Treating the work of Sappho, Goethe, Blake, Hölderlin, Verlaine, George, Mörike, and Yeats in detail, Bennett makes the provocative argument that the nature of lyric poetry in the West has an element of defectiveness. This study delves into the irresolvable conflict between a poem's guise as quasi-architectural stasis and quasi-musical kinesis.
Frequently asked questions
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes, you can access The Defective Art of Poetry by B. Bennett in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Literary Criticism in Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
[You, on your many-colored throne, immortal Aphrodite, trap-weaving daughter of Zeus, I beseech you, great lady, do not overwhelm my heart with troubles and sufferings // but come here, if ever at an earlier time, hearing my voice from afar, you listened and, leaving behind your father’s golden house, you came, // your chariot harnessed; lovely and swift sparrows, rapidly beating their wings, drew you over the black earth down through the middle of bright heaven; // quickly they arrived. But you, o blessed one, your immortal face smiling, asked what I had suffered yet again and why I am calling now yet again // and what, in my raving heart, I most wish to happen, and whom am I yet again persuading even you to bring to your way of loving. “Who, o Sappho, is wronging you? // Even if she now flees, soon she will pursue; if she does not accept gifts, still she will give them; if she does not love, soon she will love, even without wishing it.” // Come now to me also, and release me from heavy cares. Whatever my heart desires to be accomplished, accomplish that, and be yourself my fellow fighter.]
The above reconstruction of Sappho’s famous complaint to Aphrodite follows in the main the edition of Voigt and that of Lobel and Page, with one major deviation in the sentence from line 18 to line 19, where I prefer to read: τίνα δη
τε πείθω / καί σ’ ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα ([you asked . . . ] whom am I [Sappho] yet again persuading even you [Aphrodite] to bring to your way of loving).1 This form of the Greek text is the reading of all but one of the manuscripts of Dionysius of Halicarnassus that contain the poem.2 It is true that on paleographic grounds the καί (even) is made problematic by readings from other sources.3 Still, even Page concedes (Sappho and Alcaeus 9–10) that the problems in question seem to admit no clear solution, and concludes “that emendation is required.” Or at least emendation would be required if there were no adequate defense of the reading I prefer. And such a defense will have to be interpretive, not paleographic.
Basic Interpretation
A couple of crucial interpretive points have long been established, including especially Page’s insistence (12–13), and after him Sarah T. Mace’s,4 on the importance of the repeated δη
τε. What has Sappho suffered yet again, why is she calling yet again, who is meant, yet again, to be the target of either persuading or conducting? But there are other points that have hardly been mentioned. Especially the words δολόπλοκε and σύμμαχος ought to have caused readers more difficulty than they have. “Wile-weaving” or “weaver of wiles,” sounds nice as a translation of δολόπλοκος, but only because it is a euphemism. If Sappho is really the coiner of the word—as seems likely—then I think we have to assume she is using the element δόλος in a sense closer to its original and proper meaning of “bait,” especially as used in fishing (e.g., Odyssey, 12.252).5 Which means Sappho is invoking “Aphrodite, baiter of traps,” or more strictly (with πλέκω), “weaver of baited traps”; and we must be able to explain the epithet in this sense. As for σύμμαχος (fellow fighter), as far as I know, the root μαχ- (Attic μάχομαι) never suggests anything but struggle or competition against an adversary. Which means we have to be able to answer the question: against whom is Sappho seeking to enlist Aphrodite as an ally?
In order to get anywhere with these matters, we must view them in relation to the poem as a whole, and in relation to other crucial interpretive questions. In particular, to whom does the second-person possessive adjective refer in the phrase ἐς σὰν φιλότατα (into your love, or way of loving)? Most readers assume it refers to Sappho: the recalcitrant beloved must be brought back “into your [Sappho’s] love.” Therefore, Aphrodite must be speaking. But there is no firm grammatical ground for this opinion. In lines 15–20, a transition from indirect to direct questioning evidently takes place: from ὄττι δη
τε πέπονθα κὤττι / δη
τε κάλημμι ([you asked] what I had suffered yet again and why I am calling now yet again) to the direct question, τίς σ’,
/ Ψάπφ’, ἀδικήει; (Who, o Sappho, is wronging you?). But exactly where does the transition take place? Before or after the question τίνα δη
τε πείθω / καί σ’ ἄγην ἐς σὰν φιλότατα, the question of someone’s persuading someone with respect to someone’s way of loving? A. J. Beattie, already in 1957, points out
that the τίνα δ᾽ η
τε πείθω . . . sentence is in series with the three questions (beginning with ὄττι δη
τε, κὤττι δη
τε, and κὤττι μοι) that precede it; like them it depends on ἤρεο, l. 15. This connexion is guaranteed both by the repetition of δη
τε and by the presence of a 1st pers. sing. verb (πέπονθα, κάλημμι, θέλω, πείθω) in all four sentences. There is, moreover, a bond of meaning that unites the four verbs. By way of contrast, we note that in the next sentence—τίς σ’
Ψάπφ’ ἀδικήει;—there is no connective particle, the verb is in the 3rd pers. sing., and it is unrelated in sense to the other four. Thus it is plain, despite the fact that Professor Page and others assume a change from indirect to direct speech at τίνα δηὖτε πείθω, that no such change is necessary, or even likely, at that point. On the contrary, the structure of the passage suggests that this change should occur after ἐς σὰν φιλότατα.6
In other words, as long as we take πείθω as a verb (not a noun, not personified “Persuasion”), it is highly unlikely that anyone but Sappho is its subject, which means that the second-person in that sentence must refer to Aphrodite: [you asked] whom am I yet again persuading even you to bring to your way of loving.
But then how exactly do we read ἐς σὰν φιλότατα (to your way of loving)? Beattie’s answer to this question is simple and, up to a point, perfectly adequate.
The meaning of the sentence will then be: “whom then do I (Sappho) urge thee (Aphrodite) to bring back to the Love that is thine (Aphrodite’s)?” i.e. τίνα is the object of ἄγην; σε is the object of πείθω. Sappho is in love with someone who runs away and will have nothing to do with her (cf. ll. 21–23), and she calls upon Aphrodite to bring this person back to her. The Love in question belongs to Aphrodite in the sense that it is the emotion which she inspires or the relationship between two mortals which she favours. (180)
My own preference would be to translate ἐς σὰν φιλότατα with “into your kind of love”; and I would eliminate Beattie’s insistence on bringing the beloved back to that kind of love, which has to do with his wish to read ἄψ as the first word of line 19. But otherwise I cannot see anything to quarrel with in his argument. In any event, there is no longer any interpretive objection to reading that first word as καί. “Whom am I yet again persuading even you—in the sense of: precisely you, whom else but you?—to bring into your way of loving?”
Revenge
With respect to the suggestion that Sappho wishes to engage with Aphrodite in maneuvers (perhaps involving baited traps) against an adversary, the crucial point is this: Once we are freed from what seems to me the clear error of reading the “your” in ἐς σὰν φιλότατα as referring to Sappho, we are also freed from the necessity of reading strophe six to mean that the beloved will pursue you (Sappho), that she will offer gifts to you, that she will love you. As far as I know, only one commentator has ever suggested an alternative to this reading, even though the actual pronoun “you” never occurs in the strophe. But Page’s very definite formulation on this point inadvertently throws into relief the problems in that standard reading.
Sappho’s words, “If she refuses your gifts, yet she shall be making gifts,” can only mean “If today she refuses your gifts, tomorrow you will be refusing hers.” And the third line is in harmony: “Today she loves you not; tomorrow she shall love you even against her will.” Why “against her will”? Because her love for you will then be unrequited; she will suffer as you suffer now, and she will pray for relief as you do today.
So Aphrodite is made to say in the plainest possible terms: “Why do you take this affair so seriously, and why do you keep plaguing me, when you know very well that the roles will soon be reversed? Today it is she who runs from you; tomorrow it will be she who pursues, you who seek to escape.” It is at once evident that the spirit of Aphrodite’s answer here is in perfect harmony with the tone of good-humoured raillery in the preceding stanza: “Why do you keep calling me? Who is it this time, Sappho? It has all happened so often before, and the end has always been the same.” (15)
The crucial recognition here is that we cannot accept the standard reading of strophe six without assuming that the love Sappho complains of is really a kind of courtship game, in which lover and beloved repeatedly exchange roles on the way to an eventual union.
Even Mace goes along with Page’s idea of a spirit of “good-humoured raillery”—although she tries to do so in a manner that avoids understanding Sappho’s love as a courtship game. She characterizes Aphrodite’s repeated “yet again” as “ironic” (358); and she insists that “Aphrodite’s speech alludes playfully to the fact that this poetess-speaker’s repertoire includes a regular litany of love complaints of the form ‘Eros . . . me, again!’” (360). I say even Mace, because it is precisely she who points out that in fragment 130 Sappho deviates from the relatively good-humored poetry of “Eros . . . me, again,” that Sappho “has chosen to develop the darker side of this theme . . . the more pointed paradox: desire is both alluring and repellent . . . the sinister aspect [of Eros]” (342). And it is not clear to me why she backs away from this view in discussing fragment 1, especially since Aphrodite’s “irony” or good humor or playfulness, if it existed there, would have to be attributed to Sappho herself, who is after all addressing herself by way of the goddess; and there is certainly no sign of such a spirit in the poem’s final strophe.
In any case, I do not see how one could accept the standard reading of strophe six without insisting on the poem’s basic playfulness. If Sappho were seriously in torment and concerned mainly with relieving her pain and satisfying her love, then surely she would desire simply that her beloved stop fleeing, accept her gifts, and return her love. How could she reasonably desire more than that? Is it at all likely, or even possible, that that woman, who until now had refused her love, will now suddenly turn about and pursue Sappho (διώκω, suggesting close, determined pursuit) as an aggressive suitor? Page’s inference is entirely correct. If we accept the standard reading of strophe six, then we must treat Sappho’s love as a courtship game. Which it is obviously not. Therefore the standard reading fails—and with it, I should think, the whole idea of the poem’s playfulness.
The alternative reading I alluded to above, which is a vast improvement upon the standard reading, was proposed by Anne Carson, who argues that the standard reading
is not what the Greek words say. Aphrodite’s statements contain no direct object. She does not say that the girl will pursue Sappho, she does not say that the girl will give gifts to Sappho, she does not say that the girl will love Sappho. She merely says that the girl will pursue, give gifts, and love. There is an interpretation of these words available to us which imposes no assumptions on the grammar and which, furthermore, is in better agreement with the traditions of Greek erotic poetry. For it is not the case generally in Greek poetry that scorned lovers pin their hopes on a mutual reversal of erotic roles. In general, forlorn lovers console themselves w...
