NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
Camille Paglia is furious about what has been done to the canon in her lifetime. Furious, I tell you! Her three books (outside of the essay collections) have been manifestos of RAGING redress against the demolishment of the established Western canon by special-interest groups who have infiltrated and intimidated modern academia:
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems
Art, poetry, literature … in Paglia’s view, the deconstructionism of post-modernism has wrecked students’ ability to SEE, to HEAR. It has limited them to their own time, and the only possible way to analyze something that pre-dates you is through social and political contexts, as opposed to aesthetics. Paglia has been hammering this home since she first burst onto the scene with Sexual Personae. She paints with broad strokes. She infuriates people because she goes after sacred cows or, even worse, she treats sacred cows with such contempt that they seem silly and worthless. There have been times when her words have been so heartening, so commonsensical, that I NEED to immerse myself in Puglia-Land, just to counter-act the CRAZY that is out there. And then sometimes I think, “Come on, Camille. Relax.” She gets it from all sides. “Serious” academics think she’s a lightweight because she compares Byron to Elvis in a supposedly serious essay. And liberal-hippie types fear her because she makes fun of them so mercilessly and destroys the things that they hold as self-evident truths (when, in reality, they are trends just like any other philosophical trend). Paglia gets off on all of this, clearly. My father thought she was a riot. So do I. Even when she says shit where I think, “Oh my GOD, Camille. No. NO!” I do think left-academic types have a tendency towards such humorlessness that they ruin literature for their students (the biggest crime), and also their writing is unreadable. They can’t “take a joke” because NOTHING is funny to them. Easy targets. Sometimes with Camille it’s like she’s shooting fish in a barrel.
However: I have appreciated much of her work because I didn’t “major” in anything like English, or Art, or The Humanities. I was an actress. I took a Humanities/art-survey course in high school (it was a requirement) and then took Art History 101 in college – also a requirement. These two classes gave such a good overview of the sweep of history, and Egypt and China and Africa, and the birthplaces of art, and how it swept into a continuum – that they will always be with me. And the fracturing of that continuum is what Camille fights against. She thinks it’s silly and that it is a disservice to students, who then emerge from art classes with no sense of the history of anything. I grew up with parents who read, parents who loved the theatre, a father who loved poetry … so that kind of art appreciation was the air I breathed growing up. Much of my knowledge was gained through osmosis, and I realize I was lucky. I just read Paglia’s Glittering Images, a survey art course in book form. Now, if you’re an art historian, of course you will probably look at Camille’s choices and pooh-pooh. Or you will read her analysis and think, “Oh my God, how simplistic.” Or “I am so offended that she would include Star Wars in the same book as Egyptian tomb-sculptures.” But snobs like that are part of the problem and we need to ignore them. They WANT art to be for the elite. They don’t WANT the continuum to include Star Wars or Elvis … when it clearly already does, whether they want it to or not.
But Paglia’s books are not for the experts. They are for curious regular people who have not immersed themselves in the history of art since undergraduate days, and who may have a vague notion of when the Impressionists came about and why … but beyond that? Nada. And for those people (in other words: Moi), her books are a great launching-point. In terms of literature, I’m fine. I don’t need anyone to spell anything out for me, or inform me of the wide movements that made up Romanticism or the Modernists. I got that one. But sculpture? Give me an introductory course, please. I’ll take it from there.
Her book on poetry (Break, Blow, Burn) is a frank attempt to return the study of poetry to the study of language, and not in the postmodern sense, which fractures the text into signifiers and all the rest. But poetic language. What the words unleash, and how they unleash them, the different poetic forms (ballads, sonnets, villanelles, whatever), and how those forms make language operate. And etc.
If I had to choose “a Camille” I like best, it would be the Camille that writes on art/sculpture and the Camille that writes on pop culture.
Nevertheless, here is the introduction Paglia wrote for The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
In this essay she charts the course of Love Poetry from the ancients up until the current day. It’s, again, one of her survey-course pieces. Here’s the section on the Greeks and Sappho. Paglia chooses Sappho’s poem “He seems to me a god” as one of her “ways in” (here’s an interesting page about the translation of that poem.) Paglia calls it “the first great psychological document of Western literature.” Sappho describes watching a woman she loves/desires be enthralled with a man. Here’s a 2013 translation. The whole thing sounds shockingly modern:
He Seems To Me a God
Seem, he seems to me like a god to be that
man who sits and steals in the shade of our
sun and coming close to your sweet unclosing
mouth in the daytime.
Now you laugh and I am alive, for in your
light I green my leaves and would speak if speech were
given me but oh, how the vine does speak in
vain in the evening.
No, my tongue is naught and aflame my body
yes, my eyes are naught and the ears are drumming
deaf and drowned I’m lost to my limbs, a midnight
more in darkness.
Sweat beads down and trembling all it grips me,
halves me, wholes me — seem, so I seem near broken,
bown, an ungreened grass fallen greenlessly down,
and dead.
The second poem Paglia discusses is Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite”.
Hymn to Aphrodite
Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don’t–I beg you, Lady–with pains and torments
Crush down my spirit,
But before if ever you’ve heard my pleadings
Then return, as once when you left your father’s
Golden house; you yoked to your shining car your
Wing-whirring sparrows;
Skimming down the paths of the sky’s bright ether
On they brought you over the earth’s black bosom,
Swiftly–then you stood with a sudden brilliance,
Goddess, before me;
Deathless face alight with your smile, you asked me
What I suffered, who was my cause of anguish,
What would ease the pain of my frantic mind, and
Why had I called you
To my side: “And whom should Persuasion summon
Here, to soothe the sting of your passion this time?
Who is now abusing you, Sappho? Who is
Treating you cruelly?
Now she runs away, but she’ll soon pursue you;
Gifts she now rejects–soon enough she’ll give them;
Now she doesn’t love you, but soon her heart will
Burn, though unwilling.”
Come to me once more, and abate my torment;
Take the bitter care from my mind, and give me
All I long for; Lady, in all my battles
Fight as my comrade.
Excerpt from Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
The history of European love poetry begins with the Greek lyric poets of the Archaic age (7th-6th centuries B.C.). Archilochus, Mimnermus, Sappho, and Alcaeus turn poetry away from the grand epic style toward the quiet personal voice, attentive to mood and emotion. Despite the fragmentary survival of Greek solo poetry, we see that it contains a new idea of love, which Homer shows as foolish or deceptive but never unhappy. Archilochus’ account of the anguish of love is deepened by Sappho, whose poetry was honored by male writers and grammarians until the fall of Rome. Sappho and Alcaeus were active on Lesbos, an affluent island off the Aeolian coast of Asia Minor, where aristocratic women apparently had more freedom than later in classical Athens. Sappho is primarily a love poet, uninterested in politics or metaphysics. The nature of her love has caused much controversy and many fabrications, some by major scholars. Sappho was married, and she had a daughter, but her poetry suggests that she fell in love with a series of beautiful girls, who moved in and out of her coterie (not a school, club, or cult). There is as yet no evidence, however, that she had physical relations with women. Even the ancients, who had her complete words, were divided about her sexuality.
Sappho shows that love poetry is how Western personality defines itself. The beloved is passionately perceived but also replaceable; he or she may exist primarily as a focus of the poet’s consciousness. In “He seems to me a god” (fr. 31), Sappho describes her pain at the sight of a favorite girl sitting and laughing with a man. The lighthearted social scene becomes oppressively internal, as the poet sinks into suffering: she cannot speak or see; she is overcome by fever, tremor, pallor. “This description of the symptoms of love had the most persistent influence over more than a thousand years” (Albin Lesky). In plain, concise language, Sappho analyzes her extreme state as if she were both actor and observer; she is candid and emotional yet dignified, austere, almost clinical. This poem, preserved for us by Longinus, is the first great psychological document of Western literature. Sappho’s prayer to Aphrodite (fr. 1) converts cult-song into love poem. The goddess, amused at Sappho’s desperate appeal for aid, teasingly reminds her of former infatuations and their inevitable end. Love is an endless cycle of pursuit, triumph, and ennui. The poem, seemingly so charming and transparent, is structure by a complex time scheme of past, present, and future, the ever-flowing stream of our emotional life. Sappho also wrote festive wedding songs and the first known description of a romantic moonlit night. She apparently invented the now-commonplace adjective “bittersweet” for the mixed condition of love.
Early Greek love poetry is based on simple parallelism between human emotion and nature, which has a Mediterranean mildness. Love-sickness, like a storm, is sudden and passing. Imagery is vivid and luminous, as in haiku; there is nothing contorted or artificial. Anacreon earned a proverbial reputation for wine, women, and song: his love is not Sappho’s spiritual crisis but the passing diversion of a bisexual bon vivant. Love poetry was little written in classical Athens, where lyric was absorbed into the tragic choral ode. Plato, who abandoned poetry for philosophy, left epigrams on the beauty of boys. The learned Alexandrian age revived love poetry as an art mode. Theocritus begins the long literary tradition of pastoral, where shepherds complain of unrequited love under sunny skies. Most of his Idylls contain the voices of rustic characters like homely Polyphemus, courting the scornful nymph Galatea, or Lycidas, a goatherd pining for a youth gone to sea. Aging Theocritus broods about his own love for fickle boys, whose blushes haunt him. In his Epigrams, Callimachus takes a lighter attitude toward love, to which he applies sporting metaphors of the hunt. In Medea’s agonized passion for Jason in the Argonautia, Apollonius Rhodius tries to mesh love poetry with epic. Asklepiades adds new symbols to love tradition: Eros and arrow-darting Cupid. Mileage writes with equal relish of cruel boys and voluptuous women, such as Heliodora. His is a poignant, sensual poetry filled with the color and smell of flowers.
The Greek Anthology demonstrates the changes in Greek love poetry from the Alexandrian through Roman periods. As urban centers grow and speed up, nature metaphors recede. Trashy street life begins, and prostitutes, drag queens, randy tutors, and bathhouse masseuses crowd into view. Love poets become droll, jaded, less lyrical. Women are lusciously described but given no personalities or inner life. Leonidas of Tarentum and Marcus Argentarius write of voracious sluts with special skills; Antimatter of Thessalonika coarsely derides scrawny old lechers. For the first time, love poetry incorporates ugliness, squalor, disgust. Boy-love is universal; Straton of Sardis, editor of an anthology of pederastic poems, celebrates the ripening phases of boys’ genitalia. By the early Byzantine period, however, we feel the impact of Christianity, in more heartfelt sentiment but also in guilt and melancholy.
