Collected Poems
Cavafy worked as a clerk in Alexandria for 30 years and published his poems privately in pamphlets. His subject was the Hellenistic world, its minor kings and soldiers and lovers, rendered with an irony that hid enormous erotic heat. "Ithaka" is the most widely quoted poem about the journey's meaning (not its destination); "Waiting for the Barbarians" is the great poem about how civilizations justify their decline.
In Greek, Cavafy plays purist katharevousa against street demotic; in English that music flattens into prose with line breaks, so you are largely reading the translator. His range is deliberately narrow: obscure Seleucid courtiers, ironic epitaphs, and remembered bodies in rented rooms, over and over. Keep a classical dictionary nearby or half the ironies sail past.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
