who studied history not only avidly but with a scholar's respect for detail and meticulous attention to nuance, would have recognized the dangers of abstracting people from their historical surroundings; and nowhere is this more true than in the case of Cavafy himself. To be sure, his work--the best of it, at any rate, which is as good as great poetry gets--is indeed timeless in the way we like to think that great literature can be, alchemizing the particulars of the poet's life, times, and obsessions into something relevant to a wide public over years and even centuries. But the tendency to see him as one of us, as someone of our own moment, speaking to us in a voice that is transparently, recognizably our own about things whose meaning is self-evident, threatens to take a crucial specificity away from him--one that, if we restore it to him, makes him seem only greater, more a poet of the future (as he once described himself).from The New York Review of Books: 'As Good as Great Poetry Gets'
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