City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2016 A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca: The Sea, the City and the Body in the Poetics of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy Michael P. Skafidas Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/728 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] A PASSAGE FROM BROOKLYN TO ITHACA: THE SEA, THE CITY AND THE BODY IN THE POETICS OF WALT WHITMAN AND C. P. CAVAFY By M ICHAEL SKAFIDAS A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 ii ©2016 MICHAEL SKAFIDAS All rights Reserved iii A PASSAGE FROM BROOKLYN TO ITHACA: THE SEA, THE CITY AND THE BODY IN THE POETICS OF WALT WHITMAN AND C.P. CAVAFY By MICHAEL SKAFIDAS This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Comparative Literature in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Wayne Koestenbaum __________ _______________________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Giancarlo Lombardi ___________ _____________________________________________ Date Executive Officer André Aciman ___________________________________________________ David Reynolds ____________________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv Abstract A PASSAGE FROM BROOKLYN TO ITHACA: THE SEA, THE CITY AND THE BODY IN THE POETICS OF WALT WHITMAN AND C.P. CAVAFY By MICHAEL SKAFIDAS Advisor: Professor Wayne Koestenbaum This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation to such a degree that a comparative examination of their poetics reveals two minds, and two narratives, closer than their continents. The textual approach of my subject includes the examination of poetry, prose writings, and autobiographical documentation, as well as biographical testimony. The thematic approach is organized around three key subjects that I see as integral and consistent in the poetics of Whitman and Cavafy: the sea, the city and the body. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation advisor Professor Wayne Koestenbaum for his unparalleled wisdom, support and effective supervision of my study. His valuable guidance (not to mention his remarkable promptness) made the timely completion of this project possible. I further wish to thank my two readers, Professor André Aciman and Professor David Reynolds, both great authorities on Cavafy and Whitman respectively. It was an honor having them as members of my Supervisory Committee. Special thanks to Professor Stefanos Rozanis from Athens, Greece, for sharing with me his profound knowledge of Cavafy and his era. Moreover, I wish to acknowledge the generosity of artist Lucas Samaras who provided me with insights for the third chapter, as well as with images of his work that appear his courtesy in the Image Gallery. Last but not least, I would like to thank my early mentor Professor Eugenia Paulicelli who inspired me to persevere and complete my graduate study. Naturally, I dedicate this work to the memory of my parents, Vasiliki and Panagiotis Skafidas. Without their love and encouragement none of this would have been possible. vi Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca 1 Harmonic Oppositions 3 Authoring Identity, Rethinking Masculinity 5 The Poet as a Cosmopolitan Loner 9 New World, Old World and the Legacy of the Enlightenment 15 Dissolving Barriers: Language, Meter and Innovation 19 The Negations of Modernity 37 Celebrating the Self, Visualizing the Body: Urban Narcissism and the Aesthetics of Solipsism 41 Chapter 1 The Sea …………………………………………………………………………………. The Throne of the Invisible and the Coming of the Central Man 45 A Nursery of the Craft 53 Traversing the Ulyssean Sea 56 The Meaning of Ithacas 62 Whitman on the Beach: Discovering the Invisible Influence 77 Cavafy on the Waterfront: Looking at the Mirror of the Earth and the Ego 85 Navigating a Sensual Sea 94 vii Chapter 2 The City …………………………………………………………………………………. Harbor of Dreams, City of Orgies: Discovering Language, Expressing the Self in the Urban Labyrinth 100 Champions of Desire: Spectacle, Consciousness and Memory in the Evanescent City 131 Chapter 3 The Body ………………………………………………………………………………… The Words of the Body 156 Embodying Memory, Inhabiting Desire 176 Mining the Truth from the Body: The Poetics of Confession and Reconstruction 191 Remembering the Body in Words and Images: Poetry in the age of Photography 196 On Lucas Samaras’ Island of Oblivion: Celebrating the Body in the Shadow of Whitman and Cavafy 202 Image Gallery ……………………………………………………………………….. 219 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………… 230 viii Figures Figure 1: Portrait of Walt Whitman. Samuel Hollyer, street engraving after Gabriel Harrison, 1855 ………………………………………………...……………. 219 Figure 2: Gabriel Harrison, Photographic Portrait of Whitman, 1854 ……………… 219 Figure 3: Charles Hine, Portrait of Whitman, 1860 …………………………………. 219 Figure 4: Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Whitman, 1860 ………………………………. 219 Figure 5: Frontispience for Complete Poems and Prose of Walt Whitman, 1855-1888. Photography by Charles H. Spierler, 1876……………………………… 220 Figure 6: Whitman and Bill Duckett (Photographer unknown), 1886 ……………… 221 Figure 7: Whitman with Duckett in Camden (Phhotographer unknown), 1886….…. 221 Figure 8: Thomas Eakins, “Old Man,” 1880s …………………………………………………….. 221 Figure 9: Photographic portrait of young Cavafy taken in Alexandria’s photography studio “Fettel & Bernard,” 1890s ……………………………………... 222 Figure 10: Photographic portrait of the older Cavafy, 1910s ..……………………… 222 Figure 11: David Hockney, Portrait of Cavafy in Alexandria ……………………….. 222 Figure 12: Photographic portrait of Cavafy taken in Alexandria’s photography studio “Fettel & Bernard,” 1890s ……..…………………………………………….. 222 Figure 13: Yannis Tsarouchis, Painting inspired by Cavafy’s poem “Outside the House.” …………………………………………………………………………... 223 Figure 14: Yannis Tsarouchis, Painting inspired by Cavafy’s poem “Desires.” ……. 223 Figure 15: David Hockney, Drawing inspired by Cavafy’s poem “He Asked About the Quality.” ………………………………………………………………...... 224 Figure 16: David Hockney, Portrait of Cavafy in Alexandria ……………………….. 224 Figure 17: David Hockney, Drawing inspired by Cavafy’s poem “Body of Love.” … 224 ix Figure 18: Lucas Samaras, “Self.” (Courtesy of the artist.) ………………………….. 225 Figures 19 & 20: Lucas Samaras, Self-portraits from the “Autopolaroids” series (Courtesy of the artist.) ……………………………………………………………….. 226 Figures 21 & 22: Lucas Samaras, Self-portraits from the “Phototransformations” series (Courtesy of the artist.) ………………………………………………………… 226 Figure 23: Lucas Samaras, A panoramic synthesis of Samaras’ self-portraits selected by the artist for this study. (Courtesy of the artist.) …………………………. 227 Figure 24: Lucas Samaras, Self-portrait, 2015. (Courtesy of the artist.) …………….. 228 Figure 25: Lucas Samaras, Self-portrait, 2005. (Courtesy of the artist.) …………….. 228 Figure 26: Lucas Samaras, Self-portraits from the “Autopolaroids” series. (Courtesy of the artist.) ………….…………………………………………………… 229 1 Introduction A Passage from Brooklyn to Ithaca This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. The affinities between Whitman and Cavafy start with the most generic one, the century in which they were born. Cavafy was twenty-nine years old the year (1892) Whitman died; thus, Cavafy in his formative years had plenty of opportunities and reasons to read Whitman, whose work and reputation were already established in the second half of the century in England and in France where Whitman was esteemed higher than in America.1 We have no practical evidence that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or any of his other works, were part of Cavafy’s library, which was poorly handled after his death;2 as a result only a small part of it survived.3 Nonetheless, it is highly unlikely that Cavafy, who was known to be 1 Erkkila and Blodgett in their studies have extensively documented Whitman’s reception in France and in England respectively. 2 The Cavafian scholar Stefanos Rozanis in a discussion with the author confirms that indeed after Cavafy’s death there was “book plundering” in his library to such degree that very few items were recorded. Further testimony to this matter in Peridis: 1948 (65) and Liddell (121-2). 3 In The Library of C. P. Cavafy (2003), M. Karabini-Iatrou claims that “the number of books of the survived