SOURCE: “Cavafy and Eliot—A Comparison,” in On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism, translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos, Little, Brown and Company, 1966, pp. 119-62.

In the excerpt which follows, Seferis proposes that the poetry of Cavafy and T. S. Elliot, despite differences in technique, contains parallel themes and similar outlooks.

I am not going to suggest that Constantine Cavafy and Thomas Eliot are bound together by any bonds of influence. They are too widely separated by the years—almost a whole generation. Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863; Eliot in St. Louis in 1888. When Eliot is still at the starting point of his orientation—about 1920, with his “Gerontion,” I believe—Cavafy has already published the poems which reveal his basic characteristics.¹

To be more precise, I do not mean that the Cavafy of this period is already his full self. On...