Πτυχές του καβαφικού μοντερνισμού: Τα «αποσιωπημένα» πεζά ποιήματα

Abstract

Τhe three prose poems by Cavafy that are known to us («The Regiment of pleasure», «The Ships», «The Garments») are the only sample of the poet' s exploration in the field of prose poetry. They represent Cavafy5s escape from the metrical verse in a crucial period of his poetic life, when from romanticism he turned to aesthetic symbolism. It was an attempt to renew his poetry (but this renewal finally occur ed in a different way). The above prose poems are the intertextual indices of the poet's experience as a reader of European prose poetry; moreover, they introduce a cavafian microcosm (desire, enclosure, nature of poetic art). The aim of my study is a close reading of these prose poems as narrative and rythmological entities, as well as an evaluation of them compared with the rest of Cavafy's work and, of course, with other European and Greek prose poems. Compared to the latter they constitute a significant deviation. They are essentially an important manifestation of a genre which in Greece did not significantly improve until Embirico's prose poetry. Cavafy mainly communicates with Baudelaire; he avoids the overflow of emotion, the ethic and moral commonplaces and the mythological (or occasionally biblical) elements in the subject matter commonly in use in Greek prose poetry of the period of aesthetism. Another aim of my study is to define the common elements of Cavafy's and Baudelaire's prose poetry through a brief comparative analysis. Via this coreading the elements of the identification inside the differentiation and vice versa are analysed. Futhermore, a re-evaluation and reclassification of Cavafy's early text «The Mountain» is being attempted. In conclusion, I make some assumptions about the reasons that kept Cavafy from publishing these poems, though not destroying his manuscripts. One may assume that the poet finally chose the unusual metrical stepping of a dislocated iamb and the «adventurous» enjambments, the grammatical and metrical acrobatics, because this disorganisation of the verse in his poetry serves the ironical subversion of the characters. Unlike dislocated verse, prose poetry being by nature less flexible and elliptical does not seem suitable for his subvertive poetics.