a unique tone of voice . the complete poems of Cavafy . translated by Rae Dalven . 234 pp Hogarth press . 25 s . any new translation of Cavafy is to be welcomed , especially when it claims to be complete - and no doubt it is complete in the sense that it covers all those poems which have so far been published in Greek . the previous collection in English , translated by Professor Mavrogordato , has long been difficult to acquire . thus this new work fulfils an important need . some of Cavafy &apos;s most celebrated and most characteristic poems were written as early as 1911 and he wrote poems in every subsequent year until his death in 1933 . to English readers he was first introduced by E M Forster , who , in his Pharos and Pharillon , published in 1923 , wrote a witty and affectionate description of the poet in which occur the significant words &amp;hellip; a Greek gentleman in a straw hat , standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe . and one is inclined to say that the slight angle implies more than eccentricity ( and Cavafy was certainly eccentric ) ; it reminds one , too , of the leve clinamen of Lucretius - the slight deviation from the regular which is at the root of all creation . for one of the first things which strikes one about Cavafy is that he is unique . this is a point well made by Mr Auden in his introduction when he writes : I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands , but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy ; nobody else could possibly have written it . this does not mean , of course , that all translations of Cavafy are equally good ; but it does mean that it is almost impossible to translate him in a way that is positively misleading . the authentic voice is certain to come through . the present translation by Miss Rae Dalven is no exception to the rule . sometimes one may deplore a certain insensitivity to rhythm , and sometimes one may wish that Miss Dalven had been more ambitious - had attempted , for instance , to reproduce the rhyme which Cavafy uses in many of his poems . but on the whole the work is careful and exact . what Mr Auden calls Cavafy &apos;s unique tone of voice is everywhere recognizable . it is not so gracefully represented as in the translations of Professor Mavrogordato , but in quantity this volume has the advantage over the earlier one . it is unfortunately doubtful whether the reader will be greatly helped by Mr Auden &apos;s introduction . early on in this Mr Auden comes to the odd conclusion that if the importance of Cavafy &apos;s poetry is his unique tone of voice , there is nothing for a critic to say , for criticism can only make comparisons . this , certainly , does not prevent Mr Auden from going on himself for seven closely printed pages , which contain few comparisons . but the pages are not very illuminating . much more sensitive and thorough studies are to be found in Sir Maurice Bowra &apos;s the creative experiment and in Mr Sherrard &apos;s the marble threshing floor . these writers are aware that one function of criticism is to explain and they avoid such nearly meaningless statements as , Cavafy has three principal concerns : love , art , and politics in the original Greek sense . is it the politics of Homer , of Pericles , of Aristotle ? nothing could be more remote from Cavafy than any of these . what is in fact the case is that he was concerned with a view of a Greek &apos;s place in history , a view which was peculiarly his own and which has been found by his contemporaries and successors in the Greek tradition peculiarly true and enlightening . it is a view taken from a slight angle to the universe , but is none the less accurate for that . nearly the whole of Cavafy &apos;s life was spent in Alexandria . this , as can be seen when one knows Cavafy , was a fitting background . it was the city founded by Alexander the great , the city where he was buried , the city above all symbolical of the diffusion of Greek language and culture from the Indus to the far west . of other Greek cities only Athens and Constantinople have equally powerful associations , and the worlds of Alexandria and Constantinople are , of course , utterly different from the world of fifth-century Athens . it was out of the world of the Greek dispersal that Cavafy created his personal mythology - a world both of triumph and disaster , a world of courage , of humour and of irony . Cavafy was the first modern Greek poet who contrived to be patriotic without being romantic , and his method was to stand at a slight angle to what is assumed to be the universe of history . his favourite subjects are from Antioch , Alexandria , Byzantium , or from Greek states already subjugated to Rome . these are themes which we , in our normal classical education , are encouraged to regard as decadent ; and indeed so strong is prejudice that one will still find people who will apply the adjective decadent to Cavafy &apos;s poetry . it is therefore refreshing to find such a critic as Sir Maurice Bowra , who writes : &amp;hellip; respect for human courage and character is perhaps Cavafy &apos;s most characteristic note . the same gentle understanding and forceful irony are to be found in the poems that deal with love ( always homosexual love ) . here again Mr Auden does not help our understanding when he writes : the erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs . these are sometimes part of the theme , but from such things emerges a splendour of which Mr Auden seems unaware . has he not read Myres or the mirror in the hall ? however , Cavafy can speak , and has spoken , for himself . he has been the greatest influence from the past on contemporary Greek poetry and has already influenced poets in many other languages . his complete sincerity , his angular stance , his tenderness that is combined with the accuracy of a surgeon , his awareness of the past in the present and of the present in the past , his meticulousness , his grandeur - these are some of the qualities which no reader can fail to observe and which , singly and together , make him one of the greatest writers of our times . rebels with a pen . Bruce Ingham Granger : political satire in the American revolution , 1763-1783 . 314 pp Cornell University press . London : Oxford University press . 40 s . the American revolution produced some first-class writing of the solemn and more dignified types . Burke on one side of the Atlantic , Jefferson on the other , rose to the height of the great argument . but judging from the samples quoted in this learned and interesting book , there were no comic equivalents of Jefferson or even of Thomas Paine at work in north America during these twenty years . Dr Granger has gleaned most thoroughly and has classified various types of political satire in a sensible fashion . but with the possible exception of Franklin , none of the writers he exhumes is of great interest today or deserves anything but historical respect . even Hopkinson , even Trumbull are dim figures and M&apos;Fingal is a burlesque much more completely forgotten than Hudibras . from the point of view of American literary history , one of the chief types of interest in this book is the evidence it furnishes of the close imitation of English models , of Butler , Swift , Addison , and the contemporary Charles Churchill . the versifiers do not display a high degree of technical competence . they are , however , bold in the use of rhyme to a degree that would astonish Mr Ogden Nash . thus , one poetaster rhymes mouse with sous , treating sous as a singular noun . even the comparatively competent Trumbull writes : behold that martial Macaroni , compound of Phoebus and Bellona . the prose writing seems vastly superior . Arbuthnot &apos;s history of John Bull was imitated with some success , and Franklin managed adroitly the humorous atrocity story suggesting that the ministerial troops should castrate the American males . it is possible , however , that the editors of the great new edition of Franklin &apos;s works will not accept all the identifications made here . the themes reflect the controversies of the age . the Quebec act with its threat of popery provoked a great deal of irrelevant indignation . the royalists were inclined to sneer at the low social origins and vulgar ambitions of the rebel leaders , and Franklin &apos;s reputed irreligion laid him open to attack . the rebel propagandists became increasingly hostile to the king and scornful to the royal representatives , civil and military . the alleged amorous propensities of these representatives of the crown were duly noted . their morals as well as their good faith were impugned . Hessians , Irish , Welsh were assailed as well as the universally unpopular Scots . this is a useful and a mildly entertaining book , although its author does not show that mastery of the political background displayed by Professor Arthur M Schlesinger , Sr , in his recent investigation of revolutionary propaganda . it is probably useless to protest against the failure to give the Howe brothers their proper titles . and the complicated history of George Sackville may excuse the fact that he appears as Lord Germain , a title he never held . in defence of Lawrence . F J Temple : D H Lawrence . 237 pp Paris : Seghers . 12 N.F . it is not difficult to imagine how Lawrence &apos;s habitual and often very outspoken frankness together with his almost incredible confidence in his own insights aroused the resentment of many of those whom he knew . ( it is true that in his preface to M Temple &apos;s biography Mr Richard Aldington claims that he personally bore no grudge at all for the home truths he was asked to swallow . he reminds his French readers of Rimbaud &apos;s obscene parting rites in the home of an acquaintance and explains that Lawrence &apos;s own ungrateful mocking of those who had helped him was only to be expected in a great artist . ) someone as courageous as Lawrence in following the promptings of his own intuition is bound to inspire the jealousy or the envy of those who are more timorous and conventional and it is probably for this reason that so few of his critics , whether or not they have known him personally , have been capable of a truly disinterested assessment of his character and genius . M Temple &apos;s short study of the life and works is on the whole eulogistic and he defends Lawrence vigorously against some of the charges that have been brought against him in the past : that he was a precursor of Nazism , that he sentimentalized the noble Mexican savage , that he suffered from the neuroses described in Murry &apos;s son of woman and that he earned money to which he was not entitled by publishing Maurice Magnus &apos;s memoirs . it is only occasionally that he gives the impression of not wanting to sound too impressed , as , for example , when he mentions in passing the numerous ( unspecified ) pu&amp;eacute;rilit&amp;eacute;s in Lawrence &apos;s daily life and in many of his books . M Temple makes good use of the available biographical information . he also quotes lengthily and well from Lawrence &apos;s letters . if one is forced to conclude that he seriously misrepresents both the life and the work of Lawrence it is not therefore because he is swayed by any deep prejudice or because of any particular inaccuracy ( his worst inaccuracy is to describe Ursula in the rainbow as Tom Brangwen &apos;s daughter ) . the principal defect of this book is that it is written in a style which will convey to the reader little or nothing of the resemblances between Lawrence &apos;s inner life and his own : M Temple writes in clich&amp;eacute;s and in doing so not only distorts the essential biographical facts but attributes clich&amp;eacute;s of thought and expression to Lawrence . defiant gestures . Alfred Marnau : Ra&quot;uber-Requiem . 123 pp Salzburg : Otto Mu&quot;ller . DM 10.90 . Alfred Marnau , who was born in Bratislava in 1918 and has lived in England since before the war , shares with Rilke and Kafka the distinction of having origins which seem to escape national boundaries . like them he also makes of German his own language , which seems hammered out , a medium suggesting sheets of gold leaf . 