Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Paul Valéry
C. P. Cavafy
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
In the autumn of 1871, as France was still reeling from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian War and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune, a child was born in the Mediterranean port town of Sète who would become one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary intellects. Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry entered the world on October 30th, in a region where the brilliant southern light seemed to sharpe…
“The smile is a system; consideration is foresight.”
Constantine Peter Cavafy, universally known as C. P. Cavafy, was born Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, on 29 April 1863, and died there on 29 April 1933, his seventieth birthday. The coincidence has naturally encouraged a Cavafian reading of his life: a date returning with a measured inevitability, an ending that seems to complete a private design. Yet Cavafy’s achievement was anything but neat or pr…
“I have tried to write about things which are not entirely foreign to me.”
About 2,668 km separate Sète, Occitanie, France from Alexandria, Egypt. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Paul Valéry: sète, franco-prussian war, paris commune, symbolist movement, stéphane mallarmé, la jeune parque, le cimetière marin, charmes. C. P. Cavafy: alexandria, greek diaspora, anglo-egyptian war, peter john cavafy, haricleia georgaki cavafy, the god abandons antony, waiting for the barbarians, che fece... il gran rifiuto.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Paul Valéry: Longing, Sensuality, Tenderness. C. P. Cavafy: Despair, Sorrow, Longing.
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