Kavafis' poetry, while steadfastly resisting categorization, rules, and generalizations, at the same time adapts, with protean flexibility, to interpretive frameworks and theories, constantly immersing its readers in old and new dilemmas.

This study engages with both the older and the more recent Kavafis bibliography, rekindling the discussion on the influences that defined and shaped the poetic temperament of the Alexandrian.

Through theoretical and historical approaches, the literature of Decadence, as it is shaped in France and disseminated throughout Europe, is not exclusively defined by the cult of the Beautiful or the Morbid, but dynamically addresses the relationship with antiquity and history.

This persistent engagement with the ancient world, whether concerning reading practices or experimental confrontations with writing, ultimately describes and interprets one of the figures of modernity.

And while the reception of Decadence in the ethnographic Greece of the late 19th century leaves little trace, in Kavafis' poetry it is detected as a vibrant relationship with the European literature of the time, from which themes and motifs are consistently and sometimes unpredictably drawn, reevaluating and redefining the significance of historical method in his poetic art.