Cavafy

‘As Good as Great Poetry Gets’


by


Daniel Mendelsohn


New York Review of Books        November 20 2008

…..he died in the Greek Hospital in Alexandria, on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday: an elegant closure that is nicely suggested by what is said to have been his last act. For we are told that on one of the pieces of paper that had become his sole mode of communication, he drew a circle; and then placed a small dot in the middle of that circle. Whatever he may have meant by that glyph, certain people will recognize in it an apt symbol. It is the conventional notation, used by writers when correcting printer’s proofs, for the insertion of a period, a full stop.