"Fashioned for desire": Re-Constructing the Body in Bliss Carman’s Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics

by Kelly McGuire

 

In "Anactoria," Algernon Charles Swinburne alludes to the mystique that from time immemorial has surrounded Sappho, proclaiming that her "face seen once, [her] songs once heard in a strange place, / Cleave to men’s lives" (279-80). For Swinburne, as for countless others before and since, Sappho’s legendary status as an historical figure assumes pre-eminence over her reputation as  an artist, and she represents the supreme example of a poet whose art was infused with her biography. Whether or not one reads Sappho’s fragments as expressive of actual rather than imagined    experience, the impulse to read her text as autobiographical is pervasive. No less than modern audiences, the earliest commentators were susceptible to the tendency to focus first on the historical personage and only secondarily upon her work. A monograph surviving on the Oxyrhynchus papyrus attests that "in appearance [Sappho] seems to have been contemptible and quite ugly, being dark in complexion and of very small stature" (Campbell 3), and several Attic vase-paintings claiming to depict Sappho herself    suggest an early concern with the poet’s physical image.1 The erotically charged nature of Sappho’s verse that embodies its author to an unprecedented degree incites interest in the figure of Sappho herself as readers strive to envision the actual appearance of the purveyor of such heated emotions.2 Identified by Yopie Prins as  "an important moment in Sappho’s reception" (10), the nineteenth century witnessed a revival of interest in Sappho in which attempts to reconstruct her autobiographically proliferated, and authors endeavoured through mimesis to evoke the poet’s voice.

Bliss Carman also subscribes to his century’s preoccupation with the "cult" of Sappho, and in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics he suggests a correlation between the fragments and the author’s "embodied" presence within them. Carman’s poems sensitively reconstruct the lost lyrics of Sappho, working in an "autobiographical" mode that simultaneously attempts to recreate Sappho as a physical and historical figure within the work itself. As Charles G.D. Roberts first noted, Carman’s task involves "imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction" (xv) of not only Sappho’s greater poetic corpus, but also of her corporeal presence as well. Drawing heavily upon Henry T. Wharton’s Sappho, A Memoir and Translation,3 the most popular English edition of the Sapphic fragments by the turn of the century" (Prins 52), Carman engages with the language, and, perhaps more importantly, with the central thematics of Sappho’s work. R.A. Kizuk argues that "Carman’s poetic career inscribes an arc that begins in mysticism and melancholy for a lost wholeness, curves through a philosophical economy, and terminates in a    symbolics of desire turned in upon itself" (156). Although Carman composed Sappho at the mid-point of his career, the concern with desire is very much apparent in this text. Critics have interpreted Carman’s poem variously and often divergently. D.M.R. Bentley’s argument for the text’s impetus towards Unitrinianism and its  corresponding concern with the Eleusinian mysteries acknowledges the philosophical and religious complexity of the Sappho poems and recovers the work from generations of neglect marked by what M. Nelson-McDermott characterizes as "critical misapprehension about the intrinsic artistic merit of Carman’s poetry" (5). Even while conceding that the text undertakes a "search for the embodiment of a Unitrinian ideal of love . . . a love that combines the physical, the mental and the spiritual" (Bentley 4), one might explore further the "symbolics of desire"4 and the relation of that eroticism to Carman’s recuperation of Sappho bodily over the course of the work. Carman focuses upon Sappho’s erotic lyrics primarily, and to a considerable extent his restoration involves a reconceptualization of desire and of the body itself, demonstrating thereby his ambivalence towards Sappho even as it reflects his profound admiration of and sympathy for her.5 Carman does not subordinate the sexual impulse but rather attributes to it an equal significance within the poem.

Carman’s epigraphs tellingly quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s encomia to Sappho, who, she claims "broke off a fragment of her soul for us to guess at." Barrett Browning’s description of Sappho "with that gloriole / Of ebon hair on calmed brows," exemplifies the need felt among readers of Sappho to reconstruct the poet in her physical form.6 Sappho is seen as fragmented not only poetically, but also bodily as well, as if the fragments represent a "body in pieces" that preserves imperfectly her elusive essence. Sappho’s poetry is commonly read as deeply embodied; however, counter to that reception runs the notion that her poems contain an implicit critique of eroticism, a view that holds much currency among critics uncomfortable with her homoerotic sensuality.7 As Page duBois asserts, "for centuries, Sappho commentary has been torn between two radically opposed visions: on the one hand, Sappho as the abandoned woman, the essence of unmediated female suffering and pain; and, on the other, Sappho as detached and wry commentator on the ‘vanity and impermanence’ of human—not essentially female—passion" (28). In his rendition of Sapphic poems, Carman indisputably esteems Sappho the paragon of ancient lovers, as the facility with which he navigates his way through his subject’s amatory catalogue readily attests. Carman draws upon the various names that Sappho’s fragments assign to her lovers, manipulating them to lend structure to the poem through divisions "constellated about Sappho’s relationship with a different lover" (Bentley 33). Most significantly, perhaps, Carman’s lyrics preserve the "marked degree of mutual eros" that Kenneth Dover identifies as the distinguishing feature of Sapphism (177). Carman repeatedly invokes images of loving couples that, described as "mated as rhythm to reed-stop" (XXXIII.13), suggest a reciprocity and an almost complete absence of hierarchy in their relations. Although Carman’s reworking meticulously incorporates many of the attributes that distinguish Sappho’s poetry, it yet aspires to a spiritual odyssey characterized by a high-minded pursuit of Ideal Beauty. But one might detect an undertow of desire within the text that constitutes a central thematic concern often elided by critics in their engagement with the work’s philosophical aspect. Desire, in its most explicit sexual and physical associations, rather than the spiritual love into which eroticism in Carman’s work is typically subsumed, acts as the fulcrum upon which the other issues balance.

Carman concerns himself with resurrecting Sappho as a physical entity at the same time as he restores the corpus of her poetry. Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics presents essentially an autobiography of Sappho, and one which appreciates the body’s ability to provide for women "rich grounds for thinking through the relationship between identity and representation" (Gilmore 87). Marcel Detienne’s assertion that "it is at the level of the body that the being appears to experience its identity" (49) suggests the centrality of the body to any autobiographical endeavour, regardless of the subject’s sex. Indeed, awareness of one’s self as a physical subject proves integral to the autobiographical process and affirms Paul de Man’s assertion that "autobiography is prosopopeia" (71). De Man’s definition invokes the term for the literary device that conveys the "impression of an absent or imaginary speaker" (Hoad 374) and etymologically takes the Greek word for "face" as its root. Carman’s text arguably enacts prosopopeia in a literalist manner in its attempt to present Sappho visually before the eyes of the reader. Although the attention of Sappho’s persona is typically rivetted to the bodies of her lovers, references to her own "passionate bright tender body" (IV.32) and "moon-white delicate body" (IV.32) occur with sufficient regularity as to evoke a vivid sense of Sappho’s corporeal being. Furthermore, by simulating Sappho’s voice, Carman conjures up Sappho with even greater effectiveness. Such assertions as "there is no quenching / In the night for Sappho" (XLI.15-16) reflect Sappho’s affinity for referring to herself in the third person and Carman’s studied adherence to this convention. Lyric VIII contains two stanzas, the first of which presents the speaker naming herself as "Sappho," an object acted upon by Aphrodite, while in the second stanza Sappho acts as the subject, demanding "how comes it . . . / I can never choose / between Gorgo and Andromeda" (6-8). The aversion to the pronoun "me" ensures that the speaker’s identity remains foremost in the reader’s mind and reinforces the effect of the persona.

An unmistakable narrative force fuels Carman’s treatment of the poems in accordance with de Man’s insistence that autobiography presents "a temporal distribution of narrated acts" (71). The need for structure, for a loose but nonetheless carefully sustained linear progression, characterizes the work in a manner that seems counterintuitive to the genre of the lyric poem to which Sappho belongs. As Bentley observes, Carman compartmentalizes his work into carefully delineated sections (6) and presents Sappho’s paramours in a sequence meant to evoke a sense of autobiographical realism. Carman’s concern to chronicle Sappho’s erotic career mirrors his attempt to reconstruct her bodily in the text. His technique of echoing from poem to poem further enhances the sense of loose narrative, as each new poem mirrors some element in the preceding lyric and thereby advances the sense of continuity and consistency within the larger work. Frequently, a lyric’s subtle imagistic echo provides a tenuous link to the poem that precedes it, as when the "quiet-running river" (XXXVIII.6) recalls the "gurgle of soft-running water" (XXXVII.7) of the earlier poem. The autobiographical mode necessarily impels the text towards Carman’s envisioned sublimation of the body; however, the fact that Carman incorporates authentic Sapphic lyrics within the greater scheme of his work introduces a counter-movement of eroticism that originates in Sappho herself. A certain intertextual tension accordingly makes itself apparent and threatens to reduce the text to the rubble of fragments from which it was initially assembled.

Directly relevant to the text’s engagement with the body is its all encompassing concern with desire. Although it might be questioned "whether it is even appropriate to tether the notion of eros to that of the body" (Welton 181), in Carman’s text desire and the body are mutually inclusive, since desire is experienced in starkly physical terms. As Carman conceives of it, desire feeds directly upon the body and manifests itself in strictly physical symptoms. In Phaon’s absence, Sappho confesses that "a fever burns [her]" (XL.5), her "knees quake on the threshold / And all [her] strength is loosened" (13-15). The body becomes the site of pleasure, and Carman notably resists constructing the typical binary of love and desire. Lyric XXX opens with one of Sappho’s more emotively arresting fragments, and the second of the non-derivative stanzas that follow offers a variation upon the opening Sapphic original. Carman transmutes Sappho’s fervent declaration: "love shakes my soul, like a mountain wind /  Falling upon the trees" (Wharton 1-2), to the more serene "love fills my heart, like my lover’s breath / Filling a hollow flute" (10-11). Carman’s adapted echo exchanges the naturalistic force of the first simile for a conceit of greater personal and physical effect. Carman’s simile presents love as a pneumatic force that actually infiltrates Sappho’s body and directly compares with her own lover’s breath. The "hollow flute" filled by the lover metaphorically evokes Sappho’s body and recalls her wish several lyrics earlier that Pan make her "but another Syrinx / For that piping" (XXVII.8-9). Sappho’s non-ironic desire to "be played on like a pipe" transforms the flute into an astonishingly sensual image and attributes to love a sexual potency with its beginnings in bodily desire.

Lyric LIII affords another example of Carman’s "emendation" of Sappho’s fragments to accommodate his own aesthetic. Carman typically appends his own distinctive verses to the end of original poems, and Lyric LIII accordingly opens with a heavily anthologized fragment beginning with the question "Art thou the topmost apple?" (1). The fragment presents the beginning of a simile that fails to supply an object of comparison. The scholiasts typically interpret the fragment as an epithalamium, a bridal song that pays homage to the intact virginity of the bride, whom in Sappho’s original "gatherers overlooked, nay overlooked not but could not reach" (Wharton 131). Wharton’s translation preserves Sappho’s reiteration of the Greek "they did not forget" that emphasizes the persisting, albeit unconsummated, desire. In contrast, the first stanza of Carman’s Lyric LIII closely follows the fragments three lines but strikingly supplies a fourth that demands of the apple, "shall not I take thee?" (4). Carman’s closing Adonic8 essentially transforms the fragment into a quasi-Sapphic stanza and lends it the appearance of a discrete poetic unit. The supplement’s direct address of the apple and use of the first-person pronoun wrenches the translated fragment from its original comparative context into one that is highly personal. Yet Carman’s addition proves highly effective in that it engineers an ingenious reversal that transfers sexual agency to Sappho as opposed to the presumably male unsuccessful "gatherers." The second stanza, beginning "art thou a hyacinth blossom," also derives from an independent fragment containing an uncompleted simile and overtones of the epithalamium. The final line "Shall not I lift thee?" again is supplied by Carman and differs from the first addendum only in its choice of verb. In reference to Lyric LIII, Cappon notes that "Carman has been doubtfully inspired to put these two fragments, with their essentially different pathos, together, and change the contemplative sympathy of Sappho into the egoistical interest of a lover coming to the rescue" (163); however, even one of Carman’s harsher critics allows that the poet "has interpreted them correctly, and has added his own conception of meaning to them" (Stephens 76). For, contrary to Cappon’s assertion, Carman’s combining of the two fragments works to great effect. The contrast between the object elevated above the earth in the first stanza and the object fallen to the earth in the second illustrates Sappho’s ability to bridge both vertical spatial planes and suggests the potency and, possibly, the undiscriminating quality of her love. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1870 combination of the two fragments in a single fluid translation perhaps inspired Carman’s own rendering, yet Carman goes beyond Rossetti with two additional stanzas that confer upon the poem an entirely original narrative context. The first of these wholly original stanzas explicitly compares Sappho to "the young god Eros / Paying no tribute to power / Seeing no evil in beauty" (9-11). In Sappho’s own lyrics, Eros is the antagonist who "masters [her] limbs and shakes [her], fatal creature, bitter-sweet" (Wharton 93), yet Carman casts him as "full of compassion" (12) and hence akin to Sappho who takes pity upon the trampled hyacinth and isolated apple. Prior to Carman’s addition, the fragments are said to "suggest an aesthetic of distance, of the beauty of the unreachable object of desire . . . the superiority of the unattainable" (duBois 53), yet the reworked poems bring Sappho into intimate proximity with the object of her desire. The images acquire a heightened physical dimension, while the no longer withheld object of desire offers itself up to Sappho’s embrace.

As this last sample of textual revisionism makes abundantly clear, Sappho ventures far beyond the realm of translation and enters a territory of vaguely defined limits and uncertain properties.9 Carman’s project involves equal parts translation and invention, and, in the context of current debate surrounding Sappho transmission, both of these ingredients potentially leave him open to censure. Although translation is commonly viewed as "hermeneutic appropriation" (Steiner 359), according to some sources it perpetrates "textual violation" only when the translator is male and the originator of the work, a woman. E.D. Harvey refers to this practice as "transvestite ventriloquism" (131), while Luise von Flotov denounces the attempts made by Sappho translators to "fill in the blank spaces, trying to ‘master the poem,’ or ‘fix it,’" and insists that "symptomatically . . . these repair jobs have also rewritten the poems in patriarchal form" (58). But, although many critics would condemn Carman’s Sappho as a "gesture of appropriation" (Irigaray 157) that attempts to return the historically aberrant and incendiary Sappho to the "phallocratic power and to the circularity of its own discursive economy" (166), it might be argued that Carman’s project, far from colonizing Sappho’s work, actually represents a sympathetic and generally enlightened treatment of the poet. Carman’s work preserves what Sappho scholars term the "polyphony of voices of sexual desire heard in her poetry" (duBois 20) and presents these voices in such a way that even while asserting a certain distinctness, they yet complement one another and advocate in unison a single and coherent philosophy of love. Instead of perceiving "feminine pleasure [as] the greatest threat of all to masculine discourse" (Irigaray 157), Carman pays homage to Sappho’s reputation as a superior lover, and in Lyric VIII he explicitly attributes the fact that Sappho "love[s] so greatly and so much" (4) to Aphrodite’s influence. Also in the same poem, far from prohibiting the expression of her sexual pleasure, Carman refers to Sappho’s "fond[ness] for all things fair" (6), while he earlier mentions her inability to "choose between / Gorgo and Andromeda" (7-8). Lesbian desire arguably constitutes a formidable menace to masculine insecurity, but Carman’s treatment of lesbianism never at any point betrays "normalizing" tendencies or intimates discomfort at the polymorphous sexuality explicit in Sappho’s fragments. Nonetheless, a Lacanian reading might charge Carman with enacting "the fantasy of the man as invisible witness" to forms of "feminine homosexuality" (Lacan 97), given the perceived fundamental disjunction between male and female sexual experience. Yet, Carman’s mimicry of Sappho’s voice enables him to move beyond the vantage point of the mere spectator and even to participate, in a sense, in the narrated activity. Since Carman’s accomplishment involves considerably more than simply shoring up fragments in a misguided effort to achieve a kind of "fantasy of wholeness," one cannot dismiss it so readily as an exercise in literary appropriation.10

Representation of Sappho’s desire is depicted, curiously enough, through her focus on fragments. Writing on the Sappho fragments, duBois notes that "piled on top of th[e] sense of fragmentation is another . . . [sense] in which the body is represented as falling into fragments, seen as a series of discrete, unconnected, disjunctive responses" (66). Carman maintains this theme of fragmentation throughout the work, calling attention to the body, not as a whole, but as the sum of its parts. At several junctures, Sappho indulges in a veritable blazon of her lover’s individual desirable parts. In Lyric XXVIII, Sappho organizes her desire stanzaically, and dedicating each unit to a different bodily part, she focuses first on the "face all rosy" (3), then shifts her attention to "the grave eyes [that] greaten" (5), and finally to her lover’s "throat" from whence "come the words that bubble" (13). Elsewhere, Sappho employs a kind of semiotics of the body as signified by various articles of clothing as she recalls the "white gown, cinctured / With a linen belt" (XXVI.1-2) of her lover, and reminisces that her "foot was covered / With fair Lydian broidered straps" (XXVI.5-6). Although in and of themselves rather unremarkable descriptions, Sappho’s recollection of these items engenders a heightened bodily awareness into which Carman has displaced his reconstitution of Sappho herself. Sappho’s own "anatomization" of her lovers foregrounds the text’s concern with the body, although, according to Thomas McEvilley, "in Sappho’s general practice, parts of the body are mentioned only as containers of erotic beauty" (17). Carman, however, focuses on parts of the body that act as signifiers, particularly in the context of homoerotic love, for Sappho’s own.

In Carman’s Lyric LIV, Sappho exclaims that she is "eager, and the flame of life / Burns quickly in the fragile lump of clay. / Passion and love and longing and hot tears / Consume this mortal Sappho" (9-12). These lines are integral to Sappho not only in that they offer a "dramatic monologue (of sorts) on personal mortality" (Nelson-McDermott 3), but also in that they encapsulate the physical dimension of Sappho’s eroticism and link that in turn to the text’s alternate thematic concern with death and mortality. The body, and bodily fluid specifically, enter into the work’s discursive continuum, and the hot tears, expressive of Sappho’s sexual frustration, vividly kindle in the reader’s imagination the corporeal presence of Sappho herself. Fluidity saturates the work, as attested to by the poem’s omnipresent reliance upon the sea as a backdrop, which, as Nelson-McDermott points out, is "one of the [text’s] controlling images" (3). Sappho implicitly likens her beloved to the sea on several occasions in Carman’s work. Most strikingly, the extended simile concluding Lyric VI compares the beloved to the "sea’s secret" (30) that attracts the "adventurous / Sailor" (23-4) with whom Sappho is associated. Aphrodite’s marine origin lurks behind the numerous images of the sea that frequently figure as the object of "unsluiced" or "thirsty" desire.

Lyric VI constitutes a translation of an extant albeit only partially preserved poem by Sappho. Accordingly, Carman follows the original with a degree of fidelity11 comparable to that demonstrated in his treatment of the preceding hymn to Aphrodite; however, as in this instance, history furnishes him with merely a fragment as opposed to a work handed down intact from posterity, he avails himself of considerable poetic license to extrapolate the remainder of the poem. In this poem, Sappho describes in physically evocative language the symptoms of love as she experiences them. The middle stanzas refer to the "subtle fire" that runs through Sappho’s body as she beholds her beloved in another’s presence. Sappho then complains of the symptoms of her affliction in vivid detail, speaking of the debilitating effects it wreaks upon her sight (14) and upon her hearing (15), claiming finally to be "Paler than grass . . . / half dead for madness" (19-20). The majority of Sappho translators conclude the poem with the Sapphic figure expiring under the force of unrequited love and extending the "half dead for madness" condition to an actual full embrace of death. However, Carman resists the thanatological impulse and suggests rather than a surrender to the ‘death drive’ a recognition of the healing power of Sappho’s song. Carman concludes the poem on a note of tranquility, calm reflection and quiet resolution. Essentially depersonalizing the poem, Carman presents Sappho as transcending her immediate and temporal location in space, as she lapses into abstraction and loses sight of the body altogether in a dream of "Beauty and summer / And the sea’s secret" (29-30). Carman’s addendum displaces the poem from the physical to the emotional realm as he modifies its tone from passionate intensity to almost tender devotion.12 The ending acts as a countermovement to the preceding Sapphic work, yet Carman’s extrapolation may adhere to the original more closely than might be immediately apparent. The fragment’s final line contains three words that trail off into ellipses, yet these words, translated as "all is to be dared," are thought to signal the beginning of a ‘gnomic’ expression of a universal as opposed to an individual condition. Carman’s insistence "Yet must I, greatly / Daring adore thee" (21-2) preserves the original’s sense of inevitability and his elision of desire into an abstract, aphysical condition, while it may speak more to his own personal bias than to that of Sappho, nonetheless accurately echoes the altered tone suggested by the transition at the fragment’s conclusion.

In the Phaedrus, Plato seems to echo Sappho’s fragment XXXI,13 as, in describing the symptoms of love as beauty enters the eyes, he claims that "first there come upon him a shuddering and a measuring . . . of awe . . . next, with the passing of the shudder, a strange sweating and fever seizes him" (497). Appreciating that aesthetics in its etymological import refers to the senses and to bodily experience, Plato recognizes (as does Carman) the central position of the body not only in ontological experience, but also in epistemological engagement as well. Carman indicates as much in the fifth poem of the work comprising the single Sapphic poem to be preserved whole, in which Sappho implores Aphrodite to "release [her] / From mordant love pain" (V.33-4). Sappho’s own words "khalepan . . . merimnan" translate literally as "difficult thought / disquietude," with "merimnan" referring specifically to mental, as opposed to emotional, distress. Wharton’s translation of the phrase as "cruel cares" fairly accurately reproduces the original; Carman, however, opts in this instance to freelance and gives his "translation" as "mordant love pain," overtly signifying thereby a physical condition. The adjective "mordant," derived from the Latin "mordere" meaning "to bite," in this instance designates a bodily action that underscores the text’s physical preoccupation. Desire manifests itself in terms of acute physical pain with Sappho’s complaint of suffering echoing as a refrain at regular intervals.14 At one juncture, Sappho laments solipsistically that she "alone of all things / Fret[s] with unsluiced fire" (XLI.13-14), and she demands elsewhere "what means this passionate grief— / This infinite ache of regret?" (XLII.7-8). Desire-induced physical affliction transforms the body from a site of pleasure into one of abjection, and necessarily        reinforces one’s sense of corporeal being. Elaine Scarry asserts that "physical pain is monolithically consistent in its assault on language, and the verbal strategies for overcoming that [assault] . . . are very small in number and reappear consistently" (12). But in offering one of the earliest extant representations of physical suffering, Sappho eloquently describes the symptoms of love-sickness that wrack her body. Sappho maintains throughout her treatment  of her "mortal body so impassionate with ardour" (XXXII.7) a consistent hold upon speech that reinforces the contiguity that Carman establishes between the body and language. This sustained eloquence also argues for an intimate connection between the discourse of desire and the body in that it recuperates the body as the site of desire and restores its capacity to express itself linguistically, despite theorists’ persistence in divorcing language from the corporeal. Although Sappho claims that "utterance leaves her" (VI.10), rendering her "tongue . . . useless" (11), the eloquence of her description clearly disputes this assertion and contradicts critics’ claims that Sappho’s alleged loss of language represents a "break in the text that expresses a woman’s physical inability to speak because of a rush of jealousy" (von Flotov 66). Sappho is a speaking body, and Carman’s preservation of her discourse of pain represents one such way in which he attempts her corporeal restoration. In fact, Sappho declares in the celebrated Lyric XXIII that "sweet speech . . . makes durable / The bitter longing and the keen desire" (11-12). Sappho’s language draws her into closer proximity with her own body and, by implication, actively involves the reader in her plight as well. Carman negotiates the traditional impasse reached by critics who would deny the body access to language by enshrining language as the exclusive domain of the intellect. This dichotomy, as the work of Julia Kristeva demonstrates, may be resisted by "reconnecting bodily drives to language" (Oliver 348). In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva refers to the body as a "substance morcelée," divided into erogoneous zones to which "formal linguistic relations" are inextricably linked (22). As Kelly Oliver writes, love for Kristeva ultimately "provides the support for fragmented meanings and fragmented subjectivities" (350), for "love is essential to the living body and it is essential in bringing the living body to life in language" (350). For Carman, love similarly provides the means whereby he might yoke language to the body and thereby restore language to an intimate relation with the realm of the semiotic as delineated by Kristeva. But it is worth noting that Carman simply takes his cue from Sappho who, according to Charles Segal, "draws upon t[he] reciprocal relation between poetry and the physical reactions of the body" (63). Deeply embedded in ritualistic tradition, Sappho’s poetry, Segal suggests, aspires to simulate the "magical" charm of love (63). On the basis of this concordance, we might argue for a deeper sympathy between Sappho’s and Carman’s approaches to poetic composition than is generally acknowledged.

Carman’s poem obliquely suggests that Sappho’s desire derives its intense strain of passion from the very fact that it remains unconsummated, or at least largely unfulfilled. This frustration is consistent with Freud’s assertion that "something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the realization of a complete satisfaction" (189). Alternatively, it might be argued that Carman’s spiritualization of Sappho’s desire is the inevitable result of the mystification of feminine jouissance. As Jacqueline Rose writes, "as negative to the man, woman becomes the total object of fantasy . . . elevated into the place of the other and made to stand for its truth" (50). This, she argues, "is the ultimate form of mystification" (50). As Sappho’s desire gradually attenuates and contours itself around notions of absence, it must inevitably redirect itself into channels of a more philosophical or even spiritual vein, and at last, albeit reluctantly, attain sublimation to the mode of love most endorsed by Plato in the Symposium. The onset of maturity and resignation might also influence what many interpret as the text’s ultimate thrust towards spiritual love, a reading supported by Carman’s own meditations on love. According to Carman, "the love passion is sublimated by imagination and mediation until it transcends the physical and becomes mystic. Raw physical passion (if it could exist without spirit or mind) could not create, it could only procreate" (qtd. in Bentley 5). Carman’s "transcendentalism" recalls the process of "being initiated into the mysteries of love" (94) as outlined in the Symposium, wherein Socrates insists that one begins

with examples of beauty in this world, and using them as steps to ascend continually with that absolute beauty as ones aim . . . physical beauty to moral beauty . . . from moral beauty to the beauty of knowledge, until one arrives at the supreme knowledge whose sole object is that absolute beauty, and knows at last what absolute beauty is. (94)

Carman ascends the platonic ladder and presents the embracing of the physical as a necessary overture to a more fulfilling intellectual and spiritual communion with a loved one. Yet, just as the platonic text fails to do away altogether with the body,15 so too does Carman’s work retain sufficient ambiguity on this score as to enable it to be questioned whether the Sappho figure ever does exchange her sensual desire for one more spiritual in nature, or remains embroiled in the realm of the physical at the work’s conclusion.

Carman’s text reverberates with echoes of the Symposium. Not only does Carman derive much of the extra-Sapphic theory of philia found in his work from Plato, but in several instances he makes express reference to the Symposium itself. In Lyric XCI, Sappho laments "Why have the gods in derision / Severed us, heart of my being?" (1-2) and invokes an "Aristophanic" legend of the separation of lovers to explain sexual diversity. As the Aristophanes figure in the Symposium explains, "man’s original body having been thus cut in two, each half yearned for the half from which it had been severed" (61). Writing several hundred years before Plato first developed the ideas that made the Symposium the definitive text on sensual and spiritual love, Sappho unfolded a textual erotics that modern (especially Victorian) translators tempered with platonic theories. For Plato, all love begins with the erotic impulse, but ideally evolves into a considerably more elevated form that eventually becomes self-sufficient and altogether divorced from the physical realm. As the paragon of lovers, the lover of wisdom, Socrates is said to possess a "degree of self-control of which one can hardly form a notion" (103). He describes "absolute beauty in its essence" as "pure and unalloyed" and spurns any "beauty tainted by human flesh and colour as a mass of perishable rubbish" (95). Despite the pressures exerted upon her by her authorial recreator, Sappho finds herself unable to partake of this contempt for the corporeal and to "apprehend divine beauty where it exists apart and alone" (95). Instead, Carman offers a characterization of Sappho whose paradoxical nature seems to suggest Carman’s own ambivalence. Moreover, Carman’s apparent allusion to the "myth of the cloven lovers" operates not to hold up gender as a divisive principle but rather to lament the enforced separation of two unified souls. It is quite plausible that Sappho, like Monique Wittig, believed in the existence of "not one, or two, but many sexes, as many sexes as there are individuals" (119).

Despite Carman’s ambivalence, desire always manifests itself in palpably physical terms in Sappho. Carman’s twelfth poem marks the resumption of the dialogue between Aphrodite and Sappho initiated earlier. Sappho demands of "the Cyprus-born" (XII.1) why she has "given to men / This thing called love, like the ache of a wound / In beauty’s side, /  To burn and throb" (4-7). Desire blurs the distinction between pleasure and pain and asserts itself as a physical sensation that, as Aphrodite explains, supersedes all other emotional and intellectual experience. In Lyric XII Aphrodite includes amongst the benefits available to humanity "The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise, / The loving heart, / Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy" and concludes that "before all else was desire" (XII.13-18). Although Carman presents this hierarchy of sensibility through the mouthpiece of Aphrodite, he elsewhere in the poem asserts the supremacy of desire with sufficient frequency as to suggest that he himself subscribes to the view that "before all else was [and is] desire" (XII.18). Even amid Carman’s Unitrinianism, one might detect a certain immortal hierarchy that repeatedly privileges Aphrodite. Sappho begins the fourth poem of the collection by offering oblations to Pan and then Hermes, praying from the gods "strength and fulfilment / Of human longing" and "wisdom" (IV.9-23) respectively. The final third of the poem Sappho dedicates to Aphrodite to whom, having previously offered "oil and honey and wheat-bread" to the other gods, she devotes herself as an offering:

Touch with thy lips and enkindle
This moon-white delicate body,
Drench with the dew of enchantment
This mortal one, that I also
Grow to the measure of beauty
   Fleet yet eternal.
                                        (IV.31-6)

The homoerotic element implicit in this invocation intermingles with a certain autoeroticism. Sappho’s fragments betray a preoccupation with her own body which Carman faithfully reproduces. The poem acts as a prelude to the hymn to Aphrodite that follows, a translation of the only Sapphic poem preserved in its entirety, and which asserts the primacy of Aphrodite in Sappho’s schematics of desire. Indeed, the first poem of the work constitutes an address to Aphrodite, the "sea-born mother." It is worth noting that despite Sappho’s predilection for invoking the assistance of Eros in her fragments, often having recourse to such formulae as "now Eros shakes my soul" (Wharton 95), and "now Eros masters my limbs" (93), only on one occasion in his own "translations" does Carman make reference to the god. While this omission arguably results from his failure to perform "great preparatory study of the material in the Sapphic fragments" (Cappon 179), it might rather suggest a deliberate intention to portray a form of desire metaphorically through the gods that does not conform to the conventional image of lustful cupidity. Invoking Aphrodite repeatedly, Carman suggests the two facets of desire usually associated with the goddess. As a figure of earthly love, Aphrodite often assumes as an epithet the term "pandemic," whereas, when she embodies the spiritual ideal of love, tradition describes her as "uranian." Suggesting the duality of desire implicit in the figure of Aphrodite, Carman presents a complex strain of desire that mingles both aspects of physical and spiritual love. Carman has Sappho describe herself as "a nameless child of passion" (1.6) who asserts a maternal relation to the "sea-born mother," Aphrodite. Aligning herself with the goddess in a matrilineal sense, then, Sappho announces her apprenticeship to Aphrodite, and, while, as a mortal figure she can never attain veritable goddess status, she nonetheless entreats the goddess to permit her to "grow to the measure of beauty / Fleet yet eternal" (IV.35-6). Sappho elevates herself to the position of a daemon figure, who, like the figure of Love in the Symposium, is "neither mortal nor immortal" and "being of an intermediate nature . . . bridges the gap" (81) between mortals and gods. As the personification of love, Sappho acts as a link between the sensible and the eternal world. Tracy Ware claims that "like so many writers in the Western tradition, Carman is constructively dualistic: he recognizes that "at his best [man] is well poised between two realms, but he demands that we ceaselessly try to improve ourselves" (115). In his treatment of Sappho, Carman reveals just such a dualism, demonstrating that even though Aphrodite presides as a sensual force throughout the poem, her presence does not serve to undermine the Unitrinian ideology in the work, but does, however, considerably complicate the presentation of her corporeal being. Throughout the work, Carman repeatedly juxtaposes mortal and immortal experience of desire, and, replying to Sappho’s question "if love be naught, / Why do the gods still love?" (LXXIV.5-6), he concludes that the gods similarly are susceptible to a love that manifests itself through strikingly human symptoms. It is worth noting that Aphrodite, Pan and Mercury, although ostensibly epitomizing different ideals, are all distinctively physical gods whose sexual appetites are well documented in popular legend and myth. Carman might have chosen an asexual god, like Athena for instance, to represent wisdom, and his choice instead of Hermes to be "master of knowledge" (IV.13) suggests that even the ideals of wisdom and spirit are erotically charged.

Carman’s Lyric LIV contains Sappho’s proclamation that she is "eager, and the flame of life / Burns quickly in the fragile lump of clay / Passion and love and longing and hot tears / Consume this mortal Sappho" (LIV.9-12). This passage is integral to Sappho not only in that it offers a "dramatic monologue (of sorts) on personal mortality" (Nelson-McDermott 3), but also in that it reveals Sappho’s almost obsessive preoccupation with death and adopts the melancholy tone that necessarily stems from this concern. Terry Whalen writes that "love and death are in close proximity in most of Carman’s melancholic poems, and melancholy is central to his love poems" (42). Considering this concern with longevity, one might expect that with the onset of age Sappho would regard her body as a decaying vessel; however, the image of her body as she presents it, and as Carman re-presents it, remains fairly static. Sappho’s desire suffers no diminution with the progression of the poems. Despite the usual opposition between youth and maturity formulated by the work’s critics, the body as Carman presents it retains its youthfulness throughout and desire remains as intense as at the work’s beginning. Sappho refers to her "passionate bright tender body" (XCVII.18) in a later poem wherein her sexual appetite retains its insatiability. A heightened sexual awareness persists to the end with Sappho remaining attuned to other love-attachments, and describing, in Lyric XCVII, the "young fig-seller with her basket / And the breasts that bud beneath her tunic" (XCVII.14-15). The "strong perception of transience" (42) which Whalen notes in Carman’s poetry is no less apparent in Sappho. Contemporary psychoanalysts have demonstrated the intimate connection to be drawn between death and desire. Both conditions refer directly to the body, as death brings home an acute, inalienable awareness of the mortality of one’s body, and desire heightens one’s sense of its physical requirements. Sappho is a creature of desire, whose self-appellation "nameless child of passion," equates her with her fellow mortals and suggests the universal desire to survive, for, as Socrates asserts in the Symposium, "mortal nature seeks, as far as may be, to perpetuate itself and become immortal" (88). Plato identifies procreation as the means whereby the sensual lover seeks to preserve himself for posterity, asserting that "those whose creative instinct is physical have recourse to women" (90), while he simultaneously indicates the existence of "some whose creative desire is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically" (90). As Carman presents her, Sappho experiences a desire that extends to both the physical and the spiritual planes of existence, since, anxious about the survival of her name, she attempts through her verse to secure for herself an "immortal and blessed memory" (XCI). Sappho’s anxiety concerning her poetry’s reception by posterity surfaces in Lyric XXXIV, in which she asserts by way of opening: "‘Who was Atthis? men shall ask, / When the world is old" (1-2), and concludes the second and last stanza by consoling herself with the hope that "one shall find [her] silver songs, / With their human freight, and guess / What a lover Sappho was" (6-9). What begins as a panegyric of Sappho’s beloved ends as a self-reflexive meditation on the longevity of her own verse, perfectly in keeping with what DeJean describes as Sappho’s patently "self-conscious discourse, a discourse that includes a commentary on its own functioning as well as its primary message" (20). Sappho’s invitation for her memory to be preserved in the words "Love was all her wisdom, / All her care" (LX.3-4) similarly expresses a concern for the preservation of her reputation as a consummate lover. But not content with the mere mortal confirmation of her superiority as a lover, Sappho longs for Fate herself to declare "Lo, one mortal has achieved / Immortality of love!" (LXXI.16). The very mode in which Carman composes the poems further aligns them with concerns of mortality, for, as de Man points out, "prosopopeia . . . deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores" (72). Prosopopeia in this sense is literally enacted as Carman, through the voice of Sappho, attempts to evoke some sense of Sappho’s genuine presence within the text, even while he uses her as a mouthpiece through which he might expound his own view of humanity’s capacity for ongoing self-amelioration.

We find that Sappho’s insistently carnal desires repeatedly prove an impediment to the ascent towards spirituality and reconcile her in the end to the realm of the physical, hence accounting for any number of textual ambiguities. For, even while Carman’s philosophy supplies an impetus towards an elevated, essentially aphysical desire, his commitment to a largely faithful reproduction of the fragments necessitates a preservation of Sapphic eroticism. The Sappho poems themselves combine erotic effusion and philosophical inquiry, as in one lyric Carman pronounces:

. . . the heart of man must seek and wander,
Ask and question and discover knowledge;
Yet above all goodly things is wisdom,
And love greater than all understanding.
                                            (XXXIX.5-8)

Presumably uttered by Phaon, this lyric, sandwiched between two stanzas focusing on deeply personal experience rather than abstraction, advocates a peripatetic philosophy of the Socratic variety. It also privileges love over wisdom and organizes a hierarchy of values that constructs an ascent reversing Plato’s own. If one equates wisdom with understanding, it follows that love must, in this context, supersede all other "goodly things." Not so much a lover of wisdom, then, Sappho—by association with Phaon—is a lover of love, and is just as much an aspiring initiate into Diotima’s "mysteries of love" as into the Eleusinian mysteries.

Carman preserves the same opacity that characterizes the Sapphic fragments, chiefly by means of the polyphony of voices that crowd the text, but also through this presentation of the mutability of human relations:

Will not men remember us
In the days to come hereafter,—
Thy warm-coloured loving beauty
   And my love for thee?
Thou, the hyacinth that grows
By a quiet-running river;
I, the watery reflection
   And the broken gleam.
                          (XXXVIII.1-8)

The lover can be identified with palpable physicality, whereas Sappho’s self-description almost defies interpretation. The "broken gleam," referring perhaps to the shimmering play of light upon water’s surface, evokes the fragmentary image usually associated with Sappho, and the etymological import of "fragment" (from the Latin verb "frangere," meaning "to break") also serves to extend Sappho’s literary as well as metaphorical identification with the image. Sappho’s self-description remains opaque as ever to the reader’s scrutiny; however, it might be speculated that Sappho’s reflection of the hyacinth suggests the homoerotic relations between her and Atthis in the act of mirroring the image of her lover. The reflection might refer on a subtextual level to another pair of Classical homosexual lovers, Apollo and Hyacinthos, whose love was similarly thwarted by the death of one of the partners.

It might even be argued that Carman expresses his ambivalence on a structural level within the poem. Several lyrics cluster towards the middle of the work and most often comprise two stanzas of which the first concentrates upon images unassociated with the body, such as "apple boughs" (XVI.1), and "pale rose leaves" (XVII.1). A second stanza then follows that bears minimal thematic relation to the preceding lines and moves into a deeply personal localized space wherein Sappho awaits "the fluttering footfall" (XVI.5) of her lover, or strains to hear "Phaon’s footstep" (XVII.8). The poem’s opening meditative abstractions are offset by the emotionalism of their conclusions, and Sappho’s anxiety, betrayed by her self-description as "all impatience" (XVII.8) disrupts the "sultry quiet" (XVII.4) of the opening scenes. The juxtaposition of the speaker’s agitated mood to the serenity of her natural surroundings perhaps parallels the tension between physical and spiritual desire as experienced by Carman.

Carman’s manipulation of colour also participates in the creation of appropriate moods and rouses in the imagination bold images of landscape and characters. Every poem combines colour to startling effect, as in Lyric LXXXII, the lines, "over the roofs the honey-coloured moon, / With purple shadows on the silver grass" (1-2), set the scene, while the final description of "the blue dome of dusk" (10) shifts the focus to a higher vantage point that rounds off the tableau. Carman’s naturalistic description thrives upon this bold use of colour, and his portraits of Sappho and of her lovers achieve particular vibrancy precisely through this means, as well. It might even be argued that Carman’s concern with portraiture and its ability to preserve a person’s remembrance for posterity stems from his preoccupation with Sappho’s elusive physicality. A cluster of poems towards the conclusion dwell specifically upon the visual arts and the varying degrees to which they may successfully capture living beauty. Lyric XC finds Sappho contemplating a "bright portrait" wherein she still beholds, "where the painter fixed them, / . . . the eyes that gladdened, and the lips that loved [her], / And, gold on rose, / The cloud of hair . . ." (5-9). Sadly, the picture affords an unsatisfactory recollection of her friend, since it produces questions such as "whence came the grief that makes of all thy beauty /One sad sweet smile?" (3-4) that her "lost love" cannot answer. Lyric LXXXV concentrates upon the incapacity of a "painter in the Isles of Hellas" to portray Gorgo, to "mix the golden tawny / With bright stain of poppies, or ensanguine / Like the life her darling mouth’s vermilion" so that "any man could say who found that likeness, / . . . This was Gorgo!'" (25-32). Only Hermes, "master of word music" (17), Sappho concludes, "ever yet in glory of gold language / Could ensphere the magical remembrance / Of her melting, half sad, wayward beauty" (18-20). Where the artist’s pallette fails, language (albeit that of a god) succeeds in preserving a semblance of Gorgo’s beauty. Strikingly enough, the "word music" summoned to "frame" the subject, Gorgo, is inextricably associated with colour, with "gold language" (17) and "silver phrase" (21) mingling for the purposes of portrayal. Both of these poems grapple with the issue of visual representation, and both paradoxically reject portraiture in favour of verbal description. This problem of representation directly reflects Carman’s own predicament in his re-creation of Sappho, and one might argue that the two poems in question advocate language as the most effective means of conserving the memory of a physical image.

Cappon accuses Carman of presenting Sappho as "almost a phantom for us" (167) and asserts that "his reconstruction avoids a definite psychology of the poetess and falls back upon a vaguely general expression of amatory feeling and on situations which hang in the air both emotionally and scenically" (168). Far from "avoiding" psychological issues, Carman engages with Sappho’s psychological development directly, as he attempts to bridge the schism that theorists have traditionally opened up between the body and language and represents desire as a physical and a mental state that comes to be constituted in language. Shepard describes Carman’s treatment of the poems as an "attempt to complete and fill out the Sapphic fragments in the spirit of the original" and echoes Charles G.D. Roberts’s claim that Carman’s "effort in making them was somewhat like that of a sculptor who might strive to carve a statue from the hint given him by some battered and broken fragment which bore the mark of Praxiteles" (55). Roberts’s description of Carman’s "attempt at poetical restoration" (55), although it ultimately degenerates into unsupported criticism of the poet’s achievement, nonetheless is noteworthy insofar as it likens Carman’s undertaking to plastic art, the medium that would truly enable him to represent Sappho physically in the poem, instead of reconstituting her through descriptions of her desire. Carman’s endeavour literally is that of an archaeologist, piecing together remnants of a lost whole. Carman represents Sappho physically in his text by bringing her bodily to its foreground. He enshrines her autobiography with a sense of corporeal presence, presenting a concept of desire necessarily coloured by the historical Sappho’s own predilections and informed by Carman’s ambivalence.
 

Notes

 
I would like to express my gratitude to Professor D.M.R. Bentley for his considerable patience and encouragement and my thanks as well to the referees whose suggestions and comments were of immense assistance to me.
  1. For a discussion of the few surviving Attic vase-paintings of Sappho see Jane McIntosh Snyder’s article "Sappho in Attic Vase-paintings." Snyder rightly points out that "what Sappho really looked like is not of much interest compared to her poetry" (108). [back]
  2. The assumption that Sappho represents a single historical individual has been challenged by Germaine Greer in Slipshod Muses. Her partially tongue-in-cheek hypothesis that Sappho "may have been a group, the Lesbian Women’s Poetry Collective" (103) raises a valid point that somewhat complicates the already vexed issue of Sapphic transmission. [back]
  3. D.M.R. Bentley confirms that "Wharton’s Sappho is unquestionably the principal source of Sappho’s work and life" (32). [back]
  4. R.A. Kizuk’s tantalizing allusion to this "symbolics of desire" requires elaboration that is not forthcoming in his text. [back]
  5. Muriel Miller’s portrait of Bliss Carman concedes that his "concept of love is a difficult one to define" (97), and in Sappho the speaker’s own complex view of love considerably complicates attempts to determine Carman’s own standpoint. [back]
  6. In fact, Prins criticizes Wharton’s attempt to popularize Sappho for just this reason, claiming that he "draws on a long tradition of biographical reading that confutes the beauty of Sappho’s poems with Sappho herself" (58). [back]
  7. Snyder speculates that the unattractive appearance assigned to Sappho by some of the early scholiasts arises from their aversion to her homoeroticism (199). [back]
  8. Cappon, acknowledging Carman’s facility with the Adonic verse, helpfully describes it as "a short dactylic line which is used so effectively by Sappho as a closing cadence to the stanza which goes by her name" (153). [back]
  9. Although Wharton’s preface to his translation perversely concedes that "Sappho is, perhaps above all other poets untranslatable" (8), his later asssertion that "so perfect are all the smallest fragments preserved . . . that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been" (32), offers a rationale for his perseverance. Wharton evokes the fantasy of restoration which must, at least partially, motivate each Sappho translator, regardless of his or her sex. In fact, the desire to recover Sappho’s work proves so compelling that Sappho increasingly resembles a palimpsest, "so thickly written over with critical accumulation that it is almost impossible to make out the words beneath" (Parker 148). Yet this is not to say that we are to condemn translation altogether. George Steiner attributes to translation an "augmentive . . . or nostalgic function" (416), and even allows that in its most felicitous form, it yields a kind of "interanimation" between the original and the reproduction. Carman’s project arguably performs this last function, since even while it acts as a supplement, the original imparts sufficient inspiration as to allow for the "free invention" (Stephens 76) apparent in Sappho. Of course, Stephens employs this term in his characteristic disparaging sense, yet it nonetheless possesses a certain appeal for those inclined to appreciate along with Charles G.D. Roberts, the "fluidity and freedom of purely original work" in Sappho. [back]
  10. Some critics argue that the concept of the "monolithic whole" is, in itself, male determined. The fragment, associated inevitably with lack, is seen as incomplete and invalid as a form of expression. Page duBois writes of the "contemporary hunger for wholeness, for restoration of a phantasied but lost bodily integrity, or our fear of fragmentation, of the powerlessness of the not-yet-whole" (35). [back]
  11. In fact, Carman’s first line, "Peer of the god he seems," preserves the comparative thrust of the original which translators beginning with Catullus have traditionally ignored. The point of the poem is the contrast between the emotional control exhibited by the rival and the speaker’s own lack of restraint. [back]
  12. Cappon goes so far as to describe Carman’s treatment of this fragment as no more than "a romanticizing transformation" (155). [back]
  13. Carman’s lyric VI corresponds to Sappho’s fragment XXI. [back]
  14. For Lacan, for whom pain is inextricably tied up with jouissance, this complaint may actually be symptomatic of enjoyment. [back]
  15. Indeed, Nicole Loraux calls attention to the dialogues’ inherent paradox which "makes us consider the importance of the body in a text totally devoted to getting rid of it" (35). [back]
 

Works Cited

 

Bentley, D.M.R. "Threefold in Wonder: Bliss Carman’s Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics." Canadian Poetry. 17 (1985): 29-58.

Campbell, David A, trans. Greek Lyric: Sappho and Alcaeus. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Cappon, James. Bliss Carman and the Literary Currents and Influences of his Time. New York: Louis Carrier, 1930.

Carman, Bliss. Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. London: Chatto and Windus, 1930.

DeJean, Joan. Fictions of Sappho. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

de Man, Paul. "Autobiography as De-facement." MLN (94): 919-30.

Dover, Kenneth. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978.

Detienne, Marcel. Les maîtres de verité dans la Grèce archaïque. Paris: F. Maspero, 1967.

duBois, Page. Sappho is Burning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

Freud, Sigmund. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XI. London: Hogarth, 1953-1974.

Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: a Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Harvey, E.D. "Ventriloquizing Sappho: Ovid, Donne, and the Erotics of the Feminine Voice." Criticism 2 (1989): 115-38.

Hoad, T.F. Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.

Kizuk, R.A. "‘A Gift for some Purpose" Bliss Carmans Lyrics and their Influence on Early Twentieth-Century Poetry in Canada." Bliss Carman: a Reappraisal. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. 141-65.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

Lacan, Jacques. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: W.W. Norton, 1985.

McEvilley, Thomas. "Sappho, Fragment Thirty-One: The Face behind the Mask." Phoenix 32 (1978): 1-18.

Miller, Muriel. Bliss Carman: A Portrait. Toronto: Ryerson P, 1935.

Nelson-McDermott, M. "Passionate Beauty: Carman’s Sappho Poems." Canadian Poetry 27 (1990): 37-46.

Oliver, Kelly. "The Flesh made Word." The Body. Ed. Donn Welton. Malden: Blackwell, 1999.

Plato. The Symposium. Trans. Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin Books, 1951.

Precosky, Don. "Bliss Carman—A Second Look." Canadian Poetry 3 (1983): 22-30.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: the Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Shepard, Odell. Bliss Carman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1923.

Snyder, Jane McIntosh. "Sappho in Attic Vase-Painting." Naked Truths. Ed. Anna Olga Koloski-Ostrow. London: Routledge, 1997. 108-120.

Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Stephens, Donald. Bliss Carman. New York: Twayne, 1966.

von Flotov, Luise. Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism. Manchester: St. Jerome, 1997.

Ware, Tracy. "‘Bringing Gladness out of Sorrow: By the Aurelian Wall." Bliss Carmans Lyrics and their Influence on Early Twentieth-Century Poetry in Canada." Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. 111-29.

Welton, Donn. The Body. Malden: Blackwell, 1999.

Whalen, Terry. Bliss Carman and His Works. Downsview: ECW, 1980.

Wharton, Henry. Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings. London: David Stott, 1907.

Wittig, Monique. "Paradigm." Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts /  Critical Texts. Ed. Elaine Marks. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.