses particularly on ancient Alexandria from the age of the Ptolemies to the Arab conquest in the 7th century, although the poet also branched out to other areas of the Panhellenic world and to other historical time periods. In his re-creation of history, Cavafy is selective, searching out historical byways and frequently portraying events from the perspective of the "victim" rather than the "manipulator." Thus, "the game of nations interests Cavafy primarily because of what it reveals about basic, perennial attitudes or emotions and only secondarily because of what...