Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  “Mechanism” approaches a view of consciousness itself as a product of evolutionary biology. The minute chemistry of enzymes and platelets is made almost psychedelically visible. The poem makes us ponder huge questions: are we merely flitting goldfinches in nature’s master plan? Is free will an illusion? Is art too a product of natural design? But the poem is fatally weakened by its abstruse diction, bombastic syntax, and factitious format. Why did Ammons choose those untidy, erratically staggered triads? They seem forced and arbitrary, out of sync with his own music. While David Young’s cryptic “Occupational Hazards” uses a concrete, vigorous, living English that connects us to the sixteenth century, “Mechanism” relies on a clotted, undigested academese that strains at profundity.

  And the poem is too long (sixteen stanzas). Shakespeare’s sonnets, bridging his piercing emotional experiences with his wary social observations, demonstrate the beauty and power of high condensation. In his great sonnet, “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats showed how a vast historical perspective could illuminate shattering contemporary events. Perhaps “Mechanism” should have been a sonnet, a worthy heir to Shakespeare and Yeats. But the poem shows the increasing distance of the poet from general society, which Ammons is analyzing but is no longer addressing in its own language. It prefigures what would happen to American poetry over the following decades, as the most ambitious poets became stranded in their own coteries and cultivated a self-blinding disdain for the surrounding culture.

  * [Arion, Fall 2008.]

  36

  WESTERN LOVE POETRY*

  In evaluating love poetry, we must ask first whether the language is private and original or formulaic and rhetorical. Is the poet speaking for him- or herself, or is the voice a persona? The poem, if commissioned by friend or patron, may be a projection into another’s adventures, or it may be an improvised conflation of real and invented details. A love poem cannot be simplistically read as a literal, journalistic record of an event or relationship; there is always some fictive reshaping of reality for dramatic or psychological ends. A love poem is secondary rather than primary experience; as an imaginative construction, it invites detached contemplation of the spectacle of sex.

  We must be particularly cautious when dealing with controversial forms of eroticism like homosexuality. Poems are unreliable historical evidence about any society; they may reflect the consciousness of only one exceptional person. Furthermore, homoerotic images or fantasies in poetry must not be confused with concrete homosexual practice. We may speak of tastes or tendencies in early poets but not of sexual orientation: this is a modern idea.

  Love poetry is equally informed by artistic tradition and contemporary cultural assumptions. The pagan attitude toward the body and its pleasures was quite different from that of Christianity, which assigns sex to the fallen realm of nature. The richness of Western love poetry may thus arise in part from the dilemma of how to reconcile mind or soul with body. Moreover, the generally higher social status of women in Western as opposed to Eastern culture has given love poetry added complexity or ambivalence: only women of strong personality could have inspired the tormented sagas of Catullus or Propertius. We must try to identify a poem’s intended audience. In antiquity the love poet was usually addressing a coterie of friends or connoisseurs; since Romanticism, however, the poet speaks to him- or herself, with the reader seeming to overhear private thoughts. We must ask about pornographic material in love poetry whether it reflects the freer sensibilities of a different time or whether the poet set out to shock or challenge his contemporaries. Much love poetry is clearly testing the limits of decorous speech, partly to bring sexual desire under the scrutiny and control of imagination. In the great Western theme of the transience of time, vivid sensuous details illustrate the evanescence of youth and beauty; the poet has a godlike power to defeat time and bestow immortality upon the beloved through art. Romantic impediments give the poem a dramatic frame: the beloved may be indifferent, far away, married to someone else, dead, or of the wrong sex. However, difficulty or disaster in real life is converted into artistic opportunity by the poet, whose work profits from the intensification and exploration of negative emotion.

  The history of European love poetry begins with the Greek lyric poets of the Archaic age (7th–6th centuries B.C.). Archilochus, Mimnermus, Sappho, and Alcaeus turn poetry away from the grand epic style toward the quiet personal voice, attentive to mood and emotion. Despite the fragmentary survival of Greek solo poetry, we see that it contains a new idea of love, which Homer shows as foolish or deceptive but never unhappy. Archilochus’ account of the anguish of love is deepened by Sappho, whose poetry was honored by male writers and grammarians until the fall of Rome. Sappho and Alcaeus were active on Lesbos, an affluent island off the Aeolian coast of Asia Minor where aristocratic women apparently had more freedom than later in classical Athens. Sappho is primarily a love poet, uninterested in politics or metaphysics. The nature of her love has caused much controversy and many fabrications, some by major scholars. Sappho was married, and she had a daughter, but her poetry suggests that she fell in love with a series of beautiful girls, who moved in and out of her coterie (not a school, club, or cult). There is as yet no evidence, however, that she had physical relations with women. Even the ancients, who had her complete works, were divided about her sexuality.

  Sappho shows that love poetry is how Western personality defines itself. The beloved is passionately perceived but also replaceable; he or she may exist primarily as a focus of the poet’s consciousness. In “He seems to me a god” (fragment 31), Sappho describes her pain at the sight of a favorite girl sitting and laughing with a man. The lighthearted social scene becomes oppressively internal as the poet sinks into suffering: she cannot speak or see; she is overcome by fever, tremor, pallor. These symptoms of love become conventional and persist for more than a thousand years. In plain, concise language, Sappho analyzes her extreme state as if she were both actor and observer; she is candid and emotional yet dignified, austere, almost clinical. This poem, preserved for us by Longinus, is the first great psychological document of Western literature. Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite (fragment 1) converts cult-song into love poem. The goddess, amused at Sappho’s desperate appeal for aid, teasingly reminds her of former infatuations and their inevitable end. Love is an endless cycle of pursuit, triumph, and ennui. The poem, seemingly so charming and transparent, is structured by a complex time scheme of past, present, and future, the ever-flowing stream of our emotional life. Sappho also wrote festive wedding songs and the first known description of a romantic moonlit night. She apparently invented the now commonplace adjective “bittersweet” for the mixed condition of love.

  Early Greek love poetry is based on simple parallelism between human emotion and nature, which has a Mediterranean mildness. Love-sickness, like a storm, is sudden and passing. Imagery is vivid and luminous, as in haiku; there is nothing contorted or artificial. Anacreon earned a proverbial reputation for wine, women, and song: his love is not Sappho’s spiritual crisis but the passing diversion of a bisexual bon vivant. Love poetry was little written in classical Athens, where lyric was absorbed into the tragic choral ode. Plato, who abandoned poetry for philosophy, left epigrams on the beauty of boys. The learned Alexandrian age revived love poetry as an art mode. Theocritus begins the long literary tradition of pastoral, where shepherds complain of unrequited love under sunny skies. Most of his Idylls contain the voices of rustic characters like homely Polyphemus, courting the scornful nymph Galatea, or Lycidas, a goatherd pining for a youth gone to sea. Aging Theocritus broods about his own love for fickle boys, whose blushes haunt him. In his Epigrams, Callimachus takes a lighter attitude toward love, to which he applies sporting metaphors of the hunt. In Medea’s agonized passion for Jason in the Argonautica, Apollonius Rhodius tries to mesh love poetry with epic. Asclepiades adds new symbols to love tradition: Eros and arrow-darting Cupid. Meleager writes with equal relish of cr
uel boys and voluptuous women, such as Heliodora. His is a poignant, sensual poetry filled with the color and smell of flowers.

  The Greek Anthology demonstrates the changes in Greek love poetry from the Alexandrian through Roman periods. As urban centers grow and speed up, nature metaphors recede. Trashy street life begins, and prostitutes, drag queens, randy tutors, and bathhouse masseuses crowd into view. Love poets become droll, jaded, less lyrical. Women are lusciously described but given no personalities or inner life. For the first time, love poetry incorporates ugliness, squalor, and disgust: Leonidas of Tarentum and Marcus Argentarius write of voracious sluts with special skills, and Antipater of Thessalonika coarsely derides scrawny old lechers. Boy-love is universal: Straton of Sardis, editor of an anthology of pederastic poems, celebrates the ripening phases of boys’ genitals. By the early Byzantine period, however, we feel the impact of Christianity in more heartfelt sentiment but also in guilt and melancholy.

  The Romans inherited a huge body of Greek love poetry. Catullus, the first Latin writer to adapt elegy for love themes, is obsessed with Lesbia, the glamorous noblewoman Clodia, promiscuously partying with midnight pickups. “I love and I hate”: this tortured affair is the most complex contribution to love poetry since Sappho, whom Catullus admired and imitated. The poet painfully grapples with the ambiguities and ambivalences of being in love with an aggressive, willful Western woman. He also writes tender love poems to a boy, honey-sweet Juventius. There is no Roman love poetry between adult men. Propertius records a long, tangled involvement with capricious Cynthia, a fast-living new woman. There are sensual bed scenes, love-bites, brawls. After Cynthia dies (perhaps poisoned), the angry, humiliated poet sees her ghost over his bed. Tibullus writes of troubled love for two headstrong mistresses, adulterous Delia and greedy Nemesis, and one elusive boy, Marathus. In Vergil’s Eclogue 2, the shepherd Corydon passionately laments his love-madness for Alexis, a proud, beautiful youth; the poem was traditionally taken as proof of Vergil’s own homosexuality. Horace names a half dozen girls whom he playfully lusts for, but only the rosy boy Ligurinus moves him to tears and dreams. In the Amores, Ovid boasts of his sexual prowess and offers strategies for adultery. The Art of Love tells how to find and keep a lover, including sexual positions, naughty words, and feigned ecstasies. The Remedies for Love contains precepts for falling out of love. The love letters of the Heroides are rhetorical monologues of famous women (Phaedra, Medea) abandoned by cads. Juvenal shows imperial Rome teeming with effeminates, libertines, and pimps; love or trust is impossible. The Empress prowls the brothels; every good-looking boy is endangered by rich seducers; drunken wives grapple in public stunts. Martial casts himself as a facetious explorer of this lewd world where erections are measured and no girl says no. The Dionysiaca, Nonnus’ late Greek epic, assembles fanciful erotic episodes from the life of Dionysus. Also extant are many Greek and Latin priapeia: obscene comic verses, attached to phallic statues of Priapus in field and garden, which threaten thieves with anal or oral rape.

  In medieval romance, love as challenge, danger, or high ideal is central to chivalric quest. From the mid-12th century, woman replaces the feudal lord as center of the militaristic chansons de geste. French aristocratic taste was refined by the courtly love of the Occitan (Provençal) troubadours, who raised woman to spiritual dominance, something new in Western love poetry. Amorous intrigue now lures the hero: to consummate his adultery with Guinevere, Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot bends the bars of her chamber, then bleeds into her bed. The symbolism of golden grail, bleeding lance, and broken sword of Chrétien’s Perceval is sexual as well as religious. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s German Parzival is vowed to purity, but adulterous Anfortas suffers a festering, incurable groin wound. Sexual temptations are specifically set to test a knight’s virtue in the French romances Yder and Hunbaut and the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The adultery of Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Isolde, with their steamy lovemaking, helped define Western romantic love as unhappy or doomed. The Trojan tale of faithful Troilus and treacherous Cressida was invented by Benoît de Sainte-Maure and transmitted to Boccaccio and Chaucer. Heavily influenced by Ovid, The Romance of the Rose (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun) uses dreamlike allegory and sexual symbols of flower, garden, and tower to chart love’s assault. The pregnancy of the Rose is a first for European literary heroines. Abelard wrote famous love songs, now lost, to Heloise. Dante’s youthful love poems to Beatrice in the Vita nuova begin in troubadour style, then modulate toward Christian mysticism. In the Inferno’s episode of Paolo and Francesca, seduced into adultery by reading a romance of Lancelot, Dante renounces his early affection for courtly love. Medieval Latin lyrics express homoerotic feeling between teacher and student in monastic communities. There are overtly pederastic poems from the 12th century and at least one apparently lesbian one, but no known vernacular or pastoral medieval poetry is homosexual. The goliardic Carmina Burana contains beautiful lyrics of the northern flowering of spring and love, as well as cheeky verses of carousing and wenching, some startlingly detailed. The French fabliau, a ribald verse-tale twice imitated by Chaucer, reacts against courtly love with bedroom pranks, barnyard drubbings, and an earthy stress on woman’s hoary genitality. Villon, zestfully atumble with Parisian trollops, will later combine the devil-may-care goliard’s pose with the fabliau’s slangy comedy.

  Renaissance epic further expands the romantic elements in chivalric adventure. Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso open quest to an armed heroine, a motif adopted by Spenser, whose Faerie Queene, emulating Ovid’s Metamorphoses, copiously catalogues incidents of normal and deviant sex. Petrarch, combining troubadour lyricism with Dante’s advanced psychology, creates the modern love poem. His Laura, unlike saintly Beatrice, is a real woman, not a symbol. Petrarch’s nature, vibrating to the lover’s emotions, will become the Romantic pathetic fallacy. His conceits, paradoxes, and images of fire and ice, which spread in sonnet sequences throughout Europe, inspired and burdened Renaissance poets, who had to discard the convention of frigid mistress and trembling wooer. Ronsard’s sonnets, addressed to Cassandre, Marie, and Hélène, first follow Petrarchan formulas, then achieve a simpler, more musical, debonair style, exquisitely attuned to nature. In the Amoretti, Spenser practices the sonnet (introduced to England by Wyatt and Surrey), but his supreme love poem is the Epithalamion, celebrating marriage. Like Michelangelo, Shakespeare writes complex love poetry to a beautiful young man and a forceful woman: the fair youth’s homoerotic androgyny is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s soft, “lovely” Adonis and Marlowe’s long-haired, white-fleshed Leander, romanced by Neptune. Richard Barnfield’s sonnets and Affectionate Shepherd openly offer succulent sexual delights to a boy called Ganymede, a common Renaissance allusion. The traditional allegory, based on the Song of Songs, of Christ the bridegroom knocking at the soul’s door, creates unmistakable homoeroticism in Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV, George Herbert’s “Love (III),” and spiritual stanzas by St. John of the Cross. In ardent poems to his fiancée, later his wife, Donne, with Spenser, demonstrates the new prestige of marriage: before this, no one wrote love poetry to his wife. Furthermore, Donne’s erudition implies that his lady, better educated than her medieval precursors, enjoys flattery of her intellect as well as of her beauty. Aretino’s sonnets daringly use vulgar street terms for acts of love. Marino’s Adonis makes baroque opera out of the ritualistic stages of sexual gratification. Waller and Marvell use the carpe diem argument to lure shy virgins into surrender; the Cavalier poets adopt a flippant court attitude toward women and pleasure. Carew’s “A Rapture” turns Donne’s ode to nakedness into a risqué tour of Celia’s nether parts. Libertines emerge in the late 17th century: Rochester, a Restoration wit, writes bluntly of raw couplings with ladies, whores, and boys. Milton’s Lycidas revives the Classical style of homoerotic pastoral lament. Paradise Lost, following Spenser and Donne, exalts “wedded Love” over the sterile wantonness of “Harlots” and “Court Amours” (4.7
50–70).

  The Age of Reason, valuing self-control and witty detachment, favored satire over love poetry. Rousseau’s delicate sentiment and pagan nature-worship created the fervent moods of “sensibility” and woman-revering Romanticism. Goethe, identifying femaleness with creativity, writes of happy sensual awakening in the Roman Elegies and jokes about sodomy with both sexes in the Venetian Epigrams, with its autoerotic acrobat Bettina; withheld pornographic verses imitate ancient priapeia. Schiller dedicates rhapsodic love poems to Laura, but his hymns to womanhood sentimentally polarize the sexes. Hölderlin addresses Diotima with generalized reverence and reserves his real feeling for Mother Earth. Blake calls for sexual freedom for women and for the end of guilt and shame. Burns composes rural Scottish ballads of bawdy or ill-starred love. Wordsworth’s Lucy poems imagine woman reabsorbed into roiling nature. In Christabel Coleridge stages a virgin’s seduction by a lesbian vampire, nature’s emissary. The younger English Romantics fuse poetry with free love. In Epipsychidion Shelley is ruled by celestial women radiating intellectual light. Keats makes emotion primary; his maidens sensuously feed and sleep or wildly dance dominion over knights and kings. Byron’s persona as a “mad, bad” seducer has been revised by modern revelations about his bisexuality. In the “Thyrza” poems, he woos and changes the sex of a favorite Cambridge choirboy; in Don Juan his blushing, girlish hero, forced into drag, catches the eye of a tempestuous lesbian sultana. Heine’s love ballads are about squires, shepherd boys, hussars, and fisher maidens; later verses record erotic adventures of the famous poet wined and dined by lady admirers.

  The French Romantics, turning art against nature in the hell of the modern city, make forbidden sex a central theme. Gautier celebrates the lonely, self-complete hermaphrodite. Baudelaire looses brazen whores upon syphilitic male martyrs; sex is torment, cursed by God. Baudelaire’s heroic, defiant lesbians are hedonistically modernized by Verlaine and later rehellenized by Louys. In Femmes Verlaine uses vigorous street argot to describe the voluptuous sounds and smells of sex with women; in Hombres he lauds the brutal virility of young laborers, whom he possesses in their rough work clothes. He and Rimbaud co-wrote an ingenious sonnet about the anus. Mallarmé’s leering faun embodies pagan eros; cold, virginal Herodias is woman as castrator. In contrast, Victorian poetry, as typified by the Brownings, exalts tenderness, fidelity, and devotion, the bonds of married love, preserved beyond the grave. Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites revive the medieval cult of idealized woman, supporting the Victorian view of woman’s spirituality. Tennyson’s heroines, like weary Mariana, love in mournful solitude. His Idylls retell Arthurian romance. In Memoriam, Tennyson’s elaborate elegy for Hallam, is homoerotic in feeling. Rossetti’s sirens are sultry, smoldering. Swinburne, inspired by Baudelaire, reintroduces sexual frankness into highbrow English literature. His Dolores and Faustine are promiscuous femmes fatales, immortal vampires; his Sappho, sadistically caressing Anactoria, boldly proclaims her poetic greatness. Whitman broke taboos in American poetry: he names body parts and depicts sex surging through fertile nature; he savors the erotic beauties of both male and female. Though he endorses sexual action and energy, Whitman appears to have been mostly solitary, troubled by homosexual desires, suggested in the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass. Reflecting the Victorian taste for bereavement, Hardy’s early poetry features gloomy provincial tales of love lost: ghosts, graveyards, suicides, tearful partings. Homoerotic Greek idealism and epicene fin-de-siècle preciosity characterize the poems of Symonds, Carpenter, Hopkins, Wilde, Symons, and Dowson. Renée Vivien, the first poet to advertise her lesbianism, writes only of languid, ethereal beauty.