Not Text but Texture: C.P. Cavafy's Poems Unread, Unfinished, Unwritten

C.P. Cavafy often writes poems about poets and their poems. In many cases, though, he fails to describe the poems he refers to, if he describes them at all, in more than the most detached and general terms. Yet a close reading of these apparently vague accounts of the poetry of others shows that although Cavafy does not describe that poetry, he nevertheless communicates its nature to his readers. In "Symeon," he does so by associating it with known literary figures. In most other cases, especially as "That's the One" indicates, Cavafy's poems about the poems others have written themselves constitute the poems about which he is writing. Such poems have a double existence: the very same text turns out to be both a poem by Cavafy himself and a work of the fictional poet to whom he refers without apparently citing.