Word: keeley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Keeley's essay fills that gap in Cavafy scholarship admirably. Keeley traces the poet's evolution from a labored Romanticist of no particular distinction to a creative and unique spokesman for the contemporary and ancient Hellenic worlds. Cavafy's literary odyssey bequeathed to modern literature a contribution which is just beginning to receive due recognition--a contribution, Keeley believes, akin to that of major poets such as 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...
...poetry of passions which were unacceptable to his cultural milieu, were ongoing expositions of the poet's personal unveiling and his commitment to honesty. During Cavafy's last years, his poetry began to display a universal statement: recognition of "man's subservience to the will of the gods," as Keeley puts...
...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 it reveals about the historical process..." Keeley explains. History serves a "metaphoric function," and it becomes one limb of Cavafy's poetic organism...
...Keeley's skillful organization of the material enhances his thesis, for the essay progresses much as Keeley would have Cavafy's myth evolve--from the first tentative attempts to circumscribe a subject to the buildup of a multicellular organism in which each part functions to the betterment of the whole. Keeley first discusses the interplay between the literal city of Alexandria and Cavafy's mythical counterpart. He then treats each plane--the sensual (contemporary) and historical--separately, and finally unifies the two in a brief discussion of the poet's latest work, and the beginnings of a "universal mode," which...
...CURIOUS neophyte, Keeley's book is a more provocative introduction to Cavafy's world than is Liddell's biography. Yet the two complement one another, for Keeley discusses the poet's life only insofar as it enters into the progression of the poetic myth, while Liddell brings poetry into his book only insofar as it illuminates the poet's life. Thus, for the truly inquisitive neophyte, reading both books more or less concurrently is a highly satisfactory introduction to Cavafy's life and work. And, by juxtaposing the two studies, one is relieved of Liddell's occasionally tedious scholarly circumspection...