Antique Desires

Cavafy’s sexual sensibility and the homoerotic aspects of his poetry, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations, embarrassed many of the earlier critics of his work and were often shunned from critical consideration or met with fierce satire. But even in recent years, after Cavafy’s international acclaim as a gay poet and his recognition in the context of World Literature, critical discussion of his erotic poetry tends to be sharply separated from its other facets, producing a theoretical and methodological partition that may impede a broader understanding of his work. This is particularly unsettling in the case of a poetic corpus where, as has aptly been suggested, “even though it remains unspoken, homosexual desire finally manages to mold and color all words and phrases, to permeate every theme and thought” (Papanikolaou, 2005, p. 242).