Cavafy’s construction of poetic personae:‘Julian in Nicomedia’ and repetition as complementarity

The topic of lecture concerns the construction of personae in Cavafy’s poetry, on the basis of his own remark about his poetry “Cavafy never repeats himself”. The above principle also applies to poetic personae, as is evident from the evolution of Cavafy’s poetics. Cavafy kaleidoscopically completes the identity of the personae that inhabit his poetry, focusing either on the same individual or on people who are akin as regards their ideological idiosyncrasy.
For the purposes of lecture, Kostiou will focus on the construction of the identity of Julian at the time of his formation and explore elements that link him to other contradictory identities in Cavafy’s poems.