Constantinos Cavafis y Jaime Gil de Biedma: dos poetas, una concepción vital y estética

My thesis is a comparative study of two poets, the Greek Constantinos Cavafis (Alexandria, 1863–1933) and the Spanish Jaime Gil de Biedma (Barcelona, 1929– 1990). My investigation doesn’t aim to search imitations or influences (basic concepts for the Comparative Literature of the nineteenth century), but analogies, parallelisms, affinities and confluences between these two authors that belong to different literary traditions. En consequence, my study is registered to the comparative studies of the twentieth century and, concretely, to the famous theory of the pollen of ideas. The aspects of the poetry of Cavafis and Gil de Biedma that I have analysed are the following: a) the irony; b) the dramatic character of their poetry (the poem as representation of the reality); c) the dramatic monologue; d) polyphony and dialogism (the presence of various voices and points of view); e) the role of the memory (the memory of the erotic experience lived in the past); f) the hedonism: the pleasure, the ultimate aim of life; g) the anxiety for the passage of time and the therapeutic function of the art (the art that heals up the wounds); h) the relation of Cavafis and Gil de Biedma with the so–called «poetry of experience»; i) the poet and the city (the urban scene seen not only as background but as a main character more of the poem); The final conclusion of my study is that the Greek and the Spanish poet share the hedonism as a vital and aesthetic principle. And both poets transform this hedonism, this bittersweet flavour that the life leaves when one evokes her ephemeral pleasures, into everlasting art.