Word: alexandrians
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...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 a biography of the entire family, for Cavafy (who never married, although he may have had heterosexual affairs in early manhood), lived with...
...Yeats, Eliot and Pound--who, like Cavafy, shaped "their individual myths out of the cities and countries of 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...
Cavafy spun out his Alexandrian mode on two planes simultaneously: the contemporary "sensual city" and the historical "world of Hellenism." His alienation from the real city is most visible in the erotic poetry which sprang from his own experiences--those of a homosexual necessarily but bitterly shackled by the conventions of his milieu. The evolution of these poems from composition to publication reveals a progression from cautious ambiguity to an increasingly more explicit statement of the poet's passions. Such an advancement mirrored Cavafy's developing belief in honest acceptance of one's passions and surroundings, in bowing...
Traveler, if you 're an Alexandrian, you won't blame...
From his desk, Hofer looks up, pointed across his office, and said, "That is my favorite thing here. It is a cast from the British Museum head of Hypnos, which is Graeco-Roman, and underneath it is written in Greek what was over the Alexandrian Library: 'A healing place for the soul.' That just gives me peace when I feel ... Well, wouldn't that give you peace...