Constantine Cavafy

The first biography in nearly fifty years of the greatest Greek poet of the twentieth century.

This study of C. P. Cavafy’s life portrays the man as a flawed genius who changed the fate of world poetry. Seeking to capture the contradictions and perplexities of Cavafy’s life and poetry, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys move through the poet's life thematically

The book begins in Cavafy’s hospital room, where he lies dying among his friends, before turning to his family, chronicling the lives of his parents and siblings and detailing the vicissitudes of the family after his father’s death with moves to London, Liverpool, and Istanbul. Next, the biography zooms in on his beloved city, Alexandria, which nourished his imagination and which he converted into a metaphor both of his own poetry and of modern life. Cavafy's circle is examined, too: his childhood companions, the friends of middle age, and finally those individuals with whom he associated at the end of his life.

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography also centers on the poetry itself, from Cavafy's first attempts to write verse to how, in middle age, he abandoned most of what he had previously written and developed the style that the world now knows as Cavafian. Further, his contradictions become apparent, as well as his crucial choice to sacrifice love for fame and a global reputation. .

A Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at the Ohio State University, Gregory Jusdanis is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, The Necessary Nation, Fiction Agonistes, and A Tremendous Thing. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Peter Jeffreys teaches at Suffolk University in Boston and has written and edited a number of books on Cavafy.