CAN A GREAT POET HAVE A MEDIOCRE LIFE?

CAN A GREAT POET HAVE A MEDIOCRE LIFE? I think the answer is no. In this essay in the New York Review of Books, it appears that Daniel Mendelsohn thinks that Constantine Cavafy was a great poet who had a mediocre life. He refers to “the middling job as a government bureaucrat, a modest, even parsimonious routine…”, and says: “All this—the mediocrity, the obscurity (whether intentional or not)—stands in such marked contrast to the poetry….” Mendelsohn refers disapprovingly several more times to Cavafy’s job, which was as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria. “[T]he life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a mid-level provincial functionary.” Mendelsohn also comments unfavorably on the “overstuffed” apartment where Cavafy lived for years: “The cluttered, declasse surroundings, the absence of aesthetic distinction, the startlingly conventional, to say nothing of middlebrow, taste….” and adds that Cavafy life involved the “increasingly tame pleasures of a middling bourgeois existence….”