"Aesthetic to the point of affliction": Cavafy and English Aestheticism

Cavafy's adolescent years spent in England exposed him to the avant-garde paintings of numerous aesthetic artists associated with the Grosvenor Gallery with which his London Ionides and Cavafy relations had significant dealings. The poet's exposure to the Pre-Raphaelite art of Burne-Jones, the impressionism of Whistler, and the hedonistic poetry of Swinburne left an unmistakable impact on his art and shaped the budding poet's decadent aesthetic. Cavafy's early poems show the mark of high aestheticism, and his early literary interests are curiously akin to those of the second-generation Pre-Raphaelite painter-poets. Vestiges of this aesthetic will remain central to Cavafy's mature poems which foreground the relationship between the visual arts and poetry and exhibit pronounced similarities to the "fleshly school of poetry." Painting and sculpture remain significant inter-textual themes that align Cavafy with the English aesthetic movement with its erudite painting and pictorial writing.