The History Man

44 JOURNAL OF THE HELLENIC DIASPORA
tized in order to contradict the perspective of the completed historical
record. Not only is the continuous thread of causally related events
broken up into its constituent elements, but the transference from historyas-event
to history-as-text, on which all our perception of the historical
past depends, is placed under the microscope. History-as-text requires
the verisimilitude of being "true to experience," and here it turns out that
the historian needs also to be a poet. The resounding, and often subtly
ironic, inscribed epigrams which appear in Cavafy's poetry are often the
work of professional poets, whose truth to fact is less evident than is their
desire to please. And the writing of history, as in "Anna Comnene" and
"Dareios" is an activity closely allied both in motive and in method to
the writing of poetry.
If time in Cavafy's poetry is the archetypal enemy, it is also a necessary
accomplice. Only by the appeal to history can the poet of the imaginative
present project his consciousness of the passing moment beyond the
bounds of the present to illuminate, and subvert, our received conception
of the past. The moment of creativity is validated by the appeal to history:
like Phernazes' dilemma, it can be documented or placed in a historical
context, but at the same time the recording of history is an impossibility
without the imaginative—and often subversive—impulse of the poet.
Cavafy's historical poems validate the poetic impulse as a constant factor
throughout two thousand years of history, while simultaneously erasing the
distinction between what he himself called "writing history" and "making
poetry."
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