André Spears

“Despite appearances to the contrary, the language in Cavafy is anything but simple: it combines and interweaves strata in the Greek language that include ancient Greek, New Testament Greek, katharevoussa, and modern Greek. By the same token, I realize now that for all its originality and accessibility Cavafy’s poetry was exemplary of the larger recuperation of the ancient world that followed the discovery of “deep time” in 1859, and that led to the “archaic revival” that animated poetry and the arts through the heyday of modernism and beyond, a topic that later became of particular interest to me.”