Showing posts with label orality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label orality. Show all posts
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Celebrities of Performance Poetry
This essay is a fragment, a chapter, perhaps, of Winged Words, a considerably longer work on orality in poetry.
John Masefield, a rather popular poet himself and a long-term Poet Laureate, said, “Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.” [1] He is certainly correct that poetry spoke to the hearts of all in the traditional village, in the theater at Epidauros and in the Globe. Nonetheless, a description of the public career of several poets of the last century and half will indicate that, well after the spread of literacy, indeed, even after the growth of mass media, the appetite for oral poetry persisted among general American audiences. However their appeal seems based on that particular sort of stylized individuality called celebrity rather than poetry alone. Just as certain movie stars play more or less the same role again and again [2] (an option unavailable to stage actors), the marketplace taught poets that, to be popular in an age of mass media, they had to construct a consistent and appealing public personality and generate color and drama as well as reading poetry.
This generalization is supported by a review of the most popular readers of poetry in recent times. Each of the cases below conjures an image of the poet stretching to bridge the increasing gap between high art and common showmanship. In the first case, audiences saw a cultivated individual impersonate simple country folk. In each of the others, the contrast is reversed: the supposedly refined poetic sensibility is represented by a hobo, bohemian, or drunk. Either way the contrast provided piquant and popular entertainment. The poets’ poetry, while it might sell books, was not in itself enough to attract a mass audience to a reading. Ticket buyers were motivated by the wish to see a celebrity or at any rate a colorful personality. The successful performing poet, it seems, must be exhibited as a curiosity or at any rate a novelty.
1.
James Whitcomb Riley, once one of the most popular of American poets, a man who dined at the White House, whose statue stands in his home town, and whose birthday was made a state holiday, is now remembered for a few pieces relegated to “children’s verse.” Having begun as an entertainer for the Wizard Oil Company before he had attained celebrity as a poet, Riley supported himself after 1875 primarily through public poetry recitations, and by 1889 he was touring most of the year. Known for his rural personae, dialect poetry, [3] and conventional sentiment, the man himself fascinated audiences. He was elegantly dressed and well-spoken, yet able to slip into his folk idiom at will. Often the program consisted of a series of acts, sometimes featuring poetry, lecture, and music during the same evening. Riley appeared sometimes with other practitioners of regional dialect such as Mark Twain or George Cable. [4]
2.
In the early 20th century Vachel Lindsay was able to support himself primarily through readings while preaching “the gospel of beauty.” He still liked to call himself a “beggar” and a “mendicant,” and the fact is that before he had become well-known he financed lengthy walking tours by reading in boarding houses, restaurants, and saloons in return for food and a bed. Challenging American materialism, he said his poems were “printed expressly as a substitute for money.” His reading style was grand and loud, in the old theatrical manner, featuring gesture and posture and nonverbal exclamations. He reports his audiences for the most part well-satisfied, but also records with wry “hip” amusement the reactions of those who thought him mad or called him a lazy bum. Lindsay was at once a counter-cultural bohemian and a popular entertainer.
He was far from unique. In a letter, Lindsay describes the state of poetry in his day:
The famous 1912 New Poetry Fire kindled by the good and great Harriet Monroe was burning up the prairie, and anything any poet did was temporarily news, at last. New Books of Poetry were popping like Popcorn. Amy Lowell was telling Massachusetts just where to get off. Ezra Pound had broadcasted imagism from London. In just two months [Edgar Lee Master's] Spoon River [Anthology] was to start in Reedy's Mirror, and to be read to tatters in Chicago and London before it came out in Book Form. Frost was coming out in England and was about to be lionized in Boston, Sandburg was soon to receive his first prize, that for His poem on Chicago, from Harriet Monroe, and all the poets in America for the first time in thirty years were looking one another in the eye.
One finds no division between high art and popular here. Poetry magazine is “burning up” the Midwest. Books are “popping” out of the poets’ consciousness and, presumably, off bookstore shelves. In order for Miss Lowell to tell Massachusetts as a whole “where to get off,” Massachusetts must have been listening. Spoon River Anthology is to be serialized in a weekly publication that had evolved from a newspaper supplement. It was perhaps the last moment at which it could be said that “all the poets in America" “were looking one another in the eye.”
3.
Amy Lowell [5] was perhaps unique in the degree of her efforts to market herself and the “new poetry.” She declared poetry to be her trade, and with a twentieth century tradesman’s eye for the role of advertising in a sound bottom line, noted "Publicity first. Poetry will follow." She boasted "I made myself a poet, but the Lord made me a business man." T. S. Eliot dubbed her the "demon saleswoman." In the words of the actress Eleanor Robson Belmont, Lowell "perform[ed] the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, 'Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry.'"
Her readings were multi-media events which featured such effects as a drummer behind a screen, while Lowell herself sang, shouted, whooped, cake-walked, and stomped. She smoked cigars, and as the reading proceeded she donned one after another of a whole series of pince-nez which she brought on stage in a basket. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, "she whizzed and she whirred, and she rustled and rumbled, and she glistened and sparkled and blazed and blared." Poet John Brooks Wheelwright called her "the Biggest Traveling One-Man Show since Buffalo Bill caught the Midnight Flyer to Contact Mark Twain." To Louis Untermeyer she was "not merely a lecturer, she was an event, a national phenomenon, a freak of nature, a dynamo on the loose."
Though she cautioned both D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce against explicit eroticism, her work foregrounds a powerful but veiled sexuality exciting to her audience in a way that would today difficult to conceive. [6] Her work was immediately meaningful to readers puzzled by the maneuvers of high modernism in works by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. She retained popularity in the role of a safe and entertaining bohemian whose outrageous repartee never became frightening. She seems to have cultivated "public rows," beginning with her combative assertion of imagism at the 1915 Poetry Society of America meeting (at the end of which angry literati charged the stage). She noted with satisfaction that, after she had attacked Whitman calling him “primitive,” “wild,” and, more surprisingly, as “a man of little influence” at the celebration of his centenary at Philadelphia’s Contemporary Club (where Whitman himself had been a member), her books sold out in that city.
4.
Dylan Thomas’ notoriety persists to this day. Thomas provided the image of The Poet [7] to better than a generation of readers of English with his unruly curly hair, his alcoholism (so congenial to a Romantic notion of the artist/hero), the “angelic” melody of his voice, and his imagery, at once surrealist and patently emotional. He was for a time the darling bad boy of the intelligentsia, reading mostly on university campuses yet misbehaving in the most satisfying and “artistic” way. [8] Thomas’ tours were commercially successful, [9] and the poet’s status was evident in his introduction not merely to literary figures, but also to Hollywood celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.
5.
Allen Ginsberg was known to millions from Howl’s obscenity trial and photos in Life magazine who never read his poetry. By taking off his clothes repeatedly at social gatherings during the nineteen fifties, he guaranteed name recognition well beyond the literary sphere. By appearing at the Human Be-In in January of 1967 he positioned himself as a father of the youth revolution. His appearances were often spectacles including chanting and music. I do not doubt that Kaddish will continue to find readers in the twenty-second century, but I would guess that a greater number will know his reputation.
Though universities can still fill halls to simply hear a talented poet read, it appears from the American history, a few points from which are sketched above, for a general audience something further is required. Perhaps this development became inevitable as soon as performance ceased to be the most common way of presenting poetry. Thousands of years after poetry was first recorded in writing, it was still sung or chanted, often with dramatic embellishment, certainly with expressive voice and body language. It may be that, once the universal tradition that bound ancient Greek and medieval English audiences fractured into the varieties of modern sensibility, the delectation of poetry for its own sake became inevitably a minority taste. The poet today who is as little attracted by the “poetry lite” of Billy Collins and Ted Kooser as by the easy sensationalism of much of today’s performance poetry might as well stop lamenting the art’s small audience and either be glad of a coterie of devotees or cultivate an attention-getting mode of performance capable of seducing today’s listeners.
1. This statement from Masefield appears on a hundred quotation sites, but nowhere is it attributed. A few mention his book The Daffodil Fields, but that seems to contain no prose. The source is immaterial to my use here, but its mystery annoys me nonetheless. Surely someone can inform me of the source.
2. John Wayne is an example of the latter, Paul Muni of the former. Cary Grant could do his patented version of suave elegance, but could also do first-rate comedy and a variety of other roles.
3. Riley’s work with dialect was an influence on Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
4. Cable deserves more readers for his portrayal of old New Orleans and for his progressive politics.
5. Much of the information in this paragraph and the next two is derived from Melissa Bradshaw. “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification.” Victorian Poetry 38.1 (2000) 141-169.
6. To some readers this represented the masking of her own homosexual orientation. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, "Writing Lesbian" (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981); Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1985).
7. As, for the same era, Einstein became the typical intellectual. By the late 1950s Time and Life had found more contemporary sensational poets and, with a few series of photographs set up the Beats in business. (Though this last phrase aspires to irony, these pictures lit the imagination of such suburban youths as myself.)
8. For instance, before reading at Pomona College, he lost his papers and notes. I recall a university professor pointing out the step on a stairway on which Thomas had fallen as a sort of holy relic.
9. Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney approached Thomas in New York City in 1952, recorded him, and launched Caedmon Records, the sole recording company specializing in spoken word.
Friday, April 1, 2016
Afloat on the Ocean of Words
Every artist in every medium is in effect shouting out “Look at me! Turn to me from all other phenomena!” And consumers of art collaborate with the considerable ego implied by this cry. Certainly in literature, whatever the theme, the author is always the hero. The critics, indeed, all readers, acknowledge sufficient value in the writer’s moves to follow every decision recorded on the page with careful attention. The creative artist’s abilities are fetishized, often considered mystically resistant to analysis and attributed to talent or inspiration. Yet at times the figure of the author can seem suddenly a specter, an insubstantial illusion shimmering even as it threatens to vanish altogether.
If the proposition sounds incredible, that is because one if the most persistent of our Romantic received values is the celebration of individual Genius. Though that word is not attested in the sense of exalted intellectual power until the late eighteenth century this use seems now only natural. The nascent Romantic Edward Young celebrates the “man of genius” for his originality, comparing him to the less impressive imitator. According to Young only such an innovator “raises his structure by means invisible.” For him and for many today the genius “partakes of something divine” since “genius is the god within.” [1] In his best-seller titled Genius Harold Bloom refers with approval to Emerson’s description of genius using the very same phrase “the god within.” Bloom begins his book with the “unique” “supreme” genius of Shakespeare which he defines as evident from the poet’s “universality,” “the pervasive illusion (is it illusion?) that he has peopled a world, remarkably like what we take to be our own, with men, women, and children preternaturally natural.” The concluding oxymoron epitomizes the broader paradox that the individual most marked off from the rest of us has somehow earned that singularity by his ability to represent the lives of all.
Yet prior to the Romantic era the successful artist was more often regarded as the best trained, likely the one who had spent an apprenticeship emulating the work if a master and the models of earlier eras. Thus according to Winckelmann “the only way for us to become great, and indeed, inimitable – if this is possible – is by imitating the ancients.” [2] Here again the neat confidence of the formulation is offset by the self-contradiction. Only by imitation do we get free of imitation, that is, become inimitable. Little wonder that the great art historian felt moved to include the qualification “if this is possible.”
In more recent decades advanced thinkers have questioned the concept of the autonomous god-like creative author. A couple of generations ago Barthes declared “The Death of the Author” [3], citing Mallarmé as a predecessor and claiming that every "text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations," that every work is "eternally written here and now," and that the “meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader,” and not the writer at all. At about the same time, Foucault asked “What is an Author?,” [4] noting, as though it were an established fact, that “criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance –or death - of the author some time ago” and concluding with the question “what difference does it make who is speaking?” The case against what might be called the authority of the author by these two and their fellow travelers is weakened by the fact that they mean to displace the artist as the creative fountainhead only to step into the same role themselves as enlightened post-modern critics, juggling conundrums for the amusement of their less celebrated peers or cracking the whip and exasperating their more commonsensical critics into growls and roars. Few readers are likely to be willing to trade Shakespeare for Derrida.
Long before the rise of deconstruction and allied theories, though, the artist’s status had been discounted or questioned. Most early poets and sculptors were anonymous. Homer does not emerge as an individual. Only after a certain date do we begin to see ancient Greek ceramic artists sign their work. We have no clue as to exactly which caryatids of the Erechtheum were crafted by Socrates’ father. Even in the Middle Ages anonymity is the rule in early lyrics and stained glass. In traditional societies the local carver is rarely celebrated as a “genius,” but rather is regarded as a craftsman like a carpenter or a potter. Folk songs and fairy tales are generally not attributed as original work by the person from whom they are collected. After all, according to the Grimm brothers’ dictum, the people as a whole compose (“das Volk dichtet”).
Indeed, who can name the author of the myth of Oedipus? Sophocles certainly, though Aeschylus and Euripedes both wrote lost plays on the same theme. But Oedipus appears as well in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Homer and as the tragedians had doubtless learned the story orally in childhood. It was the common possession of the Greek people. Though the view that authorship of folk works was in some mysterious way “collective” was championed by Francis Gummere among others, it had steadily lost favor and was finally supplanted by the careful and innovative work of Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord. [5]
What Parry and Lord found was that the singers of epics in the Balkans in the 1930s were able to improvise oral poetry by using a set inventory of phrases, formulae, and lines, most of which were common to many “authors,” but that their performances varied widely in quality and content, even between successive recitations of the same piece by the same singer. The poet might say, and might in fact think that he is exactly reproducing his own version or the version of his mentor, but the texts invariably showed pervasive and significant differences. Though working in a genre in a way collective, some performers were talented and others pedestrian. The audience and the occasion always influenced the poem.
The insights of Parry and Lord allowed for the first time an understanding of previously obscure characteristics of Homer as well as proving useful in the study of Beowulf, Pentecostal preachers, blues, and other oral forms. These works are demonstrably shaped by an entire community and a tradition though any individual work is also the product of the skill and vision of an individual. Just as art regularly both questions and affirms received ideas, it can only arise from a social consensus but through a single subjectivity.
That dialectic is evident though less marked in non-oral work as well. Every writer shapes work in part with audience in mind. Each uses phrases, images, and conventions (sometimes twisting or altering them) learned from earlier texts. The concepts that populate a particular vision of reality are based on those borrowed from others. Even opposing sides of issues in a given era are generally founded on the same basic vocabulary and assumptions. The assumptions of one’s own era are virtually invisible, while those of earlier periods are more easily discerned. [6]
The notion of genius is fostered by the supposed opposition of tradition and innovation in literary production. In all periods art is produced by crafting altered versions of the inherited templates. While during many earlier eras past masterpieces provided the model the artist could aspire to equal, for two hundred years novelty has been privileged. The radical has been admired. Yet in fact the author who defies, opposes, or omits a recognizable convention makes use of it just as much as the one who repeats it. Each use of convention – in any of these ways -- allows for the more efficient expression of information. A writer who rebels against an established trope or other device by defying it is governed by the same code as the writer who employs it. No inherent value accompanies either use of conventions or defiance of them.
The themes in literature and the language people use to express them evolve over the centuries with their own dynamic, finding expression through the agency of people active in each era. Thus one might say that Doctor Johnson, rather than being the author of his poetry, is himself written by the eighteenth century English Zeitgeist while James Joyce is an inevitable product of the altered intellectual atmosphere over a hundred and fifty years later. Just as the leopard’s fur appears in a spotted pattern without conscious planning and the clouds assume a particular aspect in every moment of the day, people’s writing is generated by the entire population of thinking humans in a grand polyphonic symphony continuing now for thousands of years. [7]
Of course, the secondary symbolic elaboration of literature only intensifies the opposition inherent in all language. One can only make use of words and phrases which a listener or reader can understand. Every utterance is based on earlier listening experiences, yet each combines the pre-existing elements in a new way. A wholly original composition could only be meaningless gibberish. On the other hand a work that exactly repeats an earlier one like Borges’ Pierre Menard whose “translation” of Don Quixote exactly reproduces the original might seem equally otiose, but Borges insists to his readers that Menard’s Quixote is “almost infinitely richer” as it includes the new author’s own experiences. Surely he was only saying in a whimsical way that meaning accumulates, that a Horatian ode today is more meaningful than when it was written, though its increase in significance has nothing to do with Horace.
Borges’ playful fancy resembles T. S. Eliot’s celebrated insight about the whole of literary history changing with every new work. To Eliot “what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . .the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.” After complaining about the modern tendency to privilege “those aspects of [the poet’s] work in which he least resembles anyone else,” he insists on the contrary that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” but rather that “his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” [8]
Finally, and perhaps most destructive to the myth of the semi-divine author, literature cannot be said to occur until the text is received by a listener or reader. Barthes was quite right in locating the consumer’s interaction with the text as the moment when significance arises. Thus the reader may well be said to be the actual composer of the work. Though some texts are comparatively rich in possibilities or may arrive already well-plowed with a history of past readings, the mere words are barren until they are read. In a sense they provide only potential arenas for constructing meaning; they cannot deliver it ready-made.
The problematics of authorship are then rather complex. The causes of literary works must be shared it seems by the writer (who might be called the “efficient cause”) with the uses of language that the writer has heard or read, the assumptions of the era of its composition, and the literary tradition preceding (and, later, following) its date. Add to these the interpretations, reactions, and allusions of others, all dynamically evolving from the work’s first appearance onwards, inevitably compounded by misunderstandings, the imprecision inherent in all language, and the data lost to noise in every transmission. Where then can the author be located?
Perhaps the choice between the multiple authors responsible for the text is a problem better transcended than solved. The identity in Buddhism between viewing the world as reality and as illusion or in Hinduism between the individual and the Whole may provide a model for that between the writer and the entire corpus of human words. [9] This link may provide the base for the scent of the divine which underlay the intuition of Young and Bloom when they imagine “the god within.” Hovering above the alternatives, the reader may embrace both or neither or may select the one with the greatest heuristic value in a given analysis.
As readers we float atop the ocean of words, each text a whitecap, briefly rising and then sinking into the vast body of language beneath, leaving it ever so slightly changed. From the perspective of an individual the whole is never in sight and one cannot even take exhaustive account of the waters in which one paddles, yet in every human society people engage artful language in a vigorous and ever-new interchange which by dint of constant effort keeps us for a time buoyant. Our babble goes on, though we know in the end that we and our words with us will fail and fall into the general ferment not to vanish but to suffer a sea change and later return reshuffled and refreshed.
1. Conjectures on Original Composition (1759).
2. Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and the Sculpture of the Greeks (1755).
3. Originally published as “La mort de l'auteur” (punning on Le Morte d'Arthur) in Aspen 5-6, 1967, reprinted in Image-Music-Text in 1977.
4. A talk originally given in 1969, the essay appears in Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp. 124-127.
5. See Milman Parry, "The Making of Homeric Verse." The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 and Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960.
6. The forgeries of Han van Meegeren, for instance, which fooled many connoisseurs and experts when they were new now can be seen to have obvious affinities with the styles of the nineteen-thirties.
7. A clear parallel exists with certain technological developments, such as the invention of automobiles, motion pictures, or nuclear weapons in which a number of researchers all but simultaneously develop what is fundamentally the same idea. The invention of the electric light need be attributed neither to the inexorable processes of impersonal history nor to Edison’s singular genius.
8. The concept of a sort of super-organism of literature resembles the Gaia hypothesis advanced during the 1970s. See James Lovelock’s popularization Gaia: A new look at life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2005) and Lynn Margulis’ The Symbiotic Planet (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
9. Perhaps the best initial texts for these views are Nagarjuna for Buddhism and Gaudapada for Hinduism.
Friday, January 1, 2010
The Birth of Erato: Lyric, Vision, and the Spread of Writing
It is natural, perhaps, for modern lovers of poetry to romanticize ancient Greek lyric. For the Greeks, as for all early and oral cultures, poetry was the privileged form of discourse. All important data were encoded in poetry: love, religion, even knowledge, including history, science, and practical advice. Poetry was a major form of popular entertainment. The Greeks performed poetry at dinner parties, athletic contests, and public events. The entire population thrilled to tragedies, and the poet retained a portion of his archaic role as shaman. In contrast, in our present age, people consume poetry primarily through the media of popular music, advertising, bumper stickers, and graffiti. Mainstream culture depicts poetry as a “special interest,” slightly odd if not ridiculous or, at times, pedantic. A close reading of ancient Greek lyric allows the modern reader to recover, not merely the lovely, profound contours of the authors’ words, but also a grander view of poetry itself, a glimpse of its sublime potential.
Poetry is universal. Though some cultures have no metals, some no pottery, and some lack the ability to control fire, all make use of refined verbal technologies. Among peoples for whom the “aesthetic” is not a category, the prestige of poetry can only arise from its usefulness. Poetry, with its figures of speech and multiple meanings, is the most densely meaningful form of signification.
1. The Earliest Art
Judging by artifacts and what we know of present-day hunter-gatherers, palaeolithic humans constituted their identity primarily through roles, collectivities, and relationships. Thus an individual belonged to a certain tribe, to a clan within that group; he or she had a clear gender role, and perhaps possessed as well honorific status due to fighting or hunting ability, wisdom, descent, or seniority. In addition, every person was connected to others through a network of family relationships. Of course, people had individual characteristics, personalities, tastes, and views, just as they do today, but these were often invisible and always secondary in the subjective constitution of identity.
Analogously in the arts of the Stone Age, convention ruled. Poets, potters, painters, and musicians tended to work in established forms whose principles were known, whose codes were familiar, and whose themes were accepted by the entire community. The artists were, nonetheless, individuals: some talented, some clumsy, some inventive, some slavish in following their models. Occasionally an artist twisted convention or overturned it or ignored it. These innovations might be imitated in their turn; more likely, they might be abandoned.
There were surely individual love poems and laments, expressing authentic passion. Those who offended community standards would likely have been pilloried in satire until they changed their ways. Friends might well commemorate significant occasions with verse. These occasional productions were soon forgotten, though fragments of striking and clever language may have found their way into other work.
The business of “professional” artists, however, was not personal utterance, but collective expression. For these early societies the artist acted as the undifferentiated intelligentsia: scientist, magician, fortune-teller, physician and metaphysician. Acting on behalf of the whole, he would advise in difficult situations, predict the future, assure good harvest, success in combat, or recovery from illness. It was the poet/shaman who provided coherence and significance to life by pronouncing the critical rituals, retelling the myths, lecturing on ethics and ultimate reality. He also made life more tolerable by providing entertainment.
With the Neolithic move from the male-dominated hunt to the female territory of the cultivated plot arose goddess-centered fertility cults. The prey animals which had appeared in such marvelous plentitude on the cave walls at Trois Freres and Lascaux are replaced by cult figurines of women with ample breasts and buttocks. Empires and their urban capitals eventually arose in part to manage the water rights to the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile with minimal violence and to protect trade.
The refinement of copper and then bronze and iron had little effect on farming. (Wooden plows, indeed, persisted in wide use into the twentieth century.) But metal did make more formidable arms, and the new technology of ore and smelter encouraged trade over large areas, requiring correspondingly greater political control at the same time that it fostered war and the coalescence of large empires. The conquering heroic patriarchal societies projected potent sky-gods that insist upon hegemony in heaven as well as earth. Jehovah is jealous of his rival gods, anxious to demonstrate his superior power (as in the magic competition between Moses, Aaron, and the Egyptians ), and Zeus dominates one locality after another by absorbing or demoting the local god and having sex with the goddess.
By the sixth or seventh century before Christ, though, the authority of these sky-gods had been undermined by the persistent worship of chthonic deities (underground, indeed, and never eliminated), by the importation of dying and reborn gods such as Dionysos, Attis, Osiris, Inanna, and Persephone, and by the mystery cults that promised personal salvation (an attractive offer compared to a etiolated afterlife in Hades). Furthermore, people were aware of multiple notions of ultimate reality, and some of these metaphysicians were aware of others. No longer would a single tradition determine the boundaries of thought. The fences were breached; the souls were roaming.
Writing had existed for three thousand years, but its use was spreading from the palaces to landowners and merchants. Commerce among nations was growing, though rapacious raids continued (and continue). Greece became a trading country, and thus a cosmopolitan one. Political ferment and class struggle resulted in the rise of tyrants to replace hereditary monarchs and oligarchs. People began to view history not wholly as divinely mandated fate, or in the light of the ancient heroes, but also as the willful creation of remarkable all-too-human humans.
Concomitant with the change in consciousness arose the spread of writing. Writing requires of its adepts a narrow visual focus that departs from the generalized alertness of preliterate humankind. In addition, Plato reminds us that writing brought the death of memory. Though writing made possible the accumulation of a vast storehouse of experience, the collective memory of the great libraries (now further expanded with digital storage), it decimated individual memory. Part of consciousness can be externally stored and need not animate the individual who can look to authorities instead of knowing everything at once, including the mysteries.
The arrival of writing necessarily transformed literature. The oral text has flexible form. Depending on the audience it may be edited for content or style. Even such a scripted spectacle as the circus varies in every performance. Its most fixed form is that constructed by the viewer. Each person’s experience, once registered, changes little, and every spectator’s response is shaped by the reactions of the group, the social conditions of reception (just as in a movie theater the viewer is more likely to laugh or gasp or drop a tear in concert with others). For a written text, the contradiction is reversed: the text never changes, but it invites a fresh construction from every reader. New meanings may always be adduced from the code, just as Augustine thought new readings of scripture may be as authentic as old. While a new reading may attempt to supplant an old one, more often it simply joins already existing readings. The poetic text glories in polysemy, whereas other forms of discourse seek simple clarity.
Manguel points out that the classic tag “scripta manet, verba volat” is today taken to indicate the advantage of writing which “lives on” while spoken words vanish, whereas it originally suggested the opposite valuation: that spoken words have wings and can fly, in other words, they are inspired, in contrast to the dead and inert written words.
Written culture was slow to come. Most readers mumbled the words if they did not read out loud. More than a thousand years after writing had become widespread and available not to an elite caste but to the well-to-do in general, Augustine is amazed to see Ambrose reading silently, and most poetry was performed aloud for another millennium after that.
Homer, at the dawn of generalized literacy, presents us with a written text of a composition processed through centuries of oral performance. The question of Homer is vast, and substantial recent discoveries in the field of oral literature have provided more fruitful questions (not all the answers). Whether the identification is literally true or not, the reader must be startled when the author of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo suddenly includes this boastful pitch, very nearly an advertisement: “Remember me in after time whenever any one of men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: `Whom think ye, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?' Then answer, each and all, with one voice: `He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.'” Around the seventh century B.C.E. we find the earliest demonstrably self-conscious artists, creators who feel they deserve a brand name.
The change in material conditions is again associated with a change in verbal technology. Art, and, in particular, lyric poetry, becomes a snapshot of consciousness, no longer what all the group sees, but what the maker says the persona sees. Though poetry still purveys dogma and received truths, it also does the opposite: it opens up critical possibilities, it points toward ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalence to a degree unknown to earlier times. Preserving a moment of consciousness, lyric verse asserts the irrational that governs the greater part of our thought even in this twenty-first century. Poetry foregrounds sense impressions, the raw data of all our conclusions. Poetry arises from an impulse toward pleasure, and Freud was far from the first to recognize the fundamental role of what he called the pleasure principle. For all these reasons, Aristotle could make his celebrated claim that poetry is truer than history. Through the play and manipulation of symbols which distinguishes our species from the others, each so excellent in its way, people have found something like the Buddhist mindful here-and-now and, using these tools of words, have vaulted from the most immediate to the sublime. A poem, a “program” of words, has the power, as Longinus says, to “entrance” its consumer, to inspire “exaltation” and “joy.”
2. Archilochos
The first named poetic personality in European literature is Archilochos, a mercenary and colonizer who died in battle during the seventh century B.C.E. Perhaps he assumed the vision of an outsider due to his birth from a slave mother (according to the traditional biography). At any rate, he is known as the first poets to use iambics, a meter strongly associated with satire and invective.
Homeric culture is heroic. The Iliad centers about Achilles’ acceptance of his impending doom. When Andromache makes her humane plea to Hektor, he says he would feel shame before both men and women, were he to fail to fight with valor. He hopes rather, he says, to gain glory for himself and his family, fame that is the warrior’s immortality. The Spartan mothers are said to have told their sons to return from battle, either with their shields or upon them (i.e. having fought nobly or else dead). Even today we are expected to glorify the war-dead, and the citizen who shows little enthusiasm for the sentiment is suspect.
In his most familiar poem, Archilochos directly contradicts the conventional pro patria et deo piety:
A Saian exults. He’s got the shield I left behind
in a bush, blameless, but against my will.
I got away myself. What’s the shield to me?
Forget it. I’ll get another no worse.
Over the centuries, the reader feels the cool breeze of a broken taboo, a boundary crossed, the simple declaration of a fact known to all combat veterans but rarely admitted: that honor and valor coexist on the battlefield with panic and pissing in one’s pants and simple self-preservation. The difference is that the poet speaks with an individual voice, confident that his own vision, his concrete specifics, bear truth and demand attention. No longer a craftsman with rigidly prescribed skills writing for a committee of the whole, he is able to warble his own tune and follow it where it leads.
The poem is not perceived more or less instantaneously like a painting or a building. Rather it unfolds over time, like music or a story. Archilochos’ poem is a kind of psychological cinematic montage. After the initial scene is sketched, it becomes a play of subjectivities. From imagining the Saian delighted at his booty, the mood shifts to the natural reaction of repugnance the Greek audience would have felt upon hearing of the lost shield. The deepening miasma is then suddenly contradicted by the single word: “blameless.” With some of the force of magic, the very pronunciation of the word makes it true. The admission, coming out of a certain military closeting, as it were, overwhelms the idée reçue. The warrior’s ego inheres in his will, and the poet admits loss, but still looks to the future, buoyed by his own individual conviction of merit, so secure he volunteers the tale of the lost shield as a paradoxical affirmation of his confidence and worth.
Whereas Demodokos in the Odyssey is “instructor of the people,” repeating the vitally important principles that create the community, those things about which all agree, Archilochos is their critic. Meleagar called him “thorny.” After he died, the story spread that wasps hovered over his grave.
3. Alcman
Originally, people regarded nature with awe. Animist beliefs found divinity in that other which they could not wholly control. When nature influences narrative in Homer, it is generally as a reflection of divine wills. Hesiod, on the other hand, a yeoman farmer rather than a landed gentleman, calls his community Ascra “a woebegone village, bad in winter, unbearable in summer, good at no time.” His entire effort was devoted to mastering nature, and he found the struggle taxing. For the later market agriculturalist animals and plants have economic reality. Their fertility, which had been illuminated with numinous potency, has become a matter of account book bottom lines. The ecstatic shamanism of the Upper Palaeolithic has deteriorated to a collection of prudential superstitions: for instance, it is taboo, Hesiod advises, to stand upright and face the sun while urinating; one should open new wine-jars on the 27th of the month.
Alcman’s time doubtless considered itself less superstitious yet, but the ritual substratum persisted. Alcman wrote choral lyrics, meant to be performed as (song and dance) by young girls under a male choirmaster. He refers to the male chorus leader as a “stallion.” In another piece, he laments the weakness of his [aged] limbs before his “girls of honey-sweet voices,” wishing he were a halcyon soaring with them over the sea. This is at once a realistic vignette suggesting freedom and energy, a wish for renewed sexuality, and a reference to the myth that claimed that the female halcyon would carry the male, when aged, on her back. In a way the choruses may resemble the entertainment world of today which elevates ever-young maidens to rejuvenate us all in imagination.
He often praised specific members of his troupe (the leaders of his half-choirs of virgins Agido and Hagesikhora, for instance) by name. The glorious dance, the beautiful bodies, the concentration of élan vital are themselves redemptive. In Oedipus Tyrannos the chorus dances and sings: “when [shameful deeds] are held in esteem, why dance together?” The inverse proposition was equally reasonable to the Greeks: when people did dance, their ordered movements indicate (and help to create) an ordered cosmos, a harmonious world. Thus the viewers of the tragedy could find solace in the performance itself even as they contemplated dread events. The chorus dances, rather like an existential “man of action;” it “goes on” like Vladimir and Estragon in the face of death and dissolution. The lyric choir dances still, though for us the dance is encoded as black marks on a white page.
The lyricist moves to recover a portion of the old mysterium tremendum. The precise details of nature, in Homeric poetry summoned to elaborate grand similes, here stand alone. He simply describes the scene, expecting that the facts, edited from raw sense impression, will be significant. The speaker is, of course, a persona and the picture doubtless owes much to earlier models, so the poem may be as much about other poems, other visions, other sensibilities, as about the scene before him, but it asserts verisimilitude. The gods are notably absent. Nature is apprehended in itself or as a projection of the viewer in a way familiar to us from Chinese and Japanese poetry. The poem is not so distant from hymns calling on deities and asking favors. Here the poet seeks sympathetic psychic rest by singing to sleep the marvels of creation, geological formations and fauna, but the last word goes to the wonders of the wholly natural. The poet invokes a sort of peace which passeth understanding, but the last word is spent in wonder at those miraculous yet ordinary objects: the wings of birds, birds that mediate between this world and another.
Sleep is on the mountains,
the peaks and the clefts,
headlands and torrents,
all those that walk the woods,
nursed by the black earth,
predators, mountain-bred,
and the race of bees,
and monsters from the sea’s purple depths!
Sleep on, you tribe of birds
with such long wings!
4. Sappho
What could be more subjective and powerful than sexual love? The focus of most popular song today, it is also the most traditional topic of poets. Archilochos wrote a number of love lyrics (as well a number of thoroughly obscene verses ), and Alcman’s young choruses dance illuminated by an erotic nimbus, but for Sappho and her coterie, love is unapologetically central. Whatever else it may have been, Sappho’s thiasos was an association for the cultivation of sensibility reminiscent of Sei Sonagon and Lady Murasaki’s Heian Japan or Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Courts of Love in southern France. The old Victorian dodge of maintaining that she ran a school may have some truth, but it was hardly the sort of excuse they sought. We now admit the ancient Greek predeliction (very well documented in the case of men) for sex between adults and teens, but she seems to refer to adult women in references to some of her associates as hetaera which sounds like a term used among equals. In addition, she does not slight the power of heterosexual love: apart from her own marriage, she was known to have written an entire book of epithalamia.
In the Phaedrus Socrates surprises his interlocutors with the claim that “our greatest goods come to us through madness,” but he quickly limits this: “assuming the madness is a gift of the gods.” All the varieties he describes are associated with poetry: prophetic madness (governed by Apollo), telestic madness (as in Dionysian ritual), poetic madness (Muses), and erotic possession (Aphrodite and Eros). Here the subjectivity in which we live is embraced and glorified as divine.
And this is not simply the transport of love’s first blossom. Sappho’s work is filled with jealousy, petty backbiting, resentment of all sorts, but this is clearly part of love’s dialectic. confidence in one’s subjectivity, a vision for triangulation, capturing what Lawrence called the mystery of “the offering-up one yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else” by keeping precise and direct record of its visitation.
The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --
listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.
My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.
Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,
without you . . .
Longinus praised this catalogue of physical symptoms of love, saying its power arises from describing the “most extreme and intense” signs of passion. The poem was translated (after a fashion) by Catullus and his version was translated by Sir Philip Sidney during the love-sonnet craze of the 16th century. In her intensity and single-minded focus, Sappho points toward the Platonic “ascent of love” from the individual beloved to the divine, later elaborated by Plotinus and the Victorines. As Longinus notes, the goal of poetry is not to persuade, but to entrance, to transport with wonder. This is an altogether different experience than being taught, persuaded or informed. The shamanic trance, the “Pentecostal” possession during group ceremonies, is replaced by an aesthetic experience, more idiosyncratic, but equally ambitious.
5. Conclusion
With the spread of writing, the individual vision is preserved and privileged. The poet perceives the Olympians through the quotidian. The educated classes in particular lost some of the cosmic participation mystique which humans had cultivated through ritual and liturgy (i.e. through art) at least since they have been homo sapiens, and the new lyric, through the real, undeniable data of everyday life, revalued everything. Archilochus presents a dissent from social norms; Alcman a nonmythological but nonetheless still sanctified nature; and Sappho the incendiary irrationality of love.
The genre of lyric poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse not merely by extraordinary compression, but also by its ability (shared only with the other arts) to accurately represent human consciousness, properly privileging subjectivity, the irrational, sense impressions, and pleasure-seeking. Poetry also allows the expression of new ideas, contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalence. Art provides the means for investigating the mysteries of god, love, and death. The thematic spectrum runs from those works that most affirm a society’s accepted truths (and this sort dominates in the oral age as well as in mass and popular media), and works that question the present order (these have been preserved since the dawn of writing, but have been preferred only since the Romantic era).
A character in an ancient dialogue says of the reputation of a poet that he would live as long as “serving-lad bears round mixed wine for cups and deals bumpers about board, so long as maiden band does holy night-long service of the dance, so long as the scale-pan that is daughter of bronze sits upon the summit of the cottabus-pole ready for the throwing of the wine drops.” This in the face of inevitable suffering and death, in a cosmos finally unknowable, and thus subjectively unpredictable and absurd, a person chooses to drink, yes, and to take joy in the bodies of others (both the “serving-lad” and the “maiden[s]” offer up their youth), but also to socialize, to fling wine in an unlikely game with elaborate rules and to pass the time as well composing poetry.
In my youth, the primary image of Greek antiquity was the fountainhead. In the old ethnocentric view, philosophy, aesthetics, democracy, values of tolerance and liberality, all good things flowed to us from the Periclean age. Europeans have made a variety of uses of the classics: the veneration of the medievals for whom antiquity regularly signified authority, Renaissance celebration of Greece to legitimize a new humanism, the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers who founded a new “cult of the muses,” the growth of scientific investigation which flowered in the philological rigor of Wilamowitz and then gave way to the decadent prose of John Addington Symonds and the poised academic swoon of Alma-Tadema’s paintings.
Like all these predecessors, I would argue that my Greeks are the authentic Greeks. Like the lyric poets, indeed, like all of us, my own subjectivity provides my sole access to Truth.
The Muses
The muses arose in association with cult practice. For Pausanias the original muses are song, memory, and occasion (Μελέτη, also “practice”). This formulation implies ritual performance. Alcman and Mimnermus regard them as children of Gaia and Ouranos, and thus primeval. Much of the vocabulary of poetry points in the same direction: metrical “feet” began with dance steps, the “strophe” signified a physical turn, etc.
To account for the later tradition that names Zeus and Mnemosyne as parents of the muses, Pausanias suggests there may have been two generations of muses. Of these the first may imply collective, altogether oral events, and the second, performances that were written, though (as the role of memory indicates) virtually always orally performed.
The muses are actually a late systemization. Erato was especially associated with love poems and hymns. Among canonical nine there are muses for astronomy, history and for geometry. In the early era the muses’ realm was spacious, extending over the range of human culture (including scientific learning) through poetry, music, and dance. Through the metrical patterning of poetry, knowledge was given a gleam of the divine and preserved.
Erato is the muse associated with lyric poetry, with the lyre (κιθάρα), with love poetry and hymns. In the tradition of late classicism Euterpe also governs lyric poetry, but she is generally depicted with a flute (the αὐλός).
The muses sometimes reflect a Jungian anima, a subconscious wisdom that inspires the poet with vision. Graves, in his twentieth-century concept of the muse-poet, who through his art worships the Goddess, consciously recalls the ancient and the medieval in his attempt to revive this blend of the vatic and the erotic.
Caveat lector: When they appeared to Hesiod as he watched his flocks, the muses said, “We know how to say many false things as though they were true, but we also know, when we choose to, to tell the truth.”
Posted by William Seaton at 8:16 AM
Poetry is universal. Though some cultures have no metals, some no pottery, and some lack the ability to control fire, all make use of refined verbal technologies. Among peoples for whom the “aesthetic” is not a category, the prestige of poetry can only arise from its usefulness. Poetry, with its figures of speech and multiple meanings, is the most densely meaningful form of signification.
1. The Earliest Art
Judging by artifacts and what we know of present-day hunter-gatherers, palaeolithic humans constituted their identity primarily through roles, collectivities, and relationships. Thus an individual belonged to a certain tribe, to a clan within that group; he or she had a clear gender role, and perhaps possessed as well honorific status due to fighting or hunting ability, wisdom, descent, or seniority. In addition, every person was connected to others through a network of family relationships. Of course, people had individual characteristics, personalities, tastes, and views, just as they do today, but these were often invisible and always secondary in the subjective constitution of identity.
Analogously in the arts of the Stone Age, convention ruled. Poets, potters, painters, and musicians tended to work in established forms whose principles were known, whose codes were familiar, and whose themes were accepted by the entire community. The artists were, nonetheless, individuals: some talented, some clumsy, some inventive, some slavish in following their models. Occasionally an artist twisted convention or overturned it or ignored it. These innovations might be imitated in their turn; more likely, they might be abandoned.
There were surely individual love poems and laments, expressing authentic passion. Those who offended community standards would likely have been pilloried in satire until they changed their ways. Friends might well commemorate significant occasions with verse. These occasional productions were soon forgotten, though fragments of striking and clever language may have found their way into other work.
The business of “professional” artists, however, was not personal utterance, but collective expression. For these early societies the artist acted as the undifferentiated intelligentsia: scientist, magician, fortune-teller, physician and metaphysician. Acting on behalf of the whole, he would advise in difficult situations, predict the future, assure good harvest, success in combat, or recovery from illness. It was the poet/shaman who provided coherence and significance to life by pronouncing the critical rituals, retelling the myths, lecturing on ethics and ultimate reality. He also made life more tolerable by providing entertainment.
With the Neolithic move from the male-dominated hunt to the female territory of the cultivated plot arose goddess-centered fertility cults. The prey animals which had appeared in such marvelous plentitude on the cave walls at Trois Freres and Lascaux are replaced by cult figurines of women with ample breasts and buttocks. Empires and their urban capitals eventually arose in part to manage the water rights to the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile with minimal violence and to protect trade.
The refinement of copper and then bronze and iron had little effect on farming. (Wooden plows, indeed, persisted in wide use into the twentieth century.) But metal did make more formidable arms, and the new technology of ore and smelter encouraged trade over large areas, requiring correspondingly greater political control at the same time that it fostered war and the coalescence of large empires. The conquering heroic patriarchal societies projected potent sky-gods that insist upon hegemony in heaven as well as earth. Jehovah is jealous of his rival gods, anxious to demonstrate his superior power (as in the magic competition between Moses, Aaron, and the Egyptians ), and Zeus dominates one locality after another by absorbing or demoting the local god and having sex with the goddess.
By the sixth or seventh century before Christ, though, the authority of these sky-gods had been undermined by the persistent worship of chthonic deities (underground, indeed, and never eliminated), by the importation of dying and reborn gods such as Dionysos, Attis, Osiris, Inanna, and Persephone, and by the mystery cults that promised personal salvation (an attractive offer compared to a etiolated afterlife in Hades). Furthermore, people were aware of multiple notions of ultimate reality, and some of these metaphysicians were aware of others. No longer would a single tradition determine the boundaries of thought. The fences were breached; the souls were roaming.
Writing had existed for three thousand years, but its use was spreading from the palaces to landowners and merchants. Commerce among nations was growing, though rapacious raids continued (and continue). Greece became a trading country, and thus a cosmopolitan one. Political ferment and class struggle resulted in the rise of tyrants to replace hereditary monarchs and oligarchs. People began to view history not wholly as divinely mandated fate, or in the light of the ancient heroes, but also as the willful creation of remarkable all-too-human humans.
Concomitant with the change in consciousness arose the spread of writing. Writing requires of its adepts a narrow visual focus that departs from the generalized alertness of preliterate humankind. In addition, Plato reminds us that writing brought the death of memory. Though writing made possible the accumulation of a vast storehouse of experience, the collective memory of the great libraries (now further expanded with digital storage), it decimated individual memory. Part of consciousness can be externally stored and need not animate the individual who can look to authorities instead of knowing everything at once, including the mysteries.
The arrival of writing necessarily transformed literature. The oral text has flexible form. Depending on the audience it may be edited for content or style. Even such a scripted spectacle as the circus varies in every performance. Its most fixed form is that constructed by the viewer. Each person’s experience, once registered, changes little, and every spectator’s response is shaped by the reactions of the group, the social conditions of reception (just as in a movie theater the viewer is more likely to laugh or gasp or drop a tear in concert with others). For a written text, the contradiction is reversed: the text never changes, but it invites a fresh construction from every reader. New meanings may always be adduced from the code, just as Augustine thought new readings of scripture may be as authentic as old. While a new reading may attempt to supplant an old one, more often it simply joins already existing readings. The poetic text glories in polysemy, whereas other forms of discourse seek simple clarity.
Manguel points out that the classic tag “scripta manet, verba volat” is today taken to indicate the advantage of writing which “lives on” while spoken words vanish, whereas it originally suggested the opposite valuation: that spoken words have wings and can fly, in other words, they are inspired, in contrast to the dead and inert written words.
Written culture was slow to come. Most readers mumbled the words if they did not read out loud. More than a thousand years after writing had become widespread and available not to an elite caste but to the well-to-do in general, Augustine is amazed to see Ambrose reading silently, and most poetry was performed aloud for another millennium after that.
Homer, at the dawn of generalized literacy, presents us with a written text of a composition processed through centuries of oral performance. The question of Homer is vast, and substantial recent discoveries in the field of oral literature have provided more fruitful questions (not all the answers). Whether the identification is literally true or not, the reader must be startled when the author of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo suddenly includes this boastful pitch, very nearly an advertisement: “Remember me in after time whenever any one of men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: `Whom think ye, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?' Then answer, each and all, with one voice: `He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.'” Around the seventh century B.C.E. we find the earliest demonstrably self-conscious artists, creators who feel they deserve a brand name.
The change in material conditions is again associated with a change in verbal technology. Art, and, in particular, lyric poetry, becomes a snapshot of consciousness, no longer what all the group sees, but what the maker says the persona sees. Though poetry still purveys dogma and received truths, it also does the opposite: it opens up critical possibilities, it points toward ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalence to a degree unknown to earlier times. Preserving a moment of consciousness, lyric verse asserts the irrational that governs the greater part of our thought even in this twenty-first century. Poetry foregrounds sense impressions, the raw data of all our conclusions. Poetry arises from an impulse toward pleasure, and Freud was far from the first to recognize the fundamental role of what he called the pleasure principle. For all these reasons, Aristotle could make his celebrated claim that poetry is truer than history. Through the play and manipulation of symbols which distinguishes our species from the others, each so excellent in its way, people have found something like the Buddhist mindful here-and-now and, using these tools of words, have vaulted from the most immediate to the sublime. A poem, a “program” of words, has the power, as Longinus says, to “entrance” its consumer, to inspire “exaltation” and “joy.”
2. Archilochos
The first named poetic personality in European literature is Archilochos, a mercenary and colonizer who died in battle during the seventh century B.C.E. Perhaps he assumed the vision of an outsider due to his birth from a slave mother (according to the traditional biography). At any rate, he is known as the first poets to use iambics, a meter strongly associated with satire and invective.
Homeric culture is heroic. The Iliad centers about Achilles’ acceptance of his impending doom. When Andromache makes her humane plea to Hektor, he says he would feel shame before both men and women, were he to fail to fight with valor. He hopes rather, he says, to gain glory for himself and his family, fame that is the warrior’s immortality. The Spartan mothers are said to have told their sons to return from battle, either with their shields or upon them (i.e. having fought nobly or else dead). Even today we are expected to glorify the war-dead, and the citizen who shows little enthusiasm for the sentiment is suspect.
In his most familiar poem, Archilochos directly contradicts the conventional pro patria et deo piety:
A Saian exults. He’s got the shield I left behind
in a bush, blameless, but against my will.
I got away myself. What’s the shield to me?
Forget it. I’ll get another no worse.
Over the centuries, the reader feels the cool breeze of a broken taboo, a boundary crossed, the simple declaration of a fact known to all combat veterans but rarely admitted: that honor and valor coexist on the battlefield with panic and pissing in one’s pants and simple self-preservation. The difference is that the poet speaks with an individual voice, confident that his own vision, his concrete specifics, bear truth and demand attention. No longer a craftsman with rigidly prescribed skills writing for a committee of the whole, he is able to warble his own tune and follow it where it leads.
The poem is not perceived more or less instantaneously like a painting or a building. Rather it unfolds over time, like music or a story. Archilochos’ poem is a kind of psychological cinematic montage. After the initial scene is sketched, it becomes a play of subjectivities. From imagining the Saian delighted at his booty, the mood shifts to the natural reaction of repugnance the Greek audience would have felt upon hearing of the lost shield. The deepening miasma is then suddenly contradicted by the single word: “blameless.” With some of the force of magic, the very pronunciation of the word makes it true. The admission, coming out of a certain military closeting, as it were, overwhelms the idée reçue. The warrior’s ego inheres in his will, and the poet admits loss, but still looks to the future, buoyed by his own individual conviction of merit, so secure he volunteers the tale of the lost shield as a paradoxical affirmation of his confidence and worth.
Whereas Demodokos in the Odyssey is “instructor of the people,” repeating the vitally important principles that create the community, those things about which all agree, Archilochos is their critic. Meleagar called him “thorny.” After he died, the story spread that wasps hovered over his grave.
3. Alcman
Originally, people regarded nature with awe. Animist beliefs found divinity in that other which they could not wholly control. When nature influences narrative in Homer, it is generally as a reflection of divine wills. Hesiod, on the other hand, a yeoman farmer rather than a landed gentleman, calls his community Ascra “a woebegone village, bad in winter, unbearable in summer, good at no time.” His entire effort was devoted to mastering nature, and he found the struggle taxing. For the later market agriculturalist animals and plants have economic reality. Their fertility, which had been illuminated with numinous potency, has become a matter of account book bottom lines. The ecstatic shamanism of the Upper Palaeolithic has deteriorated to a collection of prudential superstitions: for instance, it is taboo, Hesiod advises, to stand upright and face the sun while urinating; one should open new wine-jars on the 27th of the month.
Alcman’s time doubtless considered itself less superstitious yet, but the ritual substratum persisted. Alcman wrote choral lyrics, meant to be performed as (song and dance) by young girls under a male choirmaster. He refers to the male chorus leader as a “stallion.” In another piece, he laments the weakness of his [aged] limbs before his “girls of honey-sweet voices,” wishing he were a halcyon soaring with them over the sea. This is at once a realistic vignette suggesting freedom and energy, a wish for renewed sexuality, and a reference to the myth that claimed that the female halcyon would carry the male, when aged, on her back. In a way the choruses may resemble the entertainment world of today which elevates ever-young maidens to rejuvenate us all in imagination.
He often praised specific members of his troupe (the leaders of his half-choirs of virgins Agido and Hagesikhora, for instance) by name. The glorious dance, the beautiful bodies, the concentration of élan vital are themselves redemptive. In Oedipus Tyrannos the chorus dances and sings: “when [shameful deeds] are held in esteem, why dance together?” The inverse proposition was equally reasonable to the Greeks: when people did dance, their ordered movements indicate (and help to create) an ordered cosmos, a harmonious world. Thus the viewers of the tragedy could find solace in the performance itself even as they contemplated dread events. The chorus dances, rather like an existential “man of action;” it “goes on” like Vladimir and Estragon in the face of death and dissolution. The lyric choir dances still, though for us the dance is encoded as black marks on a white page.
The lyricist moves to recover a portion of the old mysterium tremendum. The precise details of nature, in Homeric poetry summoned to elaborate grand similes, here stand alone. He simply describes the scene, expecting that the facts, edited from raw sense impression, will be significant. The speaker is, of course, a persona and the picture doubtless owes much to earlier models, so the poem may be as much about other poems, other visions, other sensibilities, as about the scene before him, but it asserts verisimilitude. The gods are notably absent. Nature is apprehended in itself or as a projection of the viewer in a way familiar to us from Chinese and Japanese poetry. The poem is not so distant from hymns calling on deities and asking favors. Here the poet seeks sympathetic psychic rest by singing to sleep the marvels of creation, geological formations and fauna, but the last word goes to the wonders of the wholly natural. The poet invokes a sort of peace which passeth understanding, but the last word is spent in wonder at those miraculous yet ordinary objects: the wings of birds, birds that mediate between this world and another.
Sleep is on the mountains,
the peaks and the clefts,
headlands and torrents,
all those that walk the woods,
nursed by the black earth,
predators, mountain-bred,
and the race of bees,
and monsters from the sea’s purple depths!
Sleep on, you tribe of birds
with such long wings!
4. Sappho
What could be more subjective and powerful than sexual love? The focus of most popular song today, it is also the most traditional topic of poets. Archilochos wrote a number of love lyrics (as well a number of thoroughly obscene verses ), and Alcman’s young choruses dance illuminated by an erotic nimbus, but for Sappho and her coterie, love is unapologetically central. Whatever else it may have been, Sappho’s thiasos was an association for the cultivation of sensibility reminiscent of Sei Sonagon and Lady Murasaki’s Heian Japan or Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Courts of Love in southern France. The old Victorian dodge of maintaining that she ran a school may have some truth, but it was hardly the sort of excuse they sought. We now admit the ancient Greek predeliction (very well documented in the case of men) for sex between adults and teens, but she seems to refer to adult women in references to some of her associates as hetaera which sounds like a term used among equals. In addition, she does not slight the power of heterosexual love: apart from her own marriage, she was known to have written an entire book of epithalamia.
In the Phaedrus Socrates surprises his interlocutors with the claim that “our greatest goods come to us through madness,” but he quickly limits this: “assuming the madness is a gift of the gods.” All the varieties he describes are associated with poetry: prophetic madness (governed by Apollo), telestic madness (as in Dionysian ritual), poetic madness (Muses), and erotic possession (Aphrodite and Eros). Here the subjectivity in which we live is embraced and glorified as divine.
And this is not simply the transport of love’s first blossom. Sappho’s work is filled with jealousy, petty backbiting, resentment of all sorts, but this is clearly part of love’s dialectic. confidence in one’s subjectivity, a vision for triangulation, capturing what Lawrence called the mystery of “the offering-up one yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else” by keeping precise and direct record of its visitation.
The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --
listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.
My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.
Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,
without you . . .
Longinus praised this catalogue of physical symptoms of love, saying its power arises from describing the “most extreme and intense” signs of passion. The poem was translated (after a fashion) by Catullus and his version was translated by Sir Philip Sidney during the love-sonnet craze of the 16th century. In her intensity and single-minded focus, Sappho points toward the Platonic “ascent of love” from the individual beloved to the divine, later elaborated by Plotinus and the Victorines. As Longinus notes, the goal of poetry is not to persuade, but to entrance, to transport with wonder. This is an altogether different experience than being taught, persuaded or informed. The shamanic trance, the “Pentecostal” possession during group ceremonies, is replaced by an aesthetic experience, more idiosyncratic, but equally ambitious.
5. Conclusion
With the spread of writing, the individual vision is preserved and privileged. The poet perceives the Olympians through the quotidian. The educated classes in particular lost some of the cosmic participation mystique which humans had cultivated through ritual and liturgy (i.e. through art) at least since they have been homo sapiens, and the new lyric, through the real, undeniable data of everyday life, revalued everything. Archilochus presents a dissent from social norms; Alcman a nonmythological but nonetheless still sanctified nature; and Sappho the incendiary irrationality of love.
The genre of lyric poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse not merely by extraordinary compression, but also by its ability (shared only with the other arts) to accurately represent human consciousness, properly privileging subjectivity, the irrational, sense impressions, and pleasure-seeking. Poetry also allows the expression of new ideas, contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalence. Art provides the means for investigating the mysteries of god, love, and death. The thematic spectrum runs from those works that most affirm a society’s accepted truths (and this sort dominates in the oral age as well as in mass and popular media), and works that question the present order (these have been preserved since the dawn of writing, but have been preferred only since the Romantic era).
A character in an ancient dialogue says of the reputation of a poet that he would live as long as “serving-lad bears round mixed wine for cups and deals bumpers about board, so long as maiden band does holy night-long service of the dance, so long as the scale-pan that is daughter of bronze sits upon the summit of the cottabus-pole ready for the throwing of the wine drops.” This in the face of inevitable suffering and death, in a cosmos finally unknowable, and thus subjectively unpredictable and absurd, a person chooses to drink, yes, and to take joy in the bodies of others (both the “serving-lad” and the “maiden[s]” offer up their youth), but also to socialize, to fling wine in an unlikely game with elaborate rules and to pass the time as well composing poetry.
In my youth, the primary image of Greek antiquity was the fountainhead. In the old ethnocentric view, philosophy, aesthetics, democracy, values of tolerance and liberality, all good things flowed to us from the Periclean age. Europeans have made a variety of uses of the classics: the veneration of the medievals for whom antiquity regularly signified authority, Renaissance celebration of Greece to legitimize a new humanism, the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers who founded a new “cult of the muses,” the growth of scientific investigation which flowered in the philological rigor of Wilamowitz and then gave way to the decadent prose of John Addington Symonds and the poised academic swoon of Alma-Tadema’s paintings.
Like all these predecessors, I would argue that my Greeks are the authentic Greeks. Like the lyric poets, indeed, like all of us, my own subjectivity provides my sole access to Truth.
The Muses
The muses arose in association with cult practice. For Pausanias the original muses are song, memory, and occasion (Μελέτη, also “practice”). This formulation implies ritual performance. Alcman and Mimnermus regard them as children of Gaia and Ouranos, and thus primeval. Much of the vocabulary of poetry points in the same direction: metrical “feet” began with dance steps, the “strophe” signified a physical turn, etc.
To account for the later tradition that names Zeus and Mnemosyne as parents of the muses, Pausanias suggests there may have been two generations of muses. Of these the first may imply collective, altogether oral events, and the second, performances that were written, though (as the role of memory indicates) virtually always orally performed.
The muses are actually a late systemization. Erato was especially associated with love poems and hymns. Among canonical nine there are muses for astronomy, history and for geometry. In the early era the muses’ realm was spacious, extending over the range of human culture (including scientific learning) through poetry, music, and dance. Through the metrical patterning of poetry, knowledge was given a gleam of the divine and preserved.
Erato is the muse associated with lyric poetry, with the lyre (κιθάρα), with love poetry and hymns. In the tradition of late classicism Euterpe also governs lyric poetry, but she is generally depicted with a flute (the αὐλός).
The muses sometimes reflect a Jungian anima, a subconscious wisdom that inspires the poet with vision. Graves, in his twentieth-century concept of the muse-poet, who through his art worships the Goddess, consciously recalls the ancient and the medieval in his attempt to revive this blend of the vatic and the erotic.
Caveat lector: When they appeared to Hesiod as he watched his flocks, the muses said, “We know how to say many false things as though they were true, but we also know, when we choose to, to tell the truth.”
Posted by William Seaton at 8:16 AM
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Sappho’s Holy Tortoise Shell: Eros and Poetry in Ancient Greece
Sappho is an unusual writer in that, like Hemingway, her name is known to many who have never read a word of her work. Thus her reputation is a cultural force partially independent of her poetry. The facts about her are few, but treatment of her has never been limited to the facts.
Sappho, or Psápphō (Ψάπφω) in her own Aiolic dialect, is an early Greek poet, who wrote centuries before the classical time of Periclean Athens. She lived in Lesbos, an island just off the Turkish coast, about 2600 years ago. It may well be that she didn’t actually leave written texts of her work herself, though writing was known in her time, but later editors collected her poetry into organized volumes. Her principal theme is love, love for other women, though she also wrote an entire book of marriage poems, and she is known to have had a husband and daughter. The bulk of her work has disappeared, with only those passages quoted in ancient books, fragments that could be deciphered from papyrus recovered from Egyptian trash-heaps, and a few lines from pottery still extant. Apart from the bits and pieces of her work, the facts of her biography, cobbled out of a handful of dubious references, are scant indeed, and add little to our reading of the poems. Doubtless she was an aristocrat and a friend of the poet Alkaios. She seems to have spent some time in political exile, and we may even know the names of some of her family members. Her brother seems to have been prey to his own love-madness which led to an embarrassing affair with an Egyptian courtesan.
In the history of literature, Sappho contributed toward the definition of the lyric genre by her assertion of the primacy of the data of individual lived experience. Instead of writing genuine liturgical hymns for public use (or patriotic songs or general moralizing), she wrote about specific persons, specific feelings, specific days. At a time when much poetry was choral, and most art traditional and collective, she insisted on the irreducible value of her potentially subversive subjectivity. Like the troubadours, like Villon, and Frank O’Hara (as well as many others), she uses her own name, her friends’ names, and seems very much to write about her most intimate affairs.
Part of poetry’s precision arises from just this close-up view of the author’s consciousness. The “truth” of experience is undeniable, while its interpretation is elusive. This perspective inevitably privileges the irrational, the subconscious, sense impressions, and the imperatives of desire. Most of us rarely acknowledge the extent to which we are governed by desire, while Sappho insisted on her eroticism; indeed, she deified it. Like many insightful artists from the makers of palaeolithic fetishes through Freud and the screenwriters for musicals in Bombay, Sappho realized that eros is, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, “of the great gods.” [1] As the first century author of On the Sublime says, “Sappho in her poetry always chooses the emotions attendant on the lover’s frenzy from among those which accompany this emotion in real life. And wherein does she demonstrate her excellence? In the skill with which she selects and fuses the most extreme and intense manifestations of these emotions.” [2] Yet, unlike some Provençal troubadours, her love was not idealized into ether, but rather altogether realistic, complete with selfish, envious, and vindictive thoughts, nonetheless divine despite all-too-human ego. In the great hymn to Aphrodite, pursuing a woman who rejects her, the goddess does not promise future bliss, but rather that Sappho will find acrid satisfaction of Schadenfreude when she can take her turn in rejecting the one she presently loves. Sappho can be cantankerous at the same time as she is sublime.
Oddly, the element in Sappho that has attracted the greatest share of attention since antiquity – her apparent Lesbianism in the modern sense (we owe this usage, of course, to her reputation) – seems all but irrelevant to understanding her. So far as I can tell, her “gay” sensibility so closely corresponds to my own “straight” experience that the “othernesses” of nationality, era, personality, gender itself, all seem more significant.
Yet for 2600 years Sappho’s sexual orientation has presented a conundrum to moralistic and misogynist critics. A celebrated poet active at the dawn of European culture, she was praised in the very highest terms by the best critics of ancient and modern times. Yet her explicit sexual preference for women, the theme of many of her poems, disturbed some readers from the start. Before long the cognitive dissonance was unbearable, and readers created an extraordinary body of calumnies, evasions, and myths [3] to avoid facing Sappho directly. A survey of such reactions, while it rarely sheds light on the poet, reveals a great deal about the history of sexism and homophobia. [4]
Sappho’s prestige in the ancient literary world was unquestioned. Plato called her the “tenth Muse”5 and Antipater “the mortal Muse.” Longinus made one of her poems the centerpiece of his essay On the Sublime, and Dionysos of Halicarnassus likewise pointed to a poem by Sappho as a model of excellence in his On Literary Composition. A famous story (whose historical truth is irrelevant since its evidence as to her reputation is the same whether it originated with a statesman or a creative critic) has the great law-giver Solon so impressed with a Sapphic song that he said he was satisfied to die, having heard the beauty of her words. Meleagar called her works “few, but roses.” The most prestigious Roman poets – Horace, Catullus, and Ovid among others – paid homage to her art, beginning a tradition that extends to the present day. [6] She was honored in vase paintings (a few of which survive), statues, [7] and coins.
For all that, in the generation following Sappho, the attacks on her reputation began. A poem attributed to Anacreon uses Lesbian in its modern meaning including a modern sneer:
Golden-haired Eros
tossed a purple ball my way
and asked me to play
with that young thing
in fancy sandals.
See, she comes from well-built Lesbos.
She can’t stand my white hair,
and ogles another girl.
While this text might be read as satirizing the speaker who attributes his rejection to lesbianism rather than his age, the malice and distortion in Sappho’s image was soon unmistakable. Comedies with her name in the title were written by Diphilus, Aphippus, Ameipsias, Amphis, and Antiphanes. Menander was the first to tell the fanciful tale of the Leucadian leap. In this reworking of myth, [8] Sappho gave up her sexual preference at the sight of the handsome Phaon. Rejected by him, she killed herself by leaping off a cliff. [9] In this glorious suicide, both the poet and the “problem” of lesbianism die. In other comedies [10] she is depicted as a whore, a nymphomaniac, and, in general, a model of moral depravity rather than artistic achievement.
Thus she was denounced in the second century A.D. by Tatian [11] as “a love-mad, whorish woman.” Some of the stories of Christian and Muslim moralists targeting Sappho’s works for censorship have been shown to be dubious or false, but it is clear that the great majority of her poems did not survive the destruction of the ancient libraries. [12]
The split between literary praise and increasing popular ridicule and condemnation led Aelian (in 200 A.D.) to conclude that there must have been two different women of the same name in the same time and place. The encyclopedic Suda repeated this same notion centuries later, and it persisted into the 19th century.
While there were surely no two Sapphos, the division of attitude persisted. She was praised by Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan, and Ariosto; in John Lyly’s play Sappho and Phaon, the author compliments Queen Elizabeth by associating her with Sappho. Donne refers to “the holy fire” of her verse. [13] Raphael managed to get her inside the Vatican by including her as the only mortal woman in the scene of Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura. Still, once her sexual preference became known, she was attacked by such prominent writers as Pope.
In more modern times there have also been writers who glorified her as an outsider, a transgressor, a quasi-bohemian role model, and she became a heroine to aesthetes, decadents, and rebels as well as to gays. The French were particularly fond of this image, with Baudelaire [14] in the lead. Louys and Daudet wrote novels about her while in England, Swinburne declared her the greatest poet ever, and Symonds celebrated her in overripe prose, well worth reading.
Scholars and critics, too, participate in the prejudices of their cultures. Some of the most expert professors exercised immense ingenuity to understand how an undoubtedly great poet, endorsed by the best ancient authorities, could seem, on the face of it, to be guilty of the most unthinkable immorality. Thus Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, toward the beginning of the last century, was so gallant as to propose the notion that Sappho operated a school associated with a religious cult. Thus she was made as respectable as a headmistress, which to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, was surely respectable indeed, and what had looked like erotic enthusiasm for millennia, became professional concern, perhaps slightly warmed by maternal feeling. Robinson indignantly maintains that her very artistic excellence precludes her homosexualityand even her capable modern editor, while he must concede the passionate character of her attachments, insists tortuously that there is no evidence of her having actually acted on her impulses! [15]
But it is time to bring Sappho to this new stage in my own words. Though she has been translated countless times, I suppose my own motives for producing yet more versions resemble those of Kenneth Rexroth, who speaks of his “ecstasy” when first translating Sappho, and says, “what matters most is sympathy – the ability to project into Sappho’s experience and then to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.”16 The imaginative projection across the miles, the years, and the very real gaps of personality, gender and sexual orientation I believe I have managed. As for the “viability,” only those who hear these poems can judge.
1 In “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature.
2 Chapter 10.
3 Among the fuller treatments of her reputation are the traditional David M. Robinson, Sappho and her Influence (George Harrap & Co., London, 1925) and the more modern Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937 (University of Chicago, Chicago, 1989). A broader, less scholarly narrative emerges in Margaret Reynold’s A Sappho Companion.
4 See Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality for the best general source for attitudes toward homosexuality in the ancient world, though its value for Sappho is limited by the facts that Boswell has little to say about gay women, and his principle chronological focus is in the Christian era. Still, he documents such striking points as the fact that neither Greek nor Latin even had a word corresponding to the English “homosexuality” (itself invented only a century ago).
5 This is the name of a bar in Mytilene today. Present-day Mytilene has also a Hotel Sappho and a taverna offering “Aphrodite Home-Cooking.”
6 The most recent example being Erica Jong’s novel Sappho’s Leap.
7 The one in Syracuse was inscribed “I surpassed women in poetry as greatly as Homer surpassed men.” Today a modern statue of the poet stands at quayside in Mytilene.
8 Phaon is an epithet of Adonis, and the mythic origins of the story have many parallels.
9 Since this story was repeated by Ovid, it became better known for the Middle Ages than Sappho’s own work. Other comedies, while not including her name in the title, did include references to Phaon or Leucadia, and thus may reasonably be considered treatments of the theme of Sappho.
10 None exists in its entirety, but plot summaries and quotations are extant from several.
11 Once a significant Christian missionary, Tatian is now regarded as a heretic. To him, even marriage is a form of fornication.
12 Other factors also led to the loss of her work: the preference of later ancient writers for Attic dialect instead of Sappho’s Aeolian, the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, and, of course, the general ravages of time.
13 in “Sappho to Philaenis,” where the fact of her lover’s femaleness seems not to trouble Donne in the least.
14 He had originally planned to call Les Fleurs du Mal Les Lesbiennes, and it is the poems on lesbian themes that brought down censorship.
15 Denys Page. Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1955. p. 144. Page was troubled by phrases speaking of her sleeping with her beloved, but he prefers, he says, retreating into Latin, not to take these “in malam partem.” This thoughtful reaction foundered, though, in the face of new fragments which seem to speak of a lover “wet as pasture”, and of a leather dildo (“receivers of the dildo,” in fr. 99.5), so he simply concludes, “There would be more to say on this topic if the Alexandrian collection of Sappho’s poems had survived intact.” Indeed, but would Page find the voice to say it?
16 The first quotation is from p. 154 of An Autobiographical Novel. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. The second from p. 28 “The Poet as Translator.” Assays. New York: New Directions, 1961.
I tell you straight: I would be dead.
Leaving me, she wept
so much and told me this:
"What awful woe we have, Sappho!
I swear I go against my will."
Atthis, you know our love Anaktoria,
although she lives in Sardis far away,
she thinks of us a thousand times a day,
of when we used to take our time together
and she thought yours a goddess' face.
Your singing was a thing she loved to hear.
And now her light among Lydian women
is just like when the rosy-fingered moon,
shining after setting of the sun,
pours out a light that overwhelms the stars
and flashes on the sea as bright
as its flood of light on fields thick with flowers.
Transparent dew then settles on the earth
and fills the rose and thyme with life
and also clover, rich in honey.
Often though she's far away,
our lover thinks of Atthis' love.
Exquisite longing grips her heart.
She calls for us to come. We hear --
for many tongues of night
relay her call across the sea.
Sappho (Lobel and Page 96)
And then I answered her and said,
"Rejoice and go. Remember me.
You know how we all cared for you.
If not, then I'd recall your thoughts
of good times we've gone through.
Wreaths of roses, wreaths of violets,
at my side you put them on,
woven wreaths around your tender neck.
And you took perfume fit for queens
and rubbed it on . . .
Lying on soft beds
you'd satisfy desire.
Sappho (83)
Sappho, I tell you, you'll lose my love
if you keep this up.
Oh, pull your shapely body out of bed,
take off your Chian robe and bathe
like a simple lily by a stream.
Kleis will bring us saffron robes
and dark clothes from the cedar chest,
and all just for our joy.
You'll get a fresh dress,
a flower wreath to crown your charms,
those charms that make me mad.
Praxinoa'll roast up nuts
and I will bring a proper drink --
we'll make a party fit for gods!
All this will come when you, most beautiful
of women, return, bringing joy
to the white city of Mytilene.
It'll be just like it was, like a mother
with her children. Just think --
and remember the days we've passed.
Sappho (82)
The moon and the Pleiades
gone down, middle of the night now.
Time passes;
I lie alone.
Sappho (6)
Immortal Zeus-born Aphrodite,
weaving wiles on a rich-wrought throne.
I'm your supplicant. Give me now
no further grief.
But come -- if ever you heard
my call from far and hitched
a chariot to leave
Zeus' golden home.
Fine swift sparrows thickly beating
strong wings over land
and under heaven brought you
to the black earth.
Once come, blessed goddess
with a timeless smile
you'll ask, "What now
that you need me?
What'll I do, wild heart?
Who'll feel the snare of your love?
Tell me now, Sappho,
who's done you wrong?
If she flees, soon she'll follow.
Having spurned your gifts, she'll
offer the more to you. Indifferent now --
she'll love you soon."
Come to me then and chase
my blues away. Lend
your help to grant my heart
its joy.
Sappho (28)
Virgins . . .
all night long . . .
we’ll sing of you and your young lover
(violets between her thighs).
So rouse your brothers, man,
and hit the streets with them.
Tonight we'll know less sleep
than the clear-voiced bird.
Sappho (Lobel and Page 30)
The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --
listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.
My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.
Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,
without you . . .
Sappho (2)
Sappho, or Psápphō (Ψάπφω) in her own Aiolic dialect, is an early Greek poet, who wrote centuries before the classical time of Periclean Athens. She lived in Lesbos, an island just off the Turkish coast, about 2600 years ago. It may well be that she didn’t actually leave written texts of her work herself, though writing was known in her time, but later editors collected her poetry into organized volumes. Her principal theme is love, love for other women, though she also wrote an entire book of marriage poems, and she is known to have had a husband and daughter. The bulk of her work has disappeared, with only those passages quoted in ancient books, fragments that could be deciphered from papyrus recovered from Egyptian trash-heaps, and a few lines from pottery still extant. Apart from the bits and pieces of her work, the facts of her biography, cobbled out of a handful of dubious references, are scant indeed, and add little to our reading of the poems. Doubtless she was an aristocrat and a friend of the poet Alkaios. She seems to have spent some time in political exile, and we may even know the names of some of her family members. Her brother seems to have been prey to his own love-madness which led to an embarrassing affair with an Egyptian courtesan.
In the history of literature, Sappho contributed toward the definition of the lyric genre by her assertion of the primacy of the data of individual lived experience. Instead of writing genuine liturgical hymns for public use (or patriotic songs or general moralizing), she wrote about specific persons, specific feelings, specific days. At a time when much poetry was choral, and most art traditional and collective, she insisted on the irreducible value of her potentially subversive subjectivity. Like the troubadours, like Villon, and Frank O’Hara (as well as many others), she uses her own name, her friends’ names, and seems very much to write about her most intimate affairs.
Part of poetry’s precision arises from just this close-up view of the author’s consciousness. The “truth” of experience is undeniable, while its interpretation is elusive. This perspective inevitably privileges the irrational, the subconscious, sense impressions, and the imperatives of desire. Most of us rarely acknowledge the extent to which we are governed by desire, while Sappho insisted on her eroticism; indeed, she deified it. Like many insightful artists from the makers of palaeolithic fetishes through Freud and the screenwriters for musicals in Bombay, Sappho realized that eros is, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, “of the great gods.” [1] As the first century author of On the Sublime says, “Sappho in her poetry always chooses the emotions attendant on the lover’s frenzy from among those which accompany this emotion in real life. And wherein does she demonstrate her excellence? In the skill with which she selects and fuses the most extreme and intense manifestations of these emotions.” [2] Yet, unlike some Provençal troubadours, her love was not idealized into ether, but rather altogether realistic, complete with selfish, envious, and vindictive thoughts, nonetheless divine despite all-too-human ego. In the great hymn to Aphrodite, pursuing a woman who rejects her, the goddess does not promise future bliss, but rather that Sappho will find acrid satisfaction of Schadenfreude when she can take her turn in rejecting the one she presently loves. Sappho can be cantankerous at the same time as she is sublime.
Oddly, the element in Sappho that has attracted the greatest share of attention since antiquity – her apparent Lesbianism in the modern sense (we owe this usage, of course, to her reputation) – seems all but irrelevant to understanding her. So far as I can tell, her “gay” sensibility so closely corresponds to my own “straight” experience that the “othernesses” of nationality, era, personality, gender itself, all seem more significant.
Yet for 2600 years Sappho’s sexual orientation has presented a conundrum to moralistic and misogynist critics. A celebrated poet active at the dawn of European culture, she was praised in the very highest terms by the best critics of ancient and modern times. Yet her explicit sexual preference for women, the theme of many of her poems, disturbed some readers from the start. Before long the cognitive dissonance was unbearable, and readers created an extraordinary body of calumnies, evasions, and myths [3] to avoid facing Sappho directly. A survey of such reactions, while it rarely sheds light on the poet, reveals a great deal about the history of sexism and homophobia. [4]
Sappho’s prestige in the ancient literary world was unquestioned. Plato called her the “tenth Muse”5 and Antipater “the mortal Muse.” Longinus made one of her poems the centerpiece of his essay On the Sublime, and Dionysos of Halicarnassus likewise pointed to a poem by Sappho as a model of excellence in his On Literary Composition. A famous story (whose historical truth is irrelevant since its evidence as to her reputation is the same whether it originated with a statesman or a creative critic) has the great law-giver Solon so impressed with a Sapphic song that he said he was satisfied to die, having heard the beauty of her words. Meleagar called her works “few, but roses.” The most prestigious Roman poets – Horace, Catullus, and Ovid among others – paid homage to her art, beginning a tradition that extends to the present day. [6] She was honored in vase paintings (a few of which survive), statues, [7] and coins.
For all that, in the generation following Sappho, the attacks on her reputation began. A poem attributed to Anacreon uses Lesbian in its modern meaning including a modern sneer:
Golden-haired Eros
tossed a purple ball my way
and asked me to play
with that young thing
in fancy sandals.
See, she comes from well-built Lesbos.
She can’t stand my white hair,
and ogles another girl.
While this text might be read as satirizing the speaker who attributes his rejection to lesbianism rather than his age, the malice and distortion in Sappho’s image was soon unmistakable. Comedies with her name in the title were written by Diphilus, Aphippus, Ameipsias, Amphis, and Antiphanes. Menander was the first to tell the fanciful tale of the Leucadian leap. In this reworking of myth, [8] Sappho gave up her sexual preference at the sight of the handsome Phaon. Rejected by him, she killed herself by leaping off a cliff. [9] In this glorious suicide, both the poet and the “problem” of lesbianism die. In other comedies [10] she is depicted as a whore, a nymphomaniac, and, in general, a model of moral depravity rather than artistic achievement.
Thus she was denounced in the second century A.D. by Tatian [11] as “a love-mad, whorish woman.” Some of the stories of Christian and Muslim moralists targeting Sappho’s works for censorship have been shown to be dubious or false, but it is clear that the great majority of her poems did not survive the destruction of the ancient libraries. [12]
The split between literary praise and increasing popular ridicule and condemnation led Aelian (in 200 A.D.) to conclude that there must have been two different women of the same name in the same time and place. The encyclopedic Suda repeated this same notion centuries later, and it persisted into the 19th century.
While there were surely no two Sapphos, the division of attitude persisted. She was praised by Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan, and Ariosto; in John Lyly’s play Sappho and Phaon, the author compliments Queen Elizabeth by associating her with Sappho. Donne refers to “the holy fire” of her verse. [13] Raphael managed to get her inside the Vatican by including her as the only mortal woman in the scene of Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura. Still, once her sexual preference became known, she was attacked by such prominent writers as Pope.
In more modern times there have also been writers who glorified her as an outsider, a transgressor, a quasi-bohemian role model, and she became a heroine to aesthetes, decadents, and rebels as well as to gays. The French were particularly fond of this image, with Baudelaire [14] in the lead. Louys and Daudet wrote novels about her while in England, Swinburne declared her the greatest poet ever, and Symonds celebrated her in overripe prose, well worth reading.
Scholars and critics, too, participate in the prejudices of their cultures. Some of the most expert professors exercised immense ingenuity to understand how an undoubtedly great poet, endorsed by the best ancient authorities, could seem, on the face of it, to be guilty of the most unthinkable immorality. Thus Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, toward the beginning of the last century, was so gallant as to propose the notion that Sappho operated a school associated with a religious cult. Thus she was made as respectable as a headmistress, which to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, was surely respectable indeed, and what had looked like erotic enthusiasm for millennia, became professional concern, perhaps slightly warmed by maternal feeling. Robinson indignantly maintains that her very artistic excellence precludes her homosexualityand even her capable modern editor, while he must concede the passionate character of her attachments, insists tortuously that there is no evidence of her having actually acted on her impulses! [15]
But it is time to bring Sappho to this new stage in my own words. Though she has been translated countless times, I suppose my own motives for producing yet more versions resemble those of Kenneth Rexroth, who speaks of his “ecstasy” when first translating Sappho, and says, “what matters most is sympathy – the ability to project into Sappho’s experience and then to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.”16 The imaginative projection across the miles, the years, and the very real gaps of personality, gender and sexual orientation I believe I have managed. As for the “viability,” only those who hear these poems can judge.
1 In “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature.
2 Chapter 10.
3 Among the fuller treatments of her reputation are the traditional David M. Robinson, Sappho and her Influence (George Harrap & Co., London, 1925) and the more modern Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937 (University of Chicago, Chicago, 1989). A broader, less scholarly narrative emerges in Margaret Reynold’s A Sappho Companion.
4 See Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality for the best general source for attitudes toward homosexuality in the ancient world, though its value for Sappho is limited by the facts that Boswell has little to say about gay women, and his principle chronological focus is in the Christian era. Still, he documents such striking points as the fact that neither Greek nor Latin even had a word corresponding to the English “homosexuality” (itself invented only a century ago).
5 This is the name of a bar in Mytilene today. Present-day Mytilene has also a Hotel Sappho and a taverna offering “Aphrodite Home-Cooking.”
6 The most recent example being Erica Jong’s novel Sappho’s Leap.
7 The one in Syracuse was inscribed “I surpassed women in poetry as greatly as Homer surpassed men.” Today a modern statue of the poet stands at quayside in Mytilene.
8 Phaon is an epithet of Adonis, and the mythic origins of the story have many parallels.
9 Since this story was repeated by Ovid, it became better known for the Middle Ages than Sappho’s own work. Other comedies, while not including her name in the title, did include references to Phaon or Leucadia, and thus may reasonably be considered treatments of the theme of Sappho.
10 None exists in its entirety, but plot summaries and quotations are extant from several.
11 Once a significant Christian missionary, Tatian is now regarded as a heretic. To him, even marriage is a form of fornication.
12 Other factors also led to the loss of her work: the preference of later ancient writers for Attic dialect instead of Sappho’s Aeolian, the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, and, of course, the general ravages of time.
13 in “Sappho to Philaenis,” where the fact of her lover’s femaleness seems not to trouble Donne in the least.
14 He had originally planned to call Les Fleurs du Mal Les Lesbiennes, and it is the poems on lesbian themes that brought down censorship.
15 Denys Page. Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1955. p. 144. Page was troubled by phrases speaking of her sleeping with her beloved, but he prefers, he says, retreating into Latin, not to take these “in malam partem.” This thoughtful reaction foundered, though, in the face of new fragments which seem to speak of a lover “wet as pasture”, and of a leather dildo (“receivers of the dildo,” in fr. 99.5), so he simply concludes, “There would be more to say on this topic if the Alexandrian collection of Sappho’s poems had survived intact.” Indeed, but would Page find the voice to say it?
16 The first quotation is from p. 154 of An Autobiographical Novel. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. The second from p. 28 “The Poet as Translator.” Assays. New York: New Directions, 1961.
I tell you straight: I would be dead.
Leaving me, she wept
so much and told me this:
"What awful woe we have, Sappho!
I swear I go against my will."
Atthis, you know our love Anaktoria,
although she lives in Sardis far away,
she thinks of us a thousand times a day,
of when we used to take our time together
and she thought yours a goddess' face.
Your singing was a thing she loved to hear.
And now her light among Lydian women
is just like when the rosy-fingered moon,
shining after setting of the sun,
pours out a light that overwhelms the stars
and flashes on the sea as bright
as its flood of light on fields thick with flowers.
Transparent dew then settles on the earth
and fills the rose and thyme with life
and also clover, rich in honey.
Often though she's far away,
our lover thinks of Atthis' love.
Exquisite longing grips her heart.
She calls for us to come. We hear --
for many tongues of night
relay her call across the sea.
Sappho (Lobel and Page 96)
And then I answered her and said,
"Rejoice and go. Remember me.
You know how we all cared for you.
If not, then I'd recall your thoughts
of good times we've gone through.
Wreaths of roses, wreaths of violets,
at my side you put them on,
woven wreaths around your tender neck.
And you took perfume fit for queens
and rubbed it on . . .
Lying on soft beds
you'd satisfy desire.
Sappho (83)
Sappho, I tell you, you'll lose my love
if you keep this up.
Oh, pull your shapely body out of bed,
take off your Chian robe and bathe
like a simple lily by a stream.
Kleis will bring us saffron robes
and dark clothes from the cedar chest,
and all just for our joy.
You'll get a fresh dress,
a flower wreath to crown your charms,
those charms that make me mad.
Praxinoa'll roast up nuts
and I will bring a proper drink --
we'll make a party fit for gods!
All this will come when you, most beautiful
of women, return, bringing joy
to the white city of Mytilene.
It'll be just like it was, like a mother
with her children. Just think --
and remember the days we've passed.
Sappho (82)
The moon and the Pleiades
gone down, middle of the night now.
Time passes;
I lie alone.
Sappho (6)
Immortal Zeus-born Aphrodite,
weaving wiles on a rich-wrought throne.
I'm your supplicant. Give me now
no further grief.
But come -- if ever you heard
my call from far and hitched
a chariot to leave
Zeus' golden home.
Fine swift sparrows thickly beating
strong wings over land
and under heaven brought you
to the black earth.
Once come, blessed goddess
with a timeless smile
you'll ask, "What now
that you need me?
What'll I do, wild heart?
Who'll feel the snare of your love?
Tell me now, Sappho,
who's done you wrong?
If she flees, soon she'll follow.
Having spurned your gifts, she'll
offer the more to you. Indifferent now --
she'll love you soon."
Come to me then and chase
my blues away. Lend
your help to grant my heart
its joy.
Sappho (28)
Virgins . . .
all night long . . .
we’ll sing of you and your young lover
(violets between her thighs).
So rouse your brothers, man,
and hit the streets with them.
Tonight we'll know less sleep
than the clear-voiced bird.
Sappho (Lobel and Page 30)
The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --
listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.
My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.
Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,
without you . . .
Sappho (2)
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