Marching in the Name of Pleasure: Cavafy's sexual aesthetics in view of his models

This article explores the sexual aesthetics of Cavafy’s poetry from a literary perspective; it draws attention to two crucial but largely overlooked models which are instructive vis-à-vis Cavafy’s appreciation of the role of sex in literature beyond his personal sexual orientation. First, I argue that Cavafy reworks the motif of militant Eros, found amply in Straton’s anthology of epigrams known as the Musa paidike (which survives mainly in book 12 of the Greek Anthology), by glossing it with a distinctive Roman elegy twist. Cavafy interweaves the themes of militia and servitium amoris, so typical of Latin elegy and reinterprets servitium amoris as dutiful, determined service in the name of sensual pleasure rather than inevitable enslavement to the force of erotic passion which the poet cannot resist. Roman elegiac poets, especially Propertius, with whom Cavafy was thoroughly familiar, are typically understood to have employed the motif to convey the crushing weight of their amorous affliction and their inability to break free from their unworthy object of affection. This turn occurs characteristically in Cavafy’s prose poem The Regiment of Pleasure (or of the Senses, as often translated). The mature language of the poem has led Savidis to date it between 1894 and 1897; during this early period Cavafy embraced the model of the Parnassiens while also being influenced by the movement of symbolism. Savidis’ dating of the poem is also supported by the fact that Cavafy reworks numerous motifs introduced here in his later poems, dated from 1904 to 1917, as I will point out in my analysis of the Regiment. Second, I wish to explain the Regiment as Cavafy’s response to Baudelaire’s rejection of the avant garde in his Mon coeur mis à nu (My heart laid bare). Baudelaire composed the poem in Paris in the early 1860s, shortly before his death, and it was published posthumously in 1877. Although Cavafy’s appreciation and creative competition with Baudelaire has been thoroughly acknowledged in the bibliography, to my knowledge, this connection has not been identified to date. My reading of the Regiment and its models aims to review Cavafy’s sexual aesthetics which I perceive as homoerotic but not exclusively homosexual; thus, I ought to make a few methodological distinctions prior to my analysis of the poem.