Journal of Modern Greek Studies

The way in which a poet expresses his world view is formed and colored by his sexual orientation. The critical neglect of Cavafy's eroticism and the sexual sensibility which it engenders therefore needs to be corrected. Recent critics have tried to do this by comparing Cavafy with his fin-de-siècle contemporaries, but a close examination of the poetic practice of homosexual poets on both sides of the English Channel shows that Cavafy's approach is completely different conceptually and stylistically: he does not share their predilection for coding, his poetry is not pederastic, he is not seeking to be provocative. If, on the other hand, we compare him with two late twentieth-century poets influenced by him, Mark Doty and Cathal Ò Searcaigh, his sensibility and his way of rendering it into poetry can be seen as "modern": Cavafy accepts the way in which the fragmentation inherent to gay experience can be reassembled into personal and group meanings, and he develops a mode of poetic composition where the "group meaning" of his poems derives from reading them in different sequences, arriving at different connections.