Clearing the Ground: C.P. Cavafy Poetry and Prose 1902-1911 (Book)
Title: Clearing the Ground: C.P. Cavafy Poetry and Prose 1902-1911
Author: Martin McKinsey
Author: C. P. Cavafy
Editor: Martin McKinsey
Abstract: Clearing the Ground illuminates a crucial decade of Cavafy's artistic development, marked at one end by a period of personal crisis and near creative stasis, at the other by the poetic force of the celebrated "Ithaca." The years in between are held together by the "Unpublished Notes on Poetics and Ethics." Part private confession, part public pronouncement, part journal entry, and philosophical pensée, these "Notes" were recorded between 1902 and 1911. In some of them, according to the eminent critic G. P. Savidis, Cavafy attempted to formulate "thoughts and feelings never before uttered" in his own language — in certain cases, in any language. The full body of the notes is correlated in this volume with the poetry Cavafy was writing contemporaneously — in particular the startling "hidden poems" begun in 1904. What emerges is a striking narrative of artistic and personal becoming. The afterward by Martin McKinsey examines Cavafy's sexuality and accompanying pressures in historical context and suggests the part they may have played in his poetic breakthrough.
Year: 2015
Publisher: Laertes Books
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 978-1942281009
Translator: Martin McKinsey
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Permalink: https://apps.neh.gov/publicquery/products.aspx?gn=FT-60391-12