SOURCE: “C. P. Cavafy and the Politics of Poetry,” in The Text and Its Margins: Post-Structuralist Approaches to Twentieth-Century Greek Literature, edited by Margaret Alexiou and Vassilis Lambropoulos, Pella Publishing Company, Inc., 1985, pp. 37-58.

In the essay below, Jusdanis analyzes Cavafy's poems “The Enemies,” “A Byzantine Nobleman in Exhile Composing Verses,” “Growing in Spirit” and the essay “The Thoughts of an Old Artist” discussing ideas of power and politics in his work.

The politics of Cavafy's poetry has been largely ignored or misunderstood, since traditional criticism assumes that his oeuvre itself is apolitical. Thus, any study of its politics that was undertaken proved to be biographical in so far as it involved the search for Cavafy's personal political orientation and its relationship with the current Zeitgeist. This approach, whose epistemological assumptions are based on the romantic notion of art as the expression of the artist's personality, is the...