The Importance of Being Long Dead: Ancient Characters and Modern Desire in Fernando Pessoa and C.P. Cavafy

Abstract

Pessoa and Cavafy are key figures in European Modernism. The fact that both have consistently drawn on the classical past to write about eroticism is a key theme in their work and an overlooked connection. This paper will focus on the appropriation of classical characters both by Pessoa and Cavafy to discuss this pattern as the common theme through which they can be compared. The influence of other authors, especially Baudelaire and Walter Pater, whose approach to classics played a vital role in shaping Modernity’s perspectives on the classical tradition, will also be discussed. These elements will be taken into account to examine how the two poets have borrowed and/or subverted the authority of the classics to discuss homoerotic desire and politics in poems penned during and in the aftermath of World War I.

Keywords

• Pessoa, Fernando
• Cavafy, Constantine
• Modernism
• Modernismo
• Reader-response criticism
• Baudelaire, Charles
• Pater, Walter
• Decadence (Literary movement)
• Antinoüs
• Antinous
• Eroticism in literature
• World War, 1914-1918