Constantine Petrou Photiades Cavafy (1863 – 1933), who lived most of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, is arguably the most influential Greek-language poet of his day. His work—which focuses on the margins of empires and societies—is shaped by his own experience as a homosexual poet of the diaspora who stood, in E. M. Forster’s words, “at a slight angle to the universe” (Forster 1983, 13), living and working far from Athens, the literary center of the Greek-speaking world. Cavafy has since become a towering figure in Greek letters, while several English-language translations of his work have influenced writers as far-ranging as Forster, Lawrence Durrell, Joseph Brodsky, W. H. Auden, Mark Doty, and J. M. Coetzee. Though criticism dealing with the queer slant and homosexual content of his poems has only recently gained traction in Greece,...
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Citation: Emmerich, Karen. "Constantine Cavafy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 January 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=795, accessed 09 June 2026.]
