Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Πέτρου Καβάφης [ka'vafis]; 29 April (OS 17 April), 1863 – 29 April 1933), known, especially in English, as Constantine P. Cavafy and often published as C. P. Cavafy (), was a Greek poet, journalist, and civil servant from Alexandria. A major figure of modern Greek literature, he is sometimes considered the most distinguished Greek poet of the 20th century. His works and consciously individual style earned him a place among the most important contributors not only to Greek poetry, but to Western poetry as a whole.
Cavafy's poetic canon consists of 154 poems, with dozens more that remained incomplete or in sketch form were not published until much later. He consistently refused to publish his work in books, preferring to share it through local newspapers and magazines, or even print it himself on broadsheets and give it away to anyone who might be interested. His most important poems were written after his fortieth birthday and published two years after his death.
Cavafy's work has been translated numerous times into many languages. His friend E. M. Forster, the novelist and literary critic, first introduced his poems to the English-speaking world in 1923; he referred to him as "The Poet", famously describing him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe". His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace".
Cavafy was born in 1863 in Alexandria (then Ottoman Egypt) where his Greek parents had settled in 1855; he was baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church and had six older brothers. Originating from the Phanariot Greek community of Constantinople (now Istanbul), his father was named Petros Ioannis (Πέτρος Ἰωάννης)—hence the Petrou patronymic (GEN) in his name—and his mother Charicleia (Χαρίκλεια; née Georgaki Photiades, Γεωργάκη Φωτιάδη). His father was a prosperous merchant who had lived in England in earlier years and held both Greek and British citizenship. Two years after his father's sudden death in 1870, Cavafy and his family settled for a while in England, moving between Liverpool and London. In 1876, the family faced financial problems due to the Long Depression of 1873 and with their business now dissolved they moved back to Alexandria in 1877. Cavafy attended the Greek college "Hermes", where he made his first close friends and at the age of eighteen started drafting his own historical dictionary.
In 1882, disturbances in Alexandria caused the family to move, though again temporarily, to Constantinople, where they stayed at the house of his maternal grandfather, Georgakis Photiades. In that year a revolt broke out in Alexandria against the Anglo-French control of Egypt, precipitating the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War. During these events, Alexandria was bombarded, and the family apartment at Ramleh was burned. Upon his arrival in Constantinople, the nineteen-year old Cavafy first came in contact with his many relatives and started researching his ancestry, trying to define himself in the wider Hellenic context. There he started preparing for a career in journalism and politics, and began his first systematic attempts to write poetry.
In 1885, Cavafy returned to Alexandria, where he lived for the rest of his life, leaving it only for excursions and travels abroad. After his arrival, he reacquired his Greek citizenship and abandoned the British citizenship his father had acquired in the late 1840s. He started working as a news correspondent at the journal Telegraphos (1886) and later worked at the stock exchange. He was eventually hired as a temporary, due to his foreign citizenship, clerk in the British-run Egyptian Ministry of Public Works. A conscientious worker, Cavafy held this position by renewing it annually for thirty years (Egypt remained a British protectorate until 1926). During these decades, a series of unexpected deaths of close friends and relatives left their mark on him. He published his poetry from 1891 to 1904 in the form of broadsheets, and only for his close friends. Any acclaim he received came mainly from within the Greek community of Alexandria. In 1903, he was introduced to mainland-Greek literary circles through a favourable review by Gregorios Xenopoulos. He received little recognition because his style differed markedly from mainstream Greek poetry of the period. Twenty years later, after the Greek defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), a new generation of almost nihilist poets (e.g. Karyotakis) found inspiration in Cavafy's work.
A biographical note written by Cavafy reads:
I am from Constantinople by descent, but I was born in Alexandria—at a house on Seriph Street; I left very young, and spent much of my childhood in England. Subsequently I visited this country as an adult, but for a short period of time. I have also lived in France. During my adolescence I lived over two years in Constantinople. It has been many years since I last visited Greece. My last employment was as a clerk at a government office under the Ministry of Public Works of Egypt. I know English, French, and a little Italian.
In 1922, Cavafy quit his high-ranking position at the department of Public Works, an act that he characterized as liberation, and devoted himself to the completion of his poetic work. In 1926, the Greek state honoured Cavafy for his contribution to Greek letters by awarding him the silver medal of the Order of Phoenix. He died of cancer of the larynx on 29 April 1933, his 70th birthday. Since his death, Cavafy's reputation has grown; his poetry is taught in school in Greece and Cyprus, and in universities around the world.
E. M. Forster knew him personally and wrote a memoir of him, contained in his book Alexandria. Forster, Arnold J. Toynbee, and T. S. Eliot were among the earliest promoters of Cavafy in the English-speaking world before the Second World War. In 1966, David Hockney made a series of prints to illustrate a selection of Cavafy's poems, including In the dull village.
Cavafy's complete literary corpus includes the 154 poems that constitute his poetic canon; his 75 unpublished or "hidden" poems, that were found completed in his archive or in the hands of friends, and weren't published until 1968; his 37 rejected poems, which he published but later renounced; his 30 incomplete poems that were found unfinished in his archive; as well as numerous other prose poems, essays, and letters. According to the poet's instructions, his poems are classified into three categories: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual.
Cavafy was instrumental in the revival and recognition of Greek poetry both at home and abroad. His poems are, typically, concise but intimate evocations of real or literary figures and milieux that have played roles in Greek culture. Some of the defining themes are uncertainty about the future, sensual pleasures, the moral character and psychology of individuals, homosexuality, and a fatalistic existential nostalgia. Besides his subjects, unconventional for the time, his poems also exhibit a skilled and versatile craftsmanship, which is extremely difficult to translate. Cavafy was a perfectionist, obsessively refining every single line of his poetry. His mature style was a free iambic form, free in the sense that verses rarely rhyme and are usually from 10 to 17 syllables. In his poems, the presence of rhyme usually implies irony.
Cavafy drew his themes from personal experience, along with a deep and wide knowledge of history, especially of the Hellenistic era. Many of his poems are pseudo-historical, or seemingly historical, or accurately but quirkily historical.
One of Cavafy's most important works is his 1904 poem "Waiting for the Barbarians". The poem begins by describing a city-state in decline, whose population and legislators are waiting for the arrival of the barbarians. When night falls, the barbarians have not arrived. The poem ends: "What is to become of us without barbarians? Those people were a solution of a sort." The poem influenced literary works such as The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940), The Opposing Shore (1951) by Julien Gracq, and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J. M. Coetzee.