The miserable state of many of the texts has produced surprising qualities. So many words and phrases are elliptically connected in montage structure that chance destruction has delivered us pieces of strophes that breathe experimental verse. Her time-scissored work is not quite language poetry, but a more joyful cousin of the eternal avant-garde, which is always and never new. So Sappho is ancient and, for a hundred reasons, modern.
Ezra Pound goes back full circle when he “antiques” the form of a poem in order to make it resemble a vertical strip of a Sappho papyrus. His brief poem “Papyrus,” addressed to Gongyla, reads:
Spring . . .
Too long . . .
Gongula . . .
But Sappho aces him with an impeccable strip in which plenitude resides in the ruins of her script:
Return, Gongyla
A deed
your lovely face
if not, winter
and no pain
I bid you, Abanthis,
take up the lyre
and sing of Gongyla as again desire
floats around you
the beautiful. When you saw her dress
it excited you. I’m happy.
The Kypros-born once
blamed me
for praying
this word:
I want
In her minimalist Imagist period, H.D., and her descendents in the Black Mountains, learned from Sappho, copied her absences, and found themselves through her losses. William Carlos Williams translated her and Robert Creeley and the Brazilian concrete poets were her immediate kin. But despite this parenté d’esprit that truly helped generate our modernist movements, the price of the unwitting modernization of Sappho scripture, through the random damage of her poems, has resulted in the tantalizing loss of intelligibility of hundreds of her fragments, not to mention the disappearance of most of her work.
The cost was also high to the English and German scholars who undertook the labor of unraveling the damaged papyri (both literally and figuratively). The German scholar Friedrich Blass, who first deciphered important poems by Sappho in these Fayum manuscripts, lost the use of his eyes, and Bernard P. Grenfell, the explorer and pioneer editor of Oxyrhynchus Papyri, during his intense labors for a while lost his mind. Most hurtful to Sappho were the majority of her defenders from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, who in their eagerness to clean up Sappho’s act, to create a morally sound “divine Sappho,” quite lost their perspective of the poet and hopelessly muddled the poet’s life with the poems.
While a thousand years of bigotry destroyed the greater part of Sappho’s poetry, the zeal of her later defenders, from Anne Lefebvre Dacier in 1682 to Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Bruno Snell, and C. M. Bowra,11 to rehabilitate her moral character has not helped the poet’s cause, nor has it contributed to our understanding of her work. It is no less than astonishing how otherwise temperate scholars became outraged and imaginatively unobjective at the slightest suggestions by others of moral frivolity on Sappho’s part. Not Sappho’s poems but Middle and New Comedy and Horace and Ovid are accused of instigating the black legend. Several arguments are offered and reiterated to justify her love poems to other women. The dominating cure was the thiasos remedy: since Sappho was a priestess and the head of a circle of young women, these poems did not mean literally what they say; her love poems to women were epithalamia written for ceremonial purposes; the poems castigating her brother Haraxos for his affair with Doriha prove her own high virtue; Alkaios once addressed her as agya (holy or chaste); she came from a noble and highly respectable Lesbian family. The arguments read like a brief—in an unnecessary trial.
In the nineteenth century the denial of Sappho’s homosexuality prevailed. There were exceptions to an illusory interpretation of her poems, but these were not apparently heeded. We find some notable exceptions in England and a tragic one in the instance of Charles Baudelaire, who paid bitterly for his candor. Perhaps the clearest statement regarding Sappho’s sexuality appears in William Mure of Caldwell’s A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Antient Greece. While the Scottish classicist condemns Sappho for her “scandalous history” and her “taste for impure intercourse, which forms so foul a blot on the Greek national character,” he pooh-poohs the standard notion of Sappho’s higher “purity” and insists that her Lesbian female “association” was nothing less than the “pursuit of love and pleasure.” He writes, commenting sharply on fragment 31:
In several places, Sappho addresses certain of her female associates in terms of no less voluptuous passion than those employed towards her male objects of adoration. In one passage, equal in power and nearly equal in length to the ode to Venus already cited, her ardour is inflamed by the sight of a rival, a male rival it may be remarked, participating, however slightly, in the privileges to which she herself claimed an exclusive right. She describes it as “a bliss equal to that of the gods to sit by the music of her voice, and gaze on her fascinating smile.” At the same time, in anger against her male rival she feels “mortification and jealousy.”12
In his modern “right on” commentary, William Mure notes, “If Sappho did not mean or feel what she has expressed in the passage above, then the most brilliant extant specimens of her muse become comparatively unmeaning rhapsodies; if she did so feel, her sentiments were not those of maternal tenderness of sisterly friendship.”
A generation later, John Addington Symonds (who had “shocked” Walt Whitman in a letter sent to the American poet, assuming their common passion for men) speaks of Sappho’s homoeroticism. He slightly tempers his view of Sappho as a practicing homosexual by contrasting her “sating of the senses” with the cruder voluptuousness of Persian or Arabic art. He writes, “All is so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.”13 He then laments the ruin of her literary remains: “The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho’s poems.”
In mid- and late-nineteenth-century France, official morality and hypocrisy reigned with respect to Sappho’s lesbianism. While by the end of the century, there was a fad and rash of lesbian novels and memoirs published under the guise of being “newly found novels by the poetess Sappho,” when Charles Baudelaire published his Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, Le Figaro condemned the book as “the putrescence of the human heart.” In large part because of his inclusion of six poems concerning Sappho and les femmes damnées, the author and his publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis were dragged to court, convicted, and heavily fined. The six “lesbian” poems were banned from the book, and Poulet-Malassis was sent to prison. An appeal to the empress Eugénie resulted in the reduction of Baudelaire’s fines. Only in 1949 was the ban on the immoral poems officially lifted.
It is extraordinary that until mid-twentieth century the myth of Sappho’s chaste love remained standard fare. In this cover-up there is an exact parallel with the confused and disturbed denunciations of those who dared to suggest that William Shakespeare was stained by the abnormal emotions of Greek love. Such folly was expressed only by weak critics blind to the poet’s metaphysical message and spiritual convention. Oscar Wilde was an obvious exception. He loved the Sonnets, he tells us in letters, and he theorized that the young man who received Shakespeare’s relentless ardor was actually “a wonderful lad” named Willie Hews, “a boy actor in his plays.” On the third and last day of his famous trial of “gross indecency” for a homosexual act in 1895, Wilde invoked the Sonnets in his defense, a declaration that served to deepen his legal guilt.
In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the editor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, addresses the almost universal dissemblance of Shakespeare’s homosexual passions. Without sympathy she describes W. H. Auden’s complex manner of reading Sonnets, saying that interpretation becomes “entwined with the personality (and sexuality) of the critic, as well as his or her cultural location.” She writes:
This is th
e case of W. H. Auden. Though anyone with a knowledge of Auden’s biography might expect him to celebrate and endorse the homoerotic character of 1–126, he was absolutely determined not to do so, at least publicly. In his 1964 Signet edition Auden claimed—as G. Wilson Knight had done— that the primary experience explored in Sonnets was “mystical,” and he was extremely scathing about putative readers of homosexual inclinations who might be “determined to secure our Top-Bard as a patron saint of the Homointern.” Yet his public adoption of this position seems to have been a characteristic instance of Auden’s cowardice, for later in 1964 he confessed to friends that a public account of Shakespeare (evidently equated by Auden with the speaker in Sonnets) as homosexual “won’t do just yet.” Perhaps Auden was referring to the changes in legislation then under discussion: Parliament finally decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults in July 1967.14
By contrast with Auden’s prudence, the Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) in the early 1900s fully presented his homosexuality in his poems, which, however, he printed only privately, to give to friends. Despite candor in verse, he too faced the reality of the impossible public plight of gays. Though he was in his lifetime known as the foremost poet in the Greek language and T. S. Eliot published his poems in 1924 in his The Criterion, Cavafy could not permit a collection of his own poems, carefully ordered by his own hand, to be published while he was alive. We hear his own moving statement about public acknowledgment in his prescient “Hidden Things”:
From all I did and all I said
let them not try to find out who I was.
An obstacle stood before me and transformed
my acts and my way of life.
An obstacle stood before me and stopped me
so often from what I was going to say.
My most unnoticed acts
and my most veiled writings—
only from these will they know me.
But maybe it’s not worth it to devote
so much care and effort to knowing me.
Later—in a more perfect society—
someone made like me
will certainly appear and act freely.15 [1908]
In England and America Sir Denys Page was the first major academic scholar to oppose all this posturing about Sappho’s sexuality. Page, who with Edgar Lobel has produced the most authoritative edition of Sappho’s works, chose to look at the texts and found that the poems gave no support whatsoever to the arguments. Page contends that Sappho was not a high priestess; only a small portion of her poems might be considered epithalamia; and Sappho herself, far from being a woman of unfailingly noble sentiments, was a common mortal concerned with common matters of love and jealousy. In deflating the contentions of her supporters, Page also deflates Sappho herself—not without a note of moral reproach.
I have spent some time reviewing the history of Sappho’s usually violent encounter with the world, not because one must necessarily know something or anything about an author to appreciate the work, but because in Sappho’s case the world has known—or assumed—too much, and this knowledge interferes with any fair appraisal of her poems. The question has been whether Sappho was indeed a lesbian in the sexual—and not just the geographical—sense of the word.
First, it should be stated that whatever Sappho was in her life has very little to do with the content of her poetry; whether she was indeed bisexual or merely ascetic like her contemporaries Jeremiah and Gautama Siddhartha will not change the meaning of her poems. It is not that an author’s intention must be discounted, nor need we puristically fear the heresy of intentional fallacy or other critical sins, old and new, including historiological snooping into her time and culture. Yet if the author’s intention is meaningful, it must be seen through the text, through the lyrical speaker in the poem, and not merely from outside sources. In Sappho’s case the problem is more rudimentary. Even if we could accept outside sources, there is, in fact, no reliable authority outside the poems themselves to explain the author’s intended meaning in her many poems dealing with love.
Nonetheless, the preponderance of recent literary research assumes an authoritative understanding of her culture and historical times, which runs the same risks of blunder and uncertainty as in the work of earlier literary critics, including my old heroes C. M. Bowra and Denys Page. How helpful is the work of social historians in reading the poems of Sappho? As ever, there is much to be learned from serious investigation and much to be questioned. And new generations will question again. In these domains none of us is sinless, but as an amateur reader, I prefer the less serious approach that sees Sappho mainly through her work, and reads her work not as document but as art.
To find Sappho, then, the Sappho of the poems, we may look long at the poems themselves. One fragment is addressed to her daughter, Kleis. A few of them may have been addressed to men. The majority are love poems to women. They are passionate poems, self-critical, self-revealing, detached, and intense. If we are to believe what they say, we will conclude that the speaker in the poems experienced a physical passion for her beloved, with all the sexual implications that similar poems between men and women normally imply. (Much of the world’s love poetry is homoerotic, and in ancient Greek poetry, the majority of love poems by known male poets, from Ibykos to Pindar, are addressed to other men.) To give the poems meanings that the texts do not support, for whatever moral motive, is to dilute Sappho’s language and to weaken and falsify her work. Even though the remains of her oeuvre are scant, the poems should be allowed a plain reading of unimaginative literalness. “Uninterpreted” they speak for Sappho more directly and eloquently than the countertexts of her old defenders.
In the fragments we have left, only a few lines give details of physical love: “May you sleep on your tender girlfriend’s breast.” Many speak of her passions. Sappho’s best-known love poem, “Seizure” (fragment 31), is an example of her precision, objectivity, and cumulative power. The poem is direct, self-revealing, yet detached and calmly accurate at the moment of highest fever. She begins with a statement of her pain at the sight of the man sitting near the woman she loves, who, because of his envied position, appears godlike to her; she recounts the physical symptoms of her passion for the woman; and with full intensity but without exaggeration, she uses the metaphor of green turning greener than grass to show her suffering, verging on death, because of a love not returned.
Seizure
To me he seems equal to gods,
the man who sits facing you
and hears you near as you speak
softly and laugh
in a sweet echo that jolts
the heart in my ribs. Now
when I look at you a moment
my voice is empty
and can say nothing as my tongue
cracks and slender fire races
under my skin. My eyes are dead
to light, my ears
pound, and sweat pours over me.
I convulse, greener than grass
and feel my mind slip as I go
close to death.
Yet I must suffer all, even poor
The poem states a love relationship, but more, it states the poet’s agony when, consumed by love, she is unable to compete with the rival—a man, a species with powers inaccessible to her as a woman, and who therefore appears equal to a god. She cannot reach the woman she loves. The woman affects her with paralyzing force, and she can in no way escape, except through words, from the solitude in which she is suddenly enclosed. Her senses are agitated and fail her. She can no longer see, speak, or hear.
As her bodily functions weaken, she moves close to death, her analogue of the via negativa. The mystics would describe this state as dying away from space and time. In Daoist terminology, she is moving to the open country of emptiness. There, as in Saint John of the Cross’s dark sensory night of aridities, she reaches momentary detachment from bodily senses, which permits her to speak objectively of the symptoms of he
r passion. She too is “dying from love.” And like those who have had intense physical pain, at a certain threshold she becomes a distant observer of herself. Unlike Saint John, however, the night of purgation is not, at least in this fragment, the moment before the joyful night (la noche dichosa) of illumination and union.
Sappho’s desire is conveyed as a loss of self. She is exiled, as it were, from her desire and remains in a darkness before death. In Saint John this darkness is described as “withdrawal ecstasy.” In Sappho the movement from the self into an extraordinary condition of void and separation results in a violent failure of the senses, a seizure, the ekstasis of negative ecstasy (of being elsewhere, but in the wrong place). For the mystics, the second stage is illumination, the discovery of a new self. However, in Sappho this second stage is blackness, the discovery of the loss of self. The catalog of symptoms of her seizure is a universal condition that finds expression in varying diction and metaphors, secular or religious, from Saint Teresa’s interior castles and Andrew Marvell’s entrapment in the garden to Marghanita Laski’s medical analyses16 and Jorge Guillén’s passionate merging in the circle of light. Hers, however, is love’s lightless inferno, without union and without the peace that follows union.
Unable to reach the object of her love, there is no fulfillment and no release except in the objectification of her passion in the poem. Yet in her poetry she does indeed reach the world, if not her beloved. Her words, used masterfully, make the reader one with the poet, to share her vision of herself. There is no veil between poet and reader. Here, as elsewhere in her art, Sappho makes the lyric poem a refined and precise instrument for revealing her intensely personal experience. As always, through the poems alone, we construct the true biography of voice. As mentioned earlier, in one poem in the Greek Anthology, Plato speaks of Sappho as the “tenth Muse.” The ascription of the epigram to Plato, as of all thirty-seven poems ascribed to him, is shaky. What is certain is that these words reflect ancient opinion. Sappho’s own expression of the continuity of her words appears in an astonishing line that neither contains silly phrases “worthy of a Muse” nor betrays any of the ambitious glitter and bay leaves in Petrarch’s notion of fame. Rather, the intimate voice, serenely ascertaining its future, is prophetic:
The Complete Poems of Sappho Page 3