336 p e nn y m u r r ay
appear.10 The significance of the Muses’ gender will also, surely, be
variable. One thing that should be remembered is that they are, or at
any rate begin as, goddesses, so the complex question of belief has
to be somewhere in the background of our interpretations. The
invocation of the Muse is in one sense, of course, the history of a
‘fading metaphor’, as we have often been reminded; neverthless it
needs to be emphasized that in Greek culture, at any rate, the Muses
are invoked not just as ‘literary’ figures, but as deities who are
worshipped in cult with efficacious powers. W. D. Furley has dis-
cussed the evidence we have for the religious hymns sung by the
Greeks and suggests that the strategy behind the composition
and performance of such hymns was to attract the attention of
the divinity addressed in a favourable way: hymns are sung for the
pleasure of the gods, and the Muses have an important role to play
in that process. Thus a famous cult hymn which was actually
performed at a festival of Apollo in Delphi, the Athenian Pythais
festival in either 138 or 128 bce begins with an invocation to the
Muses: ‘Listen, fair-armed daughters of loud-thundering Zeus who
received thickly wooded Helikon as your lot, come here and sing of
your brother Phoibos of the golden hair.’ Apollo, the subject of the
hymn, is not invoked directly, but through the mediation of
the Muses, in keeping, Furley notes, with Menander Rhetor’s advice
to the hymnist to seek the Muses’ help in invoking Apollo, since one
is uncertain how most effectively and politely to address him. The
Muses provide a bridge between the human poet and the world
of the gods. In this particular hymn the poet calls on the aid of
the Muses as ‘beings qualified by divinity, expertise in singing,
and kinship with Apollo’.11 Yes, they are subordinate—they are
10 See under Mousa/Mousai in LIMC vi. 657–81 and vii. 991–1059;
P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity
(Berkeley, 1995), 268 ff. and 327 ff.; P. Murray, ‘The Muses: Creativity
Personified?’, in E. Stafford and J. Herrin (eds.), Personification in the
Greek World (Aldershot, 2005), 147–59.
11 W. D. Furley, ‘Praise and Persuasion in Greek Hymns’, JHS 115
(1995), 29–46. See also J. Bremer, ‘Greek Hymns’, in H. S. Versnel (ed.),
Faith, Hope and Worship (Leiden, 1981), 193–215; W. D. Furley and J. M.
Bremer, Greek Hymns: Selected Cult Songs from the Archaic to the
Hellenistic period, 2 vols. (Tu¨ bingen, 2001).
reclaiming the muse 337
daughters of Zeus and inscribed within a patriarchal system, just as
they are in Hesiod’s canonical description of their activities in the
proem to the Theogony.12 But that is not to deny the Muses all
agency; given the religious context in which they are invoked, it is
difficult to see them as figments of the imagination or merely subject
to the poet’s whim. A lot of work currently being done on the
relationship between ‘real’ cult hymns and hymns sung, for ex-
ample, by choruses in Attic drama, both tragedy and comedy, also
makes it difficult to assume that references to the Muse in those
genres operate solely on the level of metaphor.13 It would be a
mistake, therefore, to regard the Muses as nothing more than pas-
sive fantasy figures, since whatever their status within the divine
hierarchy, they remain powerful vis-a` -vis mortals simply by virtue
of their divinity.
Apropos the divine status of the Muses, I want to draw attention
to some remarks of Nicole Loraux in her essay, ‘What is a God-
dess?’14 ‘A goddess’, she says, ‘is not a woman—that is, when
thinking about the goddesses we must always ask ourselves the
question, ‘‘to what extent does the divine take precedence over
the feminine in a goddess?’’ ’ And again, ‘The word thea is a femi-
nine form, and in sculpture the thea was always represented as a
female; yet there is no evidence that in a goddess the feminine
attributes had greater importance than the divine . . . who can say
12 See e.g. M. Arthur, ‘The Dream of a World without Women: Poetics
and the Circles of Order in the Theogony Prooemium’, Arethusa, 16
(1983), 97–116; A. Bergren, ‘Language and the Female in Early Greek
Thought’, Arethusa, 16 (1983), 69–95; E. Stehle, Performance and Gender
in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 1997), 199–207.
13 See e.g. A. Henrichs, ‘ ‘‘Why should I dance?’’ Choral Self-referenti-
ality in Greek Tragedy’, Arion, 3.1 (1994/5), 56–111; C. Calame, ‘Per-
formative Aspects of the Choral Voice in Greek Tragedy: Civic Indentity
in Performance’, in S. Goldhill, and R. Osborne, (eds.), Performance Cul-
ture and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 1999), 125–53; C. Calame,
‘Choral Forms in Aristophanic Comedy: Musical Mimesis and Dramatic
Performance in Classical Athens’, in Murray and Wilson (eds.), Music and
the Muses, 157–84; E. Stehle, ‘Choral Prayer in Greek Tragedy: Euphemia
or Aischrologia?’, ibid. 121–55. On lyric poetry, see below, (n. 37).
14 In P. Schmitt-Pantel, (ed.), A History of Women in the West (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1992), 19–20.
338 p e nn y m u r r ay
whether epiphany is not a form—the theomorphic form—of meta-
morphosis?’ These observations seem particularly pertinent to one
of the few myths we have concerning the Muses’ activities: their
punishment of the legendary Thracian bard Thamyris, who boasted
of his musical prowess and dared to challenge them to a contest. In
return for his arrogant pride they maimed him and deprived him of
his musical skills, both his wondrous singing and his ability as a lyre
player. This story, first told in Homer’s Iliad (2. 594–600), is a
classic tale of hubris, like the punishment of Niobe whose six sons
and six daughters were all killed by Apollo and Artemis because she
boasted that she had produced more children than their mother,
Leto (Iliad 24. 602–9): any mortal foolish enough to challenge the
superiority of a god would suffer such consequences. Why the story
of Thamyris should suddenly appear in the Catalogue of Ships is an
interesting question, especially since other such tales of human folly
inserted into the poem seem to have at least some relevance to their
context. Kirk speculates that this ‘otherwise gratuitous elaboration’
may be motivated by the professional singer’s pride in his art:
‘Thamyris went too far, but at least an almost divine power in
song is suggested by his story.’15 The episode certainly illustrates
the power of the Muses which (with Loraux’s observations in mind)
derives more from their divinity than from their gender. Other
authors who treat the story of Thamyris include Hesiod (Ehoiai
fr. 65) and Aeschylus, who may have composed a Thamyris, or at
least referred to the bard’s encounter with the Muses as a mytho-
logical exemplum in one of his other plays.16 But the most famous
version of the story was that dramatized by Sophocles in his play
Thamyras (the spelling of the name varies in different traditions).
Only a few fragments remain, mostly relating to musical themes,
including fr. 241: ‘For gone are the songs resounding from the
striking of the harp’, and fr. 244: ‘breaking the horn bound with
gold, breaking the harmony of the strung lyre’, both of which would
seem to refer to the bard’s loss of his musical powers. The second-
century ce writer on theatrical antiquities Pollux, (4. 141) speaks of
15 G. Kirk, The Iliad: A Commentary (Cambridge, 1985), 216.
16 See E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-definition through
Tragedy (Oxford, 1989), 135–6.
reclaiming the muse 339
a special mask for the actor playing the bard, who was blinded
during the play, with one blue eye and one black, to represent his
blindness. According to the Life of Sophocles, 5, the poet himself
played the role of Thamyras on stage, which may well have con-
tributed to the fame of the legendary bard and to the popularity of
the myth as a theme in classical art.17 When thinking about the
power of the Muses we would do well to ponder the significance of a
tragic poet taking the part of a poet-musician blinded by the Muses
and deprived of his art as a punishment for his presumption of more
than mortal powers.
A different twist is given to the story in the pseudo-Euripidean
Rhesus, where the Muse apears in a quite different guise. In this play,
whose complicated plot need not concern us, the Thracian king
Rhesus is the son of one of the nine Muses (she is not named) and
the river-god Strymon. After his murder the Muse appears ex
machina cradling her son in her arms and lamenting his death with
that sensual intensity of grief that only a mother can know.18 Like
Hecuba, the paradigm of mourning and motherhood, she mourns
her loss in song, remembering the child whom she bore who now lies
dead before her, ending her lament with the familiar tragic topos:
Such pain to have children who may die.
To bury a child. If you had any idea,
You’d choose to live a life barren.
(980–2, trans. J. M. Walton)
This thoroughly humanized and feminized Muse is presented here
as the embodiment of tragic suffering, and she traces the cause of
her sorrows back to the overweening arrogance of Thamyris. For it
was while she was crossing the river Strymon for the contest with
the Thracian bard that she was raped by the river-god and subse-
quently gave birth to Rhesus. As in traditional versions of the story,
17 See LIMC s.v. Thamyris; P. Wilson, ‘The Musicians among the Act-
ors’, in P. Easterling and E. Hall (eds.), Greek and Roman Actors (Cam-
bridge, 2002), 42–3.
18 See N. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning (Ithaca, NY, and London,
1998); I. Lada-Richards, ‘Reinscribing the Muse: Greek Drama and the
Discourse of Inspired Creativity’, in Spentzou and Fowler (eds.), Cultivat-
ing the Muse, 82.
340 p e nn y m u r r ay
Thamyris was punished for his hubris (the Muses blinded him), but
the emphasis in this play is on the Muse as tragic victim; her divine
power cannot remove her suffering.
The sexual aspect of the contest between bard and Muses seems
already to have been a part of the tradition even before this play, at
least according to the fourth-century commentator Asclepiades,
who summarizes the plot of an earlier drama thus:
They say that Thamyris was wonderful in appearance, his right eye being
blue, his left black, and that he thought that he excelled all others in singing.
When the Muses came to Thrace, Thamyris became angry with them
because he wanted to cohabit with them all, saying that it was a Thracian
custom for many women to live with a single man. So they challenged him
to a singing contest on these terms: if they were victorious, they should
do whatever they wished with him, but if he won, he could take as many
of them as he chose. This was agreed, but the Muses won, and put out
his eyes.19
Some think that the rather bizarre inclusion of the theme of polyg-
amy in this synopsis suggests a comic version, others that it derives
from tragedy or a satyr play, but in the absence of further evidence
we can only speculate about its significance. What we can say,
however, is that these various treatments of the Thamyris legend
illustrate the complex interplay of divinity, gender, and power in the
myth, and suggest that these issues need to be thought about each
time the story is told. ‘To what extent does the divine take prece-
dence over the feminine in a goddess?’ is a question which has no
easy answer.
Of course, if one wants to see the Muses as figures of power (and
I think there are many instances where we can) the root problem we
are faced with is the gap between the symbolic function of the
female in the male imaginary and the actual reality of women’s
lives. In Virginia Woolf’s words, the ‘paradoxical combination of
social oppression and poetic licence’ gives rise to
a very queer, composite being . . . Imaginatively she is of the highest import-
ance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from
cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of
kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose
19 Trans. and discussed by E. Hall, Inventing the Barbarian, 135–6.
reclaiming the muse 341
parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words,
some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real
life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her
husband. (A Room of One’s Own, 45–6)
There are various ways of dealing with this gap between image and
reality. One is to jettison the whole vocabulary and system of
imagery, abolishing the Muse for good ‘along with all the other
retro, primitive, unevolved sexist myths’.20 Alternatively, and more
productively, one might think about why this imagery of inspiration
has persisted and why the image of the Muse has remained so
central to the discourse of creativity in the Western tradition. It is
easy to say, and the claim is not without justification, that the male
poet’s invocation of the Muse is an act of appropriation or control:
the poet objectifies his source of inspiration as a passive female
figure, whilst simultaneously appropriating her creative powers
and silencing her in the process. The mythology of the Muse is no
doubt a convenient way of explaining a man’s relationship to his art
in a patriarchal culture; but there is surely more to it than that. After
all, the Muse is, amongst other things, a metaphor for the mysteri-
ous aspects of creativity, for that alchemical activity of the uncon-
scious which cannot be summoned to order; as such the Muse is
neither goddess nor whore, but genderless, a symbol of the creative
drive which incorporates and transcends both sexes. Again, the
notion of the unattainable Muse expresses something of the obses-
sional nature of artistic activity, for, as Francine Prose has observed,
‘unrequited desire may itself be a metaphor for the making of art,
for the fact that a finished work so rarely equals the initial impulse
or conception, thus compelling the artist to start over and try
again.’21 Seen in this light the eroticization of the relationship
20 F. Prose, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists they
Inspired (London, 2003), 9.
21 Ibid. 23. Joseph Brodsky, ‘The Poet, the Loved One and the Muse’,
TLS 26 October 1990, 1150, deploring the modern conception of the artist
as perpetual Don Juan, speaks of the poet’s obsession with language: ‘As for
the Muse, that angel of language . . . it would be best if biographers and the
public left her alone, and if they can’t they should at least remember that she
is older than any lover or mother, and that her voice is more implacable than
342 p e nn y m u r r ay
between artist and Muse may be more than a legitimizing strategy
on the part of the male; rather it becomes a compelling metaphor for
the link between eros and creativity, which applies as much to the
female creative artist as to the male. Thus May Sarton, who of all
female poets of the twentieth century probably engages most deeply
with the figure of the Muse, declares in her semi-autobigraphical
novel Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing that all poems are
love poems, regardless of their content. ‘In the presence of the
Muse’, her alter ego Hilary Stevens says, ‘the sources of poetry
boil; the faculty of language itself ferments . . . the poet becomes a
lover.’ For Mrs Stevens, poetry is written out of desire, and begins in
dialogue with the Muse, but ‘conquest is not the point’. The elusive
Muse who comes and goes as she pleases both is, and is not,
incarnate, indeed she describes the perfect Muse as one who could
not be approached in the flesh. Mrs Stevens’s Muse shares many of
the features of Robert Graves’s inspiring goddess, and the novel as a
whole is presented as a female response to ‘the question posited at
such huge length . . . in The White Goddess—who and what is the
Muse?’22 For Sarton, no less than for Graves, the erotic relationship
between poet and Muse is central to the creative process, regardless
of the sex of the artist involved.
One of the commonest metaphors for describing artistic produc-
tion is that of pregnancy and childbirth, and the use of sexual
imagery for mental creativity goes back at least as far as the fifth
century bce. Thus in Aristophanes’ Clouds Strepsiades is roundly
told off by one of Socrates’ pupils for kicking on the door of the
Thinkery and causing his thought to miscarry—the implications of
the metaphor are well brought out in the translation by Kenneth
McLeish: ‘My mind was pregnant with thought—and now it’s
miscarried’ (Clouds 135–7). In the Frogs Dionysus laments the
abysmal quality of tragic poets writing after the death of Euripides
and says that there isn’t a truly fertile (gonimos) poet among them.
Later on in the same play (Frogs 1058–9) Aeschylus tells Euripides
the mother-tongue.’ For further discussion see Murray, ‘The Muses: Cre-
ativity Personified?’ (n. 10, above) 150.
22 M. Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (New York,
1975), 125, 154–5, 146, 182, 83.
reclaiming the muse 343
that the poet should beget (tiktein) suitably dignified language in
which to express noble themes and sentiments. In the parabasis of
the Clouds Aristophanes exploits this metaphorical field in a more
elaborate way when speaking of his first play Banqueters: since he
was a young unmarried mother at the time he composed the play he
had to give his baby to someone else to bring up, a reference to the
fact that this comedy was actually produced by Callistratus. Again,
McLeish captures the flavour of Aristophanes’ imagery well,
though, significantly, he introduces the figure of the Muse, who is
not there in the original Greek:
When you saw my first play, how you cheered
At my characters Nasty and Nice!
You remember? My Muse was a blushing young girl,
Too young to have children and call them her own.
But she bore me a play, in another man’s name,
And you loved it, adored it, and gave it first prize.
(Clouds 528–32)
In Aristophanes’ text the playwright imagines himself rather than
his Muse as the blushing young girl whose play is his child, an image
which McLeish renders less striking by interjecting the feminine
figure of the Muse. As Edith Hall has shown, Old Comedy is full
of metapoetic figures such as Poetry, Music, Tragedy, and Comedy,
personified in female form, whom the male poet has to ‘master’ in
order to produce his art.23 So, for example, in the parabasis of
Knights the chorus speak of the difficulty of the comic poet’s pro-
fession, personifying Comedy as a mistress who grants her favours
to few: ‘Comedy’s tough, doesn’t fall for the first man who asks’
(Knights 516–17, again in McLeish’s translation). And in his play
Pytine (‘Wineflask’) Aristophanes’ great rival Cratinus presents
himself on stage as married to Comedy, who complains of his
behaviour and wants to divorce him because he has abandoned
23 See E. Hall, ‘Female Figures and Metapoetry in Old Comedy’, in F.
Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes: Studies in Athen-
ian Old Comedy (London, 2000), 407–18; Murray, ‘The Muses: Creativity
Personified?’; A. Sommerstein, ‘A Lover of his Art: The Art-Form as Wife
and Mistress in Greek Poetic Imagery’, in E. Stafford and J. Herrin (eds.),
Personification in the Greek World (Aldershot, 2005), 161–72.
344 p e nn y m u r r ay
her for Drunkennes. Cratinus defends himself by claiming that no
one who drinks only water can beget (tiktein) good poetry (fr. 203).
Comedy, which typically tends to take metaphor literally, to turn
abstract into concrete, exploits the ribald, sometimes obscene, pos-
sibilities of such imagery to the full, usually constructing the male
poet as the active agent who begets his poetry by seducing the
female art-form of which he is the practitioner. Plato, however,
sees a deeper meaning in this nexus of imagery and returns again
and again to the relationship between sexuality and creativity. His
most sustained treatment of this theme occurs in the Symposium
where Diotima, the priestess from Mantinea, initiates Socrates into
the mysteries of eros (206 b–212 b). The purpose of love, she says,
is to give birth in beauty. All of us are pregnant, whether in body or
soul, and when we reach a certain age we naturally desire to give
birth, but we can only do so in the presence of beauty, for what love
wants is reproduction and birth in beauty. Some (inferior) people
are simply pregnant in body, while others are pregnant in soul, and
when they find beauty these people will bring forth poetry, laws,
wisdom, and ideas. The final goal of love, however, is to ascend
from earthly to heavenly beauty so that when the vision of Beauty
itself is revealed to the lover (who is now, of course, the lover of
wisdom) he will give birth not to images of virtue but to true virtue.
Several things are striking about this remarkable passage of the
Symposium, not least the curious reversal whereby the lover is
pregnant before intercourse takes place; perhaps even stranger is
the fact that the language of pregnancy and childbirth is used almost
exclusively of the male (the only female example used is that of
Alcestis at 208 d). Yet, as David Halperin has suggested, it may not
be accidental that Plato has put this speech into the mouth of
a woman.24 The use of female figures to license male speech is a
24 D. Halperin, ‘Why is Diotima a Woman?’ Platonic Eros and the
Figuration of Gender’, in D. Halperin, J. Winkler, and F. Zeitlin (eds.),
Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient
Greek World (Princeton, 1990), 257–308. On sexuality and creativity in
Plato see also M. Burnyeat, ‘Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration’, BICS
24 (1977), 7–16. For a different interpretation see L. Irigaray, ‘Sorcerer
Love’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. C. Burke and G. C. Gill
(Ithaca, NY, 1993), 20–33.
reclaiming the muse 345
noteworthy feature of classical Greek culture; but the absence of the
actual feminine should not lead us to interpret Plato’s strategy here
as a straightforward attempt to appropriate the feminine. Perhaps
Diotima is a woman because her account of eros, and in particular
her view that the true aim of erotic desire is procreation, would be
regarded by Plato’s Greek audience as authentically female. From
that point of view Plato’s use of the figure of Diotima to develop this
extraordinary imagery of male pregnancy and birth, and her explor-
ation of the deep interconnection between eros and creativity, could
be read as an acknowledgement, albeit at an unconscious level, of
the peculiar power of female fecundity which the male himself
lacks.
Like Diotima, the Muse is a figure through whom the male artist
asserts his imaginative powers, but rather than deploring this fan-
tasy of appropriation, we could look for a positive significance in
the femininity of the Muses. Experts tell us that the Muse is a Greek
invention: although other cultures ascribe divine origins to poetry
and song, there seems to be no equivalent for these goddesses who
specialize in song.25 According to the myth of their own origins
(Pindar fr. 31) the Muses were created in order to hymn the praises
of Zeus’s newly ordered world, whose beauty was incomplete with-
out the harmony of their singing. Their function is to bring delight
and pleasure to the world of the gods, and to bestow the gifts of
poetry and song, the essential prerequisites of civilized society, on
human beings. In comparison with the other gods of the Olympian
pantheon the Muses have few myths of their own, but a motif that is
often associated with them is that of the contest: so, for example,
the Sirens who ventured upon a contest with them were punished by
losing the feathers of their wings (Paus. 9. 34. 3); the nine daughters
of Pierus who presumed to rival the Muses were changed into
chattering magpies (Ovid, Met. 5. 294–314, 662–78); the Muses
were complicit in the punishment of Marsyas, who was flayed alive
for challenging the superiority of Apollo;26 and it must surely be
25 See M. West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in
Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford, 1997), 170.
26 The evidence is mostly iconographical: see LIMC s.v. Mousa/Mousai,
vi, 669–70. Hyginus, Fab. 165 refers to the Muses as arbitrators of the
contest between satyr and god.
346 p e nn y m u r r ay
significant that the story most frequently attested is their punish-
ment of Thamyris, a myth that dramatizes the power of the Muses
in relation to their human subject.
In the mythic imagination the Muse is a powerful figure, but
historically speaking the relationship between poet and Muse has
been differently configured, with the Muse typically envisaged as a
mute presence behind a man’s song. Even so, there are ways of
reinventing the figure without replicating the tired old scheme of
active male/passive female, indeed the multiplicity of Muses and the
ambiguity of classical Muse imagery invites us to do so. In their
anthology The Muse Strikes Back: A Poetic Response by Women to
Men, K. McAlpine and Gail White present a collection of poems to
counter the Gravesian ‘silent Muse’ in which women poets retell
their stories from a female perspective, rejecting their traditional
role as passive objects of male desire. Amongst the many Muse
poems in the volume are included some lines from the Prologue of
the seventeenth-century colonial poet Anne Bradstreet, who was
herself entitled ‘The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America’.
Comparing her male contemporaries unfavourably with their an-
cient Greek counterparts, she recognizes the symbolic potential of
the figure of the Muse:
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ’mongst the rest they placed the arts divine.27
A more serious exploration of the diverse ways in which modern
women writers have re-visioned the Muse in order to express their
ideas about their own creativity is provided by Mary DeShazer in
her book Inspiring Women: Re-imagining the Muse.28 Through her
study of the works of, for example, Louise Bogan, H.D., and May
Sarton, she shows how the Muse can be transformed from the
traditionally passive source of inspiration for the male artist into a
powerful image of female creativity. These different women writers
envisage the Muse in various ways, some using motherhood as a
metaphor for creativity, some invoking female lovers, others calling
27 McAlpine and White (Brownsville, Tex., 1997), 87–8.
28 (New York and Oxford, 1986).
reclaiming the muse 347
forth strong female figures from their literary or mythological heri-
tage, or even becoming their own Muses, but central to their enter-
prise is the re-visioning of the Muse as an active rather than a
passive force. Thus May Sarton, for whom the Muse is a potent
symbol throughout her life, recognizes in the end that the Muse is a
part of herself, an insight which she articulates in her poem The
Muse as Medusa, which closes with the following stanza:
I turn your face around! It is my face.
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for.29
In terms of the visual arts we can see another kind of reclamation of
the image of the Muse in the works of Angelica Kauffman and
Samuel Richardson’s Nine Living Muses which I have already dis-
cussed. A modern parallel for these eighteenth-century artists is
provided by Maud Sulter, whose Zabat (1989) is the subject of an
article by Sue Malvern.30 This work, Malvern tells us, consists of
nine life-size cibachrome photographic prints depicting individual
living black women as the nine Muses of mythology, their gold
frames designed to suggest the presence of monumental works of
art exhibited in museums. As with Samuel Richardson’s earlier
painting, all Sulter’s contemporary Muses are writers, artists, and
performers themselves, so that here again we see the ancient alle-
gorical figures re-animated as authoritative and inspirational role
models for female (and in this case, black) creative artists.31
29 May Sarton, Collected Poems 1930–1973 (New York, 1974), 332. See
also e.g. ‘Pruning the Orchard’, ‘Of the Muse’, ‘Letters from Maine’, ‘After
a Winter’s Silence’ and ‘Moose in the Morning’ in Halfway to Silence
(London, 1993), 33, 39, 44–53, 58, 59.
30 ‘The Muses and the Museum: Maud Sulter’s Retelling of the Canon’,
in M. Wyke, and M. Biddiss (eds.), The Uses and Abuses of Antiquity
(Berne, 1999), 227–41. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for drawing
my attention to this article.
31 A more trivial, but in its way no less telling example appeared in the
magazine Country Life, 24 October 1996 which featured an electronically
updated version of Samuel Richardson’s 18th-c. painting. The ‘Nine Mod-
ern Muses’ of the 1990s (who included not a poet or a writer amongst them)
are said to have the same qualities of ‘social poise and accomplishment’ as
348 p e nn y m u r r ay
In various ways, then, creative artists in the modern world have
re-imagined the mythology of the Muses and seen their femininity
as a source of empowerment for their mortal counterparts. What
has not been sufficiently recognized, however, is that this potential-
ity is already there in the ancient figure. If we want to tell the story in
a different way and get beyond the gendered paradigm that silences
female creativity we could begin by looking at some instances in
Greek literature where women lay claim to the inspiration of the
Muse. In Euripides’ Medea, for example, Medea, having persuaded
Creon to allow her one day’s delay, tells the chorus of her plans to
kill her enemies (not at this stage mentioning her children), and
the chorus respond by saying that if Apollo had granted women the
gift of song, the myths of old would have been told in a different
way:
The Muses of ancient bards will cease to hymn our faithlessness. Phoebus
lord of song never endowed our minds with the glorious strains of the lyre.
Else I could have sounded a hymn in reply to the male sex. Time in its long
expanse can say many things of men’s lot as well as of women’s.’ (421–30)32
The chorus sing, prophetically as it happens, of a future when
women will have a voice and the past will look different. Later on
in the same play when Medea has just made her famous speech
before killing her children, in which she says that her thumos has
overcome her reason, the chorus comment:
Oft ere now I have engaged in discourses subtler, and entered upon contests
greater, than is right for woman to peer into. No, we too possess a muse,
who consorts with us to bring us wisdom: not with all of us, for it is some
small clan, one among many, that you will find with a share in the Muse.
I say that those mortals who are utterly without experience of children and
their 18th-c. couterparts, and are described thus: ‘experts to the last
woman, each of our present day Muses is characterized by a passion for
her field of endeavour combined with serene dignity. They are gracious in
their determination to succeed; their independence of spirit is an example
to others.’
32 Trans. D. Kovacs (Loeb edition, Cambridge, Mass., 1994), but I have
substituted ‘Muses’ in l. 421 for the Greek Mousai, which Kovacs translates
as ‘poetry’. For discussion of the ode see B. Knox, ‘The Medea of Euripides’,
Yale Classical Studies, 25 (1977), 193–225.
reclaiming the muse 349
have never borne them have the advantage in good fortune over those who
have. (1081–93)33
Here they lay claim to the wisdom that comes from the Muse, which
they referred to in the earlier ode. Of particular interest are lines
1085–6: ‘No, we too possess a muse, who consorts with us to bring
us wisdom.’ Commentators usually compare Aristophanes’ Lysis-
trata 1124, where Lysistrata says that though she is a woman she is
not stupid: ‘although I am a woman, I have a mind’, and that line
itself is a quotation from Euripides, Melanippe the Wise fr. 483. In
the Medea passage what interests me is the language, for Muse is
almost a metonym here for wisdom or intelligence (as is indicated
by the oscillation between ‘muse’ and ‘Muse’ in Kovacs’s transla-
tion). In the context of Euripides’ play the chorus’s words are a
prelude to their own articulation of the topos that it is better not to
have children than to suffer the pains that they bring, hence they are
claiming wisdom for themselves. But, interestingly, later feminist
interpretations which sought to reclaim Medea from the monstrous
mother demonized by patriarchal culture looked to this passage to
build up an image of Medea as an extraordinary artist, honoured by
her compatriots as one of the few outstanding women to possess the
gift of poetry.34
The examples discussed above are not, of course, straightforward
references to Muse-inspired activity on the part of women, since in
all cases the words are spoken or sung by male citizens imperson-
ating female characters in the context of dramatic performance. But
they do suggest that the Muses’ province is not exclusively male,
and raise some interesting questions about the gendering of creativ-
ity. What, if any, are the implications of the gender of the Muse
here? Is the Muse who consorts with females different from the
33 Trans. Kovacs. For discussion of the text see also D. Mastronarde,
Euripides: Medea (Cambridge, 2002), 346–8. For other such claims to
female sophia see e.g. Eur. Helen 1049.
34 See A. Heilman, ‘Medea at the Fin de Sie`cle: The Re-vision of Myth
in Feminist Writings by Mona Caird, Amy Levy and Vernon Lee’, forth-
coming in Historicising Sexual Politics: Victorian Engagements with the
Past, special issue of Victorian Review, guest edited by Ann Heilmann.
I am grateful to the author for sending me a copy of this paper prior to
publication.
350 p e nn y m u r r ay
muse who consorts with males? How important is it here that the
gender of the Muse is female? We might ask the same questions of
Sappho’s use of the Muse figure. Like male poets, Sappho too
invokes the Muse, as in the following fragments:
here (once again)
Muses
leaving the gold (fr. 127)
here now
tender Graces
and Muses with beautiful hair (fr. 128)35
We don’t have the contexts for these invocations, and so have to
imagine plausible settings. Perhaps the goddesses are invoked here
for the performance of a wedding song, just as Alcman’s Parthe-
neion, composed by a male poet for a chorus of young girls to
perform, begins with the words:
Come Muse, Calliope daughter of Zeus,
begin the lovely verses: set
desire on the song, and make the dancing graceful.36
Or perhaps they are preludes to cult songs of a more private nature
relating to Sappho’s group, whatever form that took. Elsewhere
Sappho speaks scathingly of someone who has ‘no share in the roses
of Pieria’ (i.e. the Muses’ gifts). Plutarch, who quotes the lines, tells us
that they were addressed to a woman who was wealthy, but amousos
(‘uncultured’ or ‘ignorant’):
Dead will you lie and never memory of you
Will there be nor desire into the aftertime—for you do not
Share in the roses
Of Pieria, but invisible too in Hades’ house
35 Cf. frr. 103 and 124. Unless otherwise stated, translations of Sappho
are taken from Anne Carson, If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
(New York, 2002) and based on the text edited by E.-M. Voigt, Sappho et
Alcaeus: Fragmenta (Amsterdam, 1971).
36 Fr. 27, trans. M. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1995), 120. Cf. Eur. Trojan Women 511–15, where the
female tragic chorus invoke the Muse to sing, on which see Lada-Richards,
Reinscribing the Muse, 84.
reclaiming the muse 351
You will go your way among dim shapes.
Having been breathed out. (fr. 55)
By contrast Sappho describes herself as a ‘servant of the Muses’
(moisopolos) in fr. 150: ‘it is not right that there should be a lament
in the house of the Muses’ servants . . . this would not become us’
(my translation), words which, according to Maximus of Tyre
(Orations 18. 9), Sappho spoke to her daughter when she (Sappho)
was dying. As with all aspects of Sappho’s poetry, controversy
surrounds the interpretation of these fragments, in particular the
meaning of the term moisopoloi. Some scholars argue that the
phrase ‘in the house of the Muses’ servants’ implies cult worship
of the Muses on the part of Sappho and her companions, or at least
some kind of insititutional association, whether of a religious or
educational nature; others that it refers to a shared interest in poetry
and musical performance, without necessarily implying an official
basis for the organization of such activity. But whatever scenario we
envisage, the Muse is not merely a figure of speech in Sappho’s
poetry, for we cannot easily separate out the religious from the
secular in this early period, nor can we draw a clear distinction
between cult song and ‘literary’ poetry.37
The Muses, like their sister-goddesses, the Graces, have as much
reality for Sappho as her beloved Aphrodite. These divinities are
invoked with an easy familiarity in Sappho’s songs of love and
feminine beauty, suggesting a world in which the desiring female
subject—whether goddess, mythical figure, or mortal—is celebrated
for her qualities, and where, at least arguably, relationships are
presented in a less hierarchical manner than in the corresponding
world of men. Lyn Hatherly Wilson, for example, detects in
37 On this see A. Ford, The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and
Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton, 2002), 13–15. On the ques-
tion of cult worship of the Muses see, most recently, A. Hardie, ‘Sappho,
Lesbos and the Archaic Cult of the Muses’ (forthcoming), which contains a
summary of the controversy and bibliography. I am most grateful to the
author for sending me an advance copy of this important paper. For alter-
native views see e.g. C. Calame, ‘Sappho’s Group: An Initiation into
Womanhood’, in E. Greene (ed.), Reading Sappho: Contemporary Ap-
proaches (Berkeley, 1996), 113–24; Stehle, Performance and Gender in
Ancient Greece (n. 12 above), 262–318.
352 p e nn y m u r r ay
Sappho’s references to the Muses, fragmentary as they are, a differ-
ent kind of relationship from that envisaged between male poets
and their inspiring divinities, suggesting intimacy and co-operation
rather than dominance and subordination. Individual readers will
find her interpretation more, or less, persuasive, depending on their
own sensibilities, but it would be hard to disagree with Wilson’s
general observation that there is an affinity between Muse and
female poet which is not available to men: ‘The male poets’, she
says, ‘can usurp some of their attributes but they cannot, in the way
that Sappho can, be like these female divinities’.38 So great is that
affinity, Wilson argues, that in the course of time Sappho was
actually identified with the goddesses whom she cultivated, through
the figure of the tenth Muse. Thus an anonymous epigram in the
Palatine Anthology (9. 571) celebrates the achievements of the great
lyric poets of Greece, eight of whom are male, and concludes with
the lines: ‘Sappho was not the ninth among men, but the tenth in the
list of lovely Muses’. Here Sappho is differentiated from her fellow
poets and put in a class of her own, a way of acknowledging her
unique status as a female poet amongst men; but that does not
automatically turn her into a passive figure.
Calling a woman the tenth Muse is not always an unambiguous
compliment—as Germaine Greer remarks, the history of women’s
poetry is littered with tenth Muses39—but Sappho’s case is different.
For Sappho has always been recognized as one of the great poets of
the Western world, and whatever fantasy and prurient speculation
may have surrounded her sexuality, the quality of her poetry has
never been in doubt.40 She was the poetess as Homer was the poet,
38 L. H. Wilson, Sappho’s Sweetbitter Songs: Configurations of Female
and Male in Ancient Greek Lyric (London, 1996), 158–62, 161. For invo-
cations of the Muse in other female poets see J. Balmer, Classical Women
Poets (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996), 13 and 30.
39 Slip-shod Sibyls, 117, and see 102–46 for discussion of Sappho.
40 See e.g. M. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (Cambridge,
Mass., 1995), 13–23. Robert Graves, for whom Sappho is a rare example of
a truly female poet, records the following anecdote: ‘I once asked my so-
called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘‘Tell me,
sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’’ He looked up and down the
street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me:
reclaiming the muse 353
and to call her a Muse does not in itself deny her agency any more
than the labelling of Homer as divine: it all depends on how the
image is used, and how we choose to interpret it. For the Muse, as
we have seen, can be an empowering image for the female creative
artist. Sappho’s canonical status, both as a poet in her own right,
and as a role model for other women poets, is repeatedly evoked by
her identification with the Muse; and her creativity is celebrated
through the, for once, appropriate imagery of childbirth in an
epigram commemorating her by the Hellenistic poet Dioscurides,
which ends with the words:
Greetings wherever you are, lady, greetings as to a god:
for your songs, your immortal daughters, are with us still.41
But perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the symbiosis of Sappho
and the Muse, and the loveliness of both, is the following epigram
by an anonymous author in the Palatine Anthology:
Come to the radiant precinct of bullfaced Hera,
Lesbian women, make your delicate feet turn.
There set up beautiful dancing and your leader will be
Sappho with a golden lyre in her hands.
Lucky ones in the glad dance: surely you will think
You hear Kalliope’s own sweet singing.42
In the modern world the figure of Sappho offers women poets a
model of feminine creativity who stands at the beginning of the
Western poetic tradition; and the divine power of the Muse in
classical myth translates into the suggestive potential of metaphor.
Eavan Boland has written of the importance of poetic tradition to
the woman poet and of her profound responsibility towards the
past.43 This is evident in the complex and sophisticated use of
classical myths and motifs in her own poetry, which Rowena Fowler
‘‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’’ (The White
Goddess, 447).
41 Palatine Anthology 7. 407, trans. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal
Daughters, 13.
42 9. 189, trans. Carson, If not, Winter, 362.
43 E. Boland, Object Lessons (Manchester, 1995), passim, but esp.
235–48.
354 p e nn y m u r r ay
discusses in this volume. In her poem The Journey, a reworking of
the Underworld scene in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Boland describes
herself falling into a reverie, the book beside her open at the page
where Aphrodite ‘comforts Sappho in her love’s duress’. A figure
appears at her side, who leads her downwards:
and as we went on the light went on
failing and I looked sideways to be certain
it was she, misshapen, musical—
Sappho—the scholiast’s nightingale
They arrive at a river and gradually her eyes make out the crowd of
women and children of the past, suffering and silent, and Sappho
says to the poet who comes after her:
‘there are not many of us; you are dear
and stand beside me as my own daughter.
I have brought you here so you will know forever
the silences in which are our beginnings,
in which we have an origin like water.’
Other poems, such as ‘Tirade for the Mimic Muse’ or ‘Tirade for the
Lyric Muse’, reject the traditional male construction of the Muse as
an icon of feminine passivity, exposing it for the fantasy that it is.
But, as Boland says in Envoi:
My muse must be better than those of men
who made theirs in the image of their myth.44
44 E. Boland, Collected Poems (Manchester, 1995) 120–2, 55–6, 130–1,
123. I should like to thank Carmen Bugan for the interesting discussions we
have had about Muses and women poets.
14
Defying History: The Legacy of
Helen in Modern Greek Poetry*
E fi Spentzou
The classical Greek heritage has been a deeply troubling and unset-
tled part of modern Greek identity ever since the creation of the
modern Greek state in the 1830s. Ancient Greek symbols offered
the reassurance of a respectable currency in dealings with the ‘civ-
ilized’ (read European) world outside. Their credentials were solid
and the young state needed respect. As a result, the liberated Greeks
found their loyalties divided between a glorious but distant and
often irrelevant past and a familiar but vilified present, that encom-
passed resonances from the Byzantine heritage and also recent, even
if confused, memories of a common identity that united the people
throughout the long Turkish occupation.1
*In their indictment of male single-mindedness, these new Helens meet the
modern Daphnes explored in Fowler’s contribution to this volume.
This essay is much indebted to the audience and participants of the
original Myth and Feminism conference in Bristol, the editors of this
volume for their constructive comments, and Jim Samson for reading and
engagingly responding to an earlier draft of it.
1 Martin Herzfeld, Ours Once more: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making
of Modern Greece (Austin, Tex., 1982) deals extensively with the deep-
seated ambiguity of modern Greek culture and the modern Greek
356 e fi s pe n tz o u
This duality is still very much alive in Greece today, a cause of
much confusion but also a source of vibrant creativity throughout
the two hundred years that have elapsed since the formal creation of
the first modern Greek state in 1831. The stories woven around
Helen of Troy (or of Sparta, depending on our angle!) represent a
microcosm of the troubled and inspired itinerary of classical myth
in the cultural mosaic of modern Greece, and it is to some of these
stories that I wish to draw attention in this essay.2 Most of the
stories I have in mind have had a literary life of about two or, at
most, three decades. This is a very small segment of the heroine’s
long and turbulent literary life, but, as I hope to show, it is a segment
that speaks of complex and far-reaching issues that lie at the heart of
the political as well as the cultural life of modern Greece. The stories
on (and of) Helen that I study here make their appearance (and their
contribution) at a time when, as we will see, the long-standing
dialogue between the intelligentsia and the ghosts of the classical
past is at a particularly transitional stage, experiencing a fluidity
triggered to a large extent by landmark changes in Greek society
before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the Colonels’
dictatorship (1967–74). Additionally, but not irrelevantly, Helen’s
stories are implicated in yet another ground-breaking development
in Greek society, as feminine expression and, on an institutional
level, feminist movements acquire an altogether new significance
within the wider political discourses of the period, creating meaning
consciousness. Particularly illustrative is his distinction between the ‘Hel-
lenist’ model which seeks to build an image of a modern Greece predom-
inantly linked to its ancient past, and what he calls the Romeic model,
which locates the vitality of modern Greece in its links with Eastern Ortho-
doxy, Byzantium, and the explicitly non-Western part of Europe with which
modern Greeks (Romioi, as they were called often derogatorily) blended so
thoroughly in the melting pot of the Ottoman empire. See also Vassilis
Lambropoulos Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of
Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton, 1988) for an elaborate discussion both
of modern Greek literature as a political institution and of the complex
politics of aesthetic criticism in contemporary Greece.
2 In fact, the very first story about Helen we have is her very own story
woven on the web she was preparing when Iris, sent by the gods, met her in
her chamber: a personal story enmeshed in a broader visual narrative about
women and warfare, which is dealt with by O’Gorman in this volume.
helen in modern greek poetry 357
where other hitherto dominant discourses are faced with difficulties
of signification. There will be more discussion of all this later; for
the time being let us hold on to the following thought: the woman
‘who killed many men and destroyed a thousand ships’ is still
capable of stirring debates and putting men’s ideologies to the test
in our own time.
Helen seems to have always been there in the Greek world. What is
more, her story comprises multiple layers of abductions and a
significant element of mystery. There were stories about her that
date before her time in Troy (where her literary history begins) and
even her very existence in Troy has been contested. Matthew Gum-
pert, in his recent extensive study of Helen’s literary representations
and transformations, points to the unreliability of chronologies and
aptly captures the elusiveness of her life and form: ‘With Helen it is
hard to know, then, where to begin, or where to end. Helen has
always already been abducted; she is always to be abducted again. It
is also possible that she was never abducted at all.’3 Gumpert’s
extensive exploration of the ancient incarnations of Helen under-
lines this uncertainty; Helen’s identity, origins, marriages, and past
adventures can never be confirmed. Throughout antiquity her stor-
ies comprised a collection of conflicting and contradictory myths.4
For Gumpert, Helen’s instability is perfectly understandable. She
has never really had an essential identity. She has been a graft
(‘a chimera, a griffon, a sphinx’) from the start. Her ever-changing
stories are acts of unrelenting and violent poetic pursuit by authors,
triggered by ‘aggressive desire and an aversion’ for the past going
hand in hand with ‘adoration, reverence, idolatry’, both sets featur-
ing as constituent drives within the wider framework of a culture
that, for Gumpert, has been fundamentally ‘mutilated, amputated,
and incomplete’ from its very beginnings.5
3 Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical
Past (Madison, 2001), 10. See also pp. 3–23 for an extensive and perceptive
discussion of this quality of ‘undecidability’ associated with the wife of
Menelaus (or is it of Paris and so Priam’s daughter-in-law?).
4 See Gumpert, Grafting Helen, part 1, for an extensive exploration of
this elusiveness.
5 Ibid. 260.
358 e fi s pe n tz o u
This is a very perceptive and suggestive way of thinking about
Helen’s undecidability. However, it does not promote adequately
one consistent and intriguing trend in her ancient Greek stories
that keeps her always, it seems, at a certain distance from both her
suitors and her readers. Throughout her ancient Greek incarnations,
Helen seems to remove herself (or rather is removed—by her own
makers?) from direct touch and even direct sight. At her very first
public appearance in Greek literature, high up on the Trojan walls in
Iliad 3, she is already beyond the reach of Greeks and spellbound
Trojans alike. In Odyssey 4, she charms everybody, and the reader
too, with her witch-like spells. In Euripides’ Helen, she is just a vain
phantom, and the deluded possession of Paris (31–5), while in his
Orestes she is a ghost-like figure fleeing a most certain death, as if the
poet has lost the power—or the will—to bring the myth to an end, as
I have argued elsewhere.6 In fact, as this latter play draws to a close,
Apollo intervenes (ll. 1635–7) and explains to the baffled crowd
wondering about Helen’s sudden disappearance that ‘Helen must
leave before she grows old and weak’, encouraging Menelaus to
reconcile himself to the impossibility of possessing her.
helen and her modern greek suitors
It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss at length the represen-
tations of Helen in classical literature, a task already attempted with
acumen by the critics.7 However, the instances I have just high-
lighted from her classical literary life are crucial for our understand-
ing of Helen’s modern Greek incarnations. Let me spell out the
significance of the aforementioned passages for the modern suitors
of Helen. By divine decree, the queen of Sparta is promised immor-
tal fame; indeed, boundless and immortal is exactly how she
features regularly in modern Greek literature, as the spellbound
6 Efrossini Spentzou, ‘Helen of Troy and the Poetics of Innocence: From
Ancient Fiction to Modern Metafiction’, Classical and Modern Literature:
A Quarterly, 16 (1996), 301–24.
7 Substantial overviews of her representations and transformations in
antiquity and beyond can be found in Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 3–98;
Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca, NY,
1994); Mihoko Suzuki, Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference,
and the Epic (Ithaca, NY, 1989).
helen in modern greek poetry 359
poets (modern Trojan Elders) compete in adoration.8 From many
possible examples, I choose a short poem by I. M. Panagiotopoulos
from 1952, where a prodigious and ephemeral Helen emerges from
the poet’s address, as an appropriate exemplification of my argu-
ment:
¯ßóÆØ ï ŒÆçìüò ìå ôÆ ðå%ßóóØÆ ð%üóøðÆ,
ìå ôÆ ðå%ßóóØÆ ïíüìÆôÆ,
ìå ôï Œï%ìß ðïý øò ü%åìÆ ôçí Æ%ìïªÞ ôïı ƺºÜæåØ
Á Á Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
ÌíÞìç Æðü ìíÞìåò ŒÆìøìÝíç ÆíÜ%Øÿìåò
ŒÆØ ðåß%Æ ôçò óôå%íÞò óôتìÞò:
(¯ºÝíç in ˘øäØÆŒüò ˚ý÷ºïò)
You are the sorrow with the lavish faces and the lavish names, with a body
which changes its fitting like a dress . . . Memory made of countless other
memories and discovery of the most recent moments.9
It is strikingly hard to retain a reliable image of such an elevated
Helen in our mind; we can only catch brief glimpses of her and even
then she is never the same. She is the ancient past and the most
recent present, a protean body with many forms, faces, and names.
The same obfuscatory veneration envelops Helen in a roughly con-
temporary poem by Aggelos Sikelianos:
`ðü ŒÆº÷üí Þ â%Ü÷ï —åíôåºÞóØï
ôï ÆÿÜíÆôï åßäøºü Óïı äå ÿÆ óôÞóø,
ìÆ Æðü ŒıðÆ%Øóóüîıºï ŒïºþíÆ
ªØÆ íÆ åıøäÜåØ ôï Ý%ªï ìïı óôïí ÆØþíÆ!
(from ˙ —Æ%ÿÝíïò ôçò ÓðÜ%ôçò)
Not of Pentelic marble nor of brass shall I erect Thy deathless idol, but from
a tall column made of cypress wood that my work may be fragrant
throughout the ages.
8 For more on the inscrutable modern Helen see Karelisa Hartigan,
‘Helen so Fatefully Named: The Continuity of her Myth in Modern
Greek Poetry’, Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 4 (1983),
17–24; also Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 239–50, for whom this process of
grafting and literary stealing that engenders modern Helen becomes in-
creasingly widespread and dynamic as poetic plundering is enlisted in the
making of history and the creation of nationhood.
9 Unless otherwise stated, the English translations of the modern Greek
poems are my own.
360 e fi s pe n tz o u
Sikelianos’ remarkably intense relation with ancient Greek myth-
ology is widely acknowledged in the literature. The poet reaches an
understanding of Greek myth rather as an initiate would come to an
understanding of the divine in the course of the famous ancient
Greek mysteries. Communication with the myth had for Sikelianos
the significance and power of a ritual. The poet takes on the role of a
seer whose ultimate ambition is not rational comprehension but
inspired participation in the sublime.10 This burning desire for a
quasi-religious ‘partaking’ of Greek myth, implicit in the above
extract, becomes transparent in the lines that follow:
˚ ÆØ
Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
ÿÆ Œôßóø
âÆ%ØÜ åŒŒºçóØÜ, ŒÆØ ìÝóÆ ÿÆ Óå Œºåßóø
ì ÆôÜ%ƪï, Æðü óßäå%ï, ðıºþíÆ!
and . . . I shall build a massive church, and in it I shall lock Thee fast with
mighty adamantine gates of iron.
In the poet/priest’s ‘possessed’ mind, Helen’s figure blends with that
of Mary, mother of Christ, with the two archetypal females inex-
tricably linked in the title of the sonnet: The Virgin of Sparta. Yet
the prophet’s inspired fervour should not distract us from our own
line of inquiry: as in the poem by I. M. Panagiotopoulos cited above,
admiration again blends with obsession and again Helen is removed
from clear view, hidden inside a shower of gifts and a cluster of
extravagant images, smothered in an oppressive adoration.
Takis Sinopoulos, also composing his Helen poems in the 1950s
(1953), follows suit, though his description of Helen is somewhat
more nuanced. Unlike the poems we have just considered, Sinopoulos’
collection allows Helen a voice; but what she says is deeply unsettling:
—ïý ðÜø ç Æóôü÷Æóôç;
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
—ÆôÝ%Æ ðïı ì åªÝííçóåò ðïØüò ÿÜíÆØ ï ÿÜíÆôüò ìïı;
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
10 For an illuminating overview of this aspect of Sikelianos’ relation to
Greek mythology, see Edmund Keeley, Modern Greek Poetry: Voice and
Myth (Princeton, 1983), 43–53.
helen in modern greek poetry 361
˚Ø ÆŒüìÆ åóý
ð%üóŒÆØ%å ƪÆðçìÝíå ıðÜ%÷åØò óìߪïíôÆò ôÆ ìݺç óïı
ŒÜôø Æðü äÜóç íý÷ôÆò ìå ôÆ ìݺç ìïı
÷ºøìÜ óıìغØøìÝíÆ:
Á Á Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
Ìïı ìغÜò
ìå íôýíåØò ìå óô%ïÝò ŒÆØ ðïØÞìÆôÆ ªØÆ íÜìÆØ Æð%üóØôç
óôØò ªÝı%åò ôïı ÷%üíïı:
(From: ˙ øíÞ ôçò ¯ºÝíçò)
Where am I heading, reckless as I am? Father who gave me birth, what will
my death be? You, my transient lover. . . mingled your limbs with my pale,
obedient limbs under the night forests . . . you speak to me and dress me in
poems and stanzas so that I cannot be reached by time’s bridges.
Her soliloquy continues in another poem:
˚Ø åªþ Æðü ôï ðïßçìÆ ôïýôï ôï ðØŒ%ü ðƺåýïíôÆò ïºÜŒå%ç
í ÆíÆäıÿþ: ÌïíÜ÷Æ Æıôü ìå óıíôç%åß óôçí ÆÿÆ%óßÆ À ç ÷ØìÆß%Æ:
Á Á Á Á Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
¿ ðØŒ%Þ ðØŒ%üôÆôç ýðÆ%îÞ ìïı Æðü ݪíïØåò âÆóغåýïıóåò,
ô%ïìå%Ýò ìÆŒ%üóı%ôåò ÆíÆìíÞóåØò:
(From: ˙ íåüôçôÆ ôçò ¯ºÝíçò)
I, struggling with all my strength to surface from the bitter poem. A chimera
only keeps me imperishable . . . Oh my life, bitter, most bitter from reigning
concerns and dragging, terrible memories.
Rare as it is, Helen’s terse expression of her feelings demands some
scrutiny. Helen feels loved and flattered by the attention. Yet this
attention stifles her as she struggles to recognize herself amidst the
waves of adulation and worries that death—her literary decline—is
fast approaching, even though her poems have kept her immortal
for centuries. It is tempting to think that Helen’s so explicitly
metapoetic uneasiness reflects or betrays some of the poet’s own
insecurities. And yet Sinopoulos ultimately dismisses the disquiet-
ude and chooses to carry on with the delusion, regardless. As he
glosses this choice, he also offers a more explicit account of what he
and the other poets we met above gain in return for their offerings:
Ó Æíƪíø%ßæø ¯ºÝíç ìïı . . .
Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
ðïôÝ ìç ýªåØò ªØÆ ôïıò ôüðïıò ôïı ÷Æìïý
Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
362 e fi s pe n tz o u
Óå ðå%ØìÝíø.
˚ïßôÆîå óïýå%Æ . . . ðåô%ÜäØÆ Æðü ôç ÿܺÆóóÆ
Á Á Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
ŒÆºÜìØÆ Æðü ôØò ðïôÆìØÝò â%Ü÷ØÆ ŒÆØ ðÝô%åò ŒØ üíåØ%Æ
ªØÆ óÝíÆ ð%ïóï%Ü.
˚ÆØ ôïýôï ô ïíïìÜæø ð%ïóìïíÞ: ˙ ªÝííçóç ôïı ðïØÞìÆôïò.
(From —ïßçìÆ ªØÆ ôçí ¯ºÝíç)
I recognize you, my own Helen . . . please never ever leave for the realms of
loss . . . I am waiting for you. Look, I brought you . . . gems from the
sea . . . reeds from the river banks, and rocks and dreams and haziness, . . . as
offerings to you. This I call waiting in hope; or else, birth of a poem.
The deal struck between the poet and Helen is now laid bare. She is
his Muse, he is her saviour from the oblivion of the everyday and the
ordinary. A question hangs, though: which of the two, if either, has
the better deal?
With this concern in mind, we now turn to a landmark in Helen’s
modern Greek travelogue, namely the homonymous poem from
Ritsos’s Fourth Dimension, a series of dramatic monologues written
between 1958 and 1975 (though the majority of them were created
during the Colonels’ dictatorship). Most feature classical Greek
figures, many of them—though with some notable exceptions—
young, less foregrounded by classical literature, or female. The
poem on Helen was written in 1970, while Ritsos was exiled in
Samos by the dictatorial regime. Once again classical Greece was
recruited as a panacea to divert attention from the pressing prob-
lems of the present. But such manipulation usually comes at a price
and antiquity seemed to inspire less and less as the present became
increasingly oppressive. Ritsos’ poem seems to expose the impo-
tence of the classical past, its irrelevance to present realities.
Even a cursory glance at Helen’s painfully long monologue pro-
vides a clear answer to my question above: Helen seems to have got
the rough side of the deal. She is a shocking spectacle. She is old, fat,
ugly, decrepit, with swollen legs and hunched shoulders, an invalid
stuck in bed, or left in front of the window when (very often) her
servants, who make no effort to hide their contempt for her, forget to
put her back in bed. Alienated from the past and from her dead loved
ones, she is plagued by fears: of the empty house, her isolation, the
night, the servants, the silence, her own face, which she no longer
helen in modern greek poetry 363
recognizes, her own withering body. This is an exceptionally power-
ful—if bleak—poem; in fact, only through a complete reading can
we appreciate the shattering force of this stream-of-consciousness at
its peak. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will highlight only
some of its pithiest moments, germane to my argument.
¯ªþ, üðøò îÝ%åØò, äØÆôç%ïýóÆ ÆŒüìç ôçí ðƺØÜ ïìï%ØÜ ìïı
óÆí Æðü ÿÆýìÆ (ƺºÜ ìå âÆÝò, ìå âüôÆíÆ . . .
. . . ŒØ ƪªïı%üíå%ï).
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
¯ôóØ ðå%ߌºåØóôç, óتìÝíç, ôåíôøìÝíç—ôØ Œïý%Æóç, ÿÝ ìïı,—
ŒÜÿå óôتìÞ óتìÝíç (ŒÆØ óôïí ýðíï ÆŒüìç)
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
` , íÆØ, ðüóåò Æíüçôåò ìÜ÷åò, ç%øØóìïß, غïäïîßåò, ıðå%ïłßåò
. . . ŒØ ܺºåò ìÜ÷åò, ªØÆ ð%ܪìÆôÆ ðïı ŒØüºÆò
åßôÆí Æðü ܺºïıò ÆðïÆóØóìÝíÆ, üôÆí ºåßðÆìå åìåßò.
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
ºÝîåØò Æÿþåò, ðÆ%ÆðºÆíçôØŒÝò, ðÆ%çªï%çôØŒÝò, äØï%ïýìåíåò ðÜíôÆ
ìÝò óôçí åŒæçôçìÝíç ôïıò ÆŒ%ßâåØÆ.
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
Õóôå%Æ Æð ôçí Ô%ïßÆ,—ç æøÞ ìÆò óôç ÓðÜ%ôç
ðïºý ðºçŒô،ޗóøóôÞ åðÆ%÷ßÆ : ˇ ºç ìÝ%Æ ŒºåØóìÝíïØ ìåò óôÆ óðßôØÆ,
ÆíÜìåóÆ óôÆ óô%ØìøªìÝíÆ ºÜı%Æ ôüóøí ðïºÝìøí.
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
[ˇØ äïýºåò] äØÆâÜæïıí ôØò ðƺØÝò åðØóôïºÝò ôøí ÿÆıìÆóôþí ìïı
Þ ôÆ ðïØÞìÆôÆ ðïı ìïý÷Æí ÆØå%þóåØ ìåªÜºïØ ðïØçôÝò.
ÔÆ äØÆâÜæïıí ìå çºßÿØï óôüìï . . .
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
ÔØò íý÷ôåò ÆŒïýø ðïı ìåôÆÝ%ïıí ïØ äïýºåò ôÆ ìåªÜºÆ ÝðØðºÜ ìïı
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
ˆØÆ íÆ ðå%íÜåØ ç þ%Æ
ðØÜíø ôï ð%üóøðï ìïı—ÝíÆ ð%üóøðï îÝíï—ôï ƪªßæø, ôï łÆýø,
. . . ðïØüò åßíÆØ ìÝóÆ óå ôïýôï ôï ð%üóøðï;
I still held on to my former beauty as though by a miracle (though also with
dyes, herbs . . . cucumber water) . . . so enclosed, taut—the fatigue of it, my
God—tensed every moment, even sleeping . . . k All those stupid battles, hero-
ics, ambitions, arrogant gestures, . . . more battles, for objects already deter-
mined by others, in our absence. k . . . words . . . innocent, seductive,
consoling, ambiguous always in their pretence of accuracy. k After Troy, our
life in Sparta’s so dull, boring, provincial: shut up indoors all day amid this, the
piled-up booty. . . . The slave-girls . . . are reading old letters from my admirers
or the verses great poets devoted to me . . . with crass pomposity. . . These days
364 e fi s pe n tz o u
I can hear the servants moving my heavy furniture . . . The Symplegades
[Crushing Rocks] are more internal k . . . I take hold of my face—the face
of a stranger—what’s inside this face of mine? (trans. R. Dalven)
The stern images are alarming and shocking in the extreme. This is
Ritsos’ most explicit and most extensive engagement with the
classical heritage, and it has attracted some vigorous and well-
deserved critical attention. For all the richness of Ritsos’s work,
the main feature noted by his fellow Greeks, especially in the
decades before the 1967 dictatorship, was his powerful political
voice. In a country with an extraordinarily polarized and inflam-
matory political climate, Ritsos has been received predominantly as
a representative of the anti-establishment par excellence and as an
author with a remarkably iconoclastic vision.11 Such associations
make Fourth Dimension an intriguing meeting place for two
unlikely bedfellows, the moment of interaction between two dia-
metrically polarized, and often mutually hostile, worlds. And as
such, the reception was scrutinized by the critics for signs of Ritsos’
characteristic revolutionary and condemnatory mentality. Signifi-
cant signs of a military spirit in confrontation with a major tool of
the establishment were indeed located. More than once and in more
than one way, the power of the past to dictate is transcended in
Ritsos’ recreation of the famous myths of the Trojan War, the
common denominator of the greater part of the monologue.
For Kostas Myrsiades, Ritsos ‘infuses ancient myth with contem-
poraneity’.12 The psychology of these figures is somehow extended
as they live in a deliberately atemporal setting. Successive wars of
modern Greece (the symbolic totality of Greek history) are accom-
modated within the ten years of the Trojan War, the immediate
subject matter of Fourth Dimension. For Myrsiades, Ritsos,
through his unconventional reworkings, gives modern Greeks the
opportunity to participate in ancient myths. Ritsos dares to respond
to the challenge of the past, confronts the past as a modern Greek’s
11 Cf. here Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution, 174 ff.
12 Kostas Myrsiades, ‘The Classical Past in Yiannis Ritsos’ Dramatic
Monologues’, Papers on Language and Literature, 14 (1978), 450–8, 451.
helen in modern greek poetry 365
right, and carves out opportunities for contemporary generations.13
The past is no longer the overwhelming lump of past excellence that
sticks in the collective throat of modern Greece, as the novelist
George Seferis often appears to feel in his poems. The difference in
mentality is striking. Dominating the Greek literary scene from the
1930s until his death in 1972, Seferis often looked upon the classical
past with nostalgia, which, however, did not prevent him from
recognizing its distance from us. Disenchanted by contemporary
problems, mainly the traumas in Cyprus, a place with which he
felt a special affinity, he constantly looked to the past for better men
and a way to escape the stalemate that had gripped his world. But
his efforts were in vain, as he admits in Mythistorima, 3:
˛ýðíçóÆ ìå ôï ìÆ%ìÜ%Øíï ôïýôï ŒåÜºØ óôÆ ÷Ý%ØÆ
ðïı ìïı åîÆíôºåß ôïıò ƪŒþíåò . . .
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
˚ïØôÜæø ôÆ ìÜôØÆ: ìÞôå ÆíïØ÷ôÜ ìÞôå ŒºåØóôÜ
ìغþ óôï óôüìÆ ðïı üºï ªı%åýåØ íÆ ìغÞóåØ
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
˜åí Ý÷ø ܺºç äýíÆìç:
I woke with this marble head in my hands, it exhausts my elbows . . . I look
at the eyes: neither open nor closed, I speak to the mouth which keeps trying
to speak . . . That’s all I’m able to do. (trans. E. Keeley)14
This insurmountable sense of a barrier plagued Seferis throughout his
poetry. It compelled him, in the King of Asini, to search for a whole
morning in the grassed and ruined site of a seaside castle for signs of a
king mentioned fleetingly in one line of the Iliad. The search is in vain,
13 For a reading of Fourth Dimension in a similar vein see M. Colakis,
‘Classical Mythology in Yiannis Ritsos’ Dramatic Monologues’, Classical
and Modern Literature: A Quarterly, 5 (1984), 117–30, esp. 125–30.
14 Interestingly, Seferis’s Helen features Teucros, Ajax’s brother, in a
protagonistic role, as he meets Helen in Egypt on his way to Cyprus and
is thus made aware that the woman they fought over for ten years on the
plains of Troy was nothing more than an idol. According to some critics,
Seferis’s poem was based on Stesichorus’s Palinody (which, in turn, was
picked up by the Platonic Phaedrus 243a), and expresses the need of Seferis
to transcend (with the help of Socratic Phaedrus) the world of illusionary
appearances in order to reach a realm of substance, that evanescent Truth
that Seferis strove to discover throughout his poetry.
366 e fi s pe n tz o u
as the castle, fading in the morning sun, stands deserted in the middle
of a landscape devoid of life. Seferis’s agonizing search for a solid past
culminates in a mask or garment that obstructs his view, fuelling a fear
in him that this mask or that garment hides nothing but a void beneath
it, a fear that so much suffering, and so much life went into the abyss,
all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen, to borrow a phrase from his
own ‘Helen’, in Edmund Keely’s translation.
Where ‘aristocratic’ Seferis deferentially hesitates, militant Ritsos
continues to probe the ancient myths, reshaping the stories to make
them speak for our present condition.15 But this is only part of the
picture of Fourth Dimension, which far from conveys a uniform
understanding and a unanimous response to the past. Many figures
appear troubled by, even crushed under, the weight of their misfor-
tune, but others, such as Clytemnestra and Chrysothemes, acquire a
much more flattering image than their counterparts from the an-
cient world. Ritsos’ stories foreground the personal plight, but also
the personal values and thoughts, of figures such as Ismene and
Chrysothemes (the lesser known siblings of Antigone and Electra
respectively).16 Ritsos’ redesigned figures take up a front-of-stage
position; the familiar epic and tragic stories are filtered through the
lens of their often frenzied minds. Public concerns are reduced to a
single tune, almost elegiac in this respect, with the plot refracted
through the protagonists’ narrow emotions and particular perspec-
tives. An encroaching but ubiquitous individualism holds the story
of the Trojan War (the main subject matter of the collection) in its
grip. In a recent, perceptive study of Ritsos’ Orestes, Dimitris
Tziovas remarks on the momentum gained by the strife between
social will and individualistic desires. ‘In Orestes the protagonist is
seeking to articulate and defend his individual freedom against
the illusion of justice and the social imperative.’17 Tziovas notices
15 For an interesting juxtaposition of the two poets’ attitudes to the
classical past with the myth of nostos (return) as a study case, see Edmund
Keeley ‘Nostos and the poet’s vision in Seferis and Ritsos’ in P. Mackridge
(ed.), Ancient Greek Myth in Modern Greek Poetry: Essays in Memory of
C. A. Trypanis (London and Portland, Ore., 1996), 81–96.
16 Cf. Colakis, ‘Classical Mythology’, 121–4.
17 Dimitris Tziovas, ‘Ritsos’ Orestes: The Politics of Myth and the Anarchy
of Rhetoric’, in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in Modern Greek Poetry, 67–80, 75.
helen in modern greek poetry 367
the multiplicity and unpredictability of the hero’s individual inclin-
ations and the corresponding ‘anarchy of form’ as an appropriate
expression of his untrammelled individualism. Characters such as
Orestes and also Philoctetes, he suggests, have access to real choices
which, however, are framed by the myth, whose restraining and
normalizing power constrains this individual energy and dictates
the ultimate outcome in these esoteric dramas.
It is about time we revisited Helen’s monologue with this ongoing
confrontation between individual will and mythic collectivity in
mind. The glorious days of the Trojan expedition are long gone in
Helen’s old age, and very few, if any, remember the actual facts,
let alone realize their significance. The servants read dusty scripts
that celebrate the old achievements with crass pomposity and
countless errors; they mock because they do not understand the
old readings. Then there was life but that life has gone. The anni-
versary celebrations of the Trojan victory back in Sparta are a sad,
soulless reproduction of an atmosphere of past pride and success,
and Helen no longer feels part of them. Her house gradually gets
stripped of its history, as the servants haul down the heavy furniture
every evening. Read through the spectacles of a somewhat cynical,
somewhat anti-establishment generation of the 1970s, this decaying
Helen, by her mere wretched presence, decries the abuse of the
classical symbolism and exposes the irrelevance of the classical
past, while the problems of the present are left to fester beneath a
shiny facade.
But there is more to read in this desperate outburst. The conflict
between individual voice and collective edicts is extraordinarily
poignant in the case of Helen. Her individual voice is truly anarchic,
to use Tziovas’ characterization. It is also a gripping novelty. In the
long course of antiquity, poems were written, stories woven by
mesmerized artists, but we rarely glimpse Helen’s own reaction to
her legendary image.18 In Ritsos’ poem, though, Helen bursts into a
lengthy and frenzied soliloquy, as if to make up for the lengthy
silence to which she has been consigned since ancient times. Such
a prolonged emphasis on Helen’s feelings is unique in the literature
associated with her. We saw I. M. Panagiotopoulos and Takis
18 But notice Ovid’s Helen in the Heroides 17, as a notable exception.
368 e fi s pe n tz o u
Sinopoulos showering Helen with images of eternal beauty. In their
time, Helen (and her antique story and era too) is centuries old, but
such down-to-earth realities do not temper the romantic zeal of the
poets, even if some inklings of unease appear briefly in Sinopoulos’
verses, as we have seen. Ritsos, however, is better placed than most
to notice Helen’s predicament. Her ‘house arrest’, elaborated by the
other poets, would have become an all too disturbing metaphor for
his own exile during the dictatorship. So his Helen puts an abrupt
halt to the male fantasies, and reveals unsparingly the ordeal of the
immortal but ageing diva. With this extra dimension of the poem in
mind, let us focus again on the details of Helen’s portrait.
Eternal beauty oppresses the Spartan Queen, her stomach
muscles clenched, her jaw set in an artificial smile. She would love
to have been left to age peacefully, and yet her distorted body
terrifies her with its decay. The fatigue of the tales on which her
life is built—‘swans, and Troys, and loves, and deeds of valor’—
numb her mind. Her past lovers/poets are now old, with white hair,
distended bellies and still strangely voracious. She buckles under the
eternal, ethereal meanings that weigh on her aged shoulders, mean-
ings that reflect nothing of her own feelings and desires, if indeed
anything is left of them inside her. She longs to efface the presti-
gious, significant memories and return to the insignificant, fleeting
images of her childhood. She slips into a terrible seclusion and
isolation. If she ever did, she no longer feels part of any family or
any community, least of all Sparta. She is shut in, locked in, without
ceremonies, without newspapers. The relentless succession of en-
trapment images might recall Sikelianos’ poem mentioned early in
this essay. In his self-centred outburst of adoration he promised he
would keep Helen in the church he had built in her honour. Ritsos’
Helen could be seen to be facing the consequences of this honour, in
a helpless vigil, day and night, as life gradually but steadily aban-
dons her ruined body and heart.
It should not be difficult to see such an iconoclastic discourse as
part of the recent trend in modern Greek letters to call into question
the classical world. However, Helen’s monologue transcends this
framework. In this rare outburst, Helen also exposes the irrelevance
of ancient myth to her female concerns, and delivers a vehement
complaint about the continuing neglect of female expression in
helen in modern greek poetry 369
classically-inspired literature. It is important to realize, though, that
the two indictments in Helen’s monologue are far from unrelated.
To return briefly to where this essay started, the Greek fight for
liberation fuelled the already idealizing adoration of classical
Greece by Romantic Europe. That Greece was pictured as a charm-
ing, mellow, slightly languid, somewhat oriental, beautiful but tame
woman, like those to be found in the paintings of artists such as
Alma Tadema and Frederick Leighton: pleasing fantasies of obedi-
ent, domestic bliss. These fantasies no doubt fed into the image of
Helen, the exemplary Greek woman, destined for immortality ever
since Apollo decreed it in Euripides’ Orestes. The modern Greek
poets were not found wanting. I have briefly discussed the quasi-
religious devotion of modern Greek poetry to Helen. Not only is she
the representative of classical Greece in modern times; she is a
goddess, a Muse, even the Virgin Mary (as in Sikelianos’ sonnet),
a figure floating across centuries and half-dissolving into the vast-
ness of her significance. In Matthew Gumpert’s own words, ‘Per-
haps Helen is modern Greece’s Transcendental Addressee, and its
Transcendental Memory.’19
And yet, Helen’s devastating indictment, addressed to poets, lovers,
and readers through Ritsos’ dramatic monologue, brings this com-
mon fate to an end. Ritsos’ Helen has had enough and wants to
renounce her crushing transcendence. The oppression of her ador-
ation crushes her. This Helen would die to live, so to speak, as a
woman of her (our) time. It is significant, I think, that she does indeed
die in Ritsos’ poem, as soon as her monologue comes to a close.
˙ ªıíÆßŒÆ ŒÆÿØóôÞ óôï Œ%åââÜôØ, ìå ôïí ƪŒþíÆ ÆŒïıìðØóìÝíï óôï ôÆߪŒØíï
ô%ÆðåæÜŒØ, ìå ôï ìܪïıºï óôçí ðƺÜìç: ˇØ ıðç%Ýô%Øåò ÝìðÆØíÆí, ÝâªÆØíÆí,
ÿï%ıâïýóÆí, ˚ÜðïØïò ôçºåøíïýóå óôï äØÜä%ïìï: ˚ÆôÜôÆóÆí ïØ ªåØôüíØóóåò:
`÷, Æ÷ , ŒÜíÆí, ŒÆØ ŒÜôØ Œ%ýâÆí ŒÜôø Æð ôÆ ïıóôÜíØÆ ôïıò: ˚ÆØ ðÜºØ ôï
ôçºÝøíï: `íÝâÆØíÆí ŒØüºÆò ïØ ÆóôıýºÆŒåò: . . .´ÜºÆí ôç íåŒ%Þ ó ÝíÆ
ï%åßï: . . . ¨Üìåíå ÝôóØ ó%ƪØóìÝíï ôï óðßôØ óÆ%ÜíôÆ ìÝ%åò, Œ ýóôå%Æ
ôÆ ıðÜ%÷ïíôÜ ôïı—üóÆ ªºýôøóÆí—ÿÆ âªÆßíÆíå óôïí ðºåØóôç%ØÆóìü: . . .
ÌåìØÜò åîÆÆíßóôçŒÆí üºÆ: `ðüºıôç óØøðÞ:
The woman is sitting in bed with her elbow propped on the little zinc-
topped table, her chin resting on the palm of her hand. The maids scurry in
19 Gumpert, Grafting Helen, 244.
370 e fi s pe n tz o u
and out, screaming and shouting. Someone is telephoning in the corridor.
Women from the neighbourhood begin to arrive, keening, hiding objects
under their skirts. More telephoning, The police are already on their way
up. . . . They lay out the corpse on a bier. . . . The house will remain sealed for
forty days, and after that its contents – or what’s left of them – will be sold
at auction. . . . Suddenly everything vanishes. Absolute silence. (trans. R.
Dalven)
A tortured and protracted life draws to a close. Interestingly, Helen
‘dies’ in the early 1970s, a time that roughly coincides with the
period when the uncontested hegemony of classical myth in modern
Greek letters is reassessed in a series of imaginative and daring
ways. Classical myths are not ignored, but their transcendental
meaning is no longer self-evident.20 Even more significantly, poetry
appears to lose its traditional privilege (as well as duty) to speak on
behalf of the modern Greek collective spirit.21 Somewhat out of
favour and one step removed from the collective Greek conscious-
ness, poetry turns its attention to the realms of private life and
expression. A so-called ‘private vision’ was dominant in poetry
during the 1980s.
In an essay on contemporary Greek poetry, John Chioles is dis-
tinctly ambivalent about this ‘private vision’ and the poetry that
engenders it: ‘The bad news is that [poetry] has virtually become
useless to a wider public; it is no longer invested with danger. . . .
Post-1974 Greek poetry concerns itself with urban boredom, with
highly personal states of mind, with the failure of nerve, with the
fragility of urban neuroses.’22 And yet, in spite of such expressions
of disappointment, this period boasts some new poetry of remark-
able lucidity and poignancy, capable of dissecting with precision
and panache the inner space that gradually emerged as a result of
20 See e.g. Dimitris Maronitis, Dialexeis (Athens, 1992), as cited in
Karen Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks and Crumpled Petticoats: What’s left of
Myth in Contemporary Women’s Poetry’ in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in
Modern Greek Poetry, 121–30.
21 See e.g. Dimitris Tziovas, ‘i wra tis pezografias kai i eksantlisi tis
poiisis’, Porfyras, 47 (1988), 68–71.
22 John Chioles, ‘Poetry and Politics: The Greek Cultural Dilemma’, in
Nadia Seremetakis (ed.), Ritual, Power, and the Body (New York: Pella,
1993), 152.
helen in modern greek poetry 371
poetry’s inward retreat. This was by no means an exclusively female
coterie.23 However, several talented women poets are prominent in
the poetry of this period: Katerina Aggelaki-Rook, Kiki Dimoula,
Nana Isaia, Jenny Mastoraki, Rhea Galanaki, among others.
Female expression and concerns were by no means unheard of in
earlier modern Greek poetry, but the corpus of women poets such as
these makes for a gendered discourse of unprecedented range and
self-awareness.24 Their gendered conscience often acquires an
emphatically anti-establishment expression. Ritsos in some ways
comes as close to that anti-establishment, gendered conscience as
any male poet could, as his Helen has just demonstrated. His
political marginalization maps easily onto the women poets’ sense
of periphery. However, there is a significant difference here between
Ritsos and these modern poetic voices. Where he appropriates the
classical myth for the needs of the present, the women poets in the
1970s articulate a wholesale antipathy towards ancient myth. They
seem to want to register a breach with this ever so powerful ideo-
logical tool, before they can contemplate ways of engaging with it
afresh. Kiki Dimoula sums up the dissatisfaction in ‘The Sign of
Recognition’ (Óçìåßï Æíƪíø%ßóåøò, 1971):
ˇ ºïØ óå ºÝíå ŒÆôåıÿåßÆí ܪƺìÆ,
åªþ óå ð%ïóøíþ ªıíÆßŒÆ ÷ÆôåıÿåßÆí:
ÓôïºßæåØò ŒÜðïØï ðÜ%Œï:
`ðü ìÆŒ%ØÜ åîÆðÆôÜò:
¨Æ%%åß ŒÆíåßò ðøò Ý÷åØò åºÆ%Ü ÆíÆŒÆÿßóåØ
íÆ ÿıìçÿåßò ÝíÆ ø%Æßï üíåØ%ï ðïı åßäåò,
ðøò ðÆß%íåØò ü%Æ íÆ ôï æÞóåØò:
`ðü ŒïíôÜ îåŒÆÿÆ%ßæåØ ô üíåØ%ï:
äåìÝíÆ ðØóÿܪøíÆ ôÆ ÷Ý%ØÆ óïı
23 A landmark publication made its appearance in 1971, during the
Colonels’ dictatorship, presenting work by six young and largely unknown
poets: Katerina Aggelaki-Rook (who was the only one of the six who had
already published work), Tasos Denegris, Nana Isaia, Dimitris Potamitis,
Lefteris Poulios, and Basilis Steriadis.
24 Karen Van Dyck, Kassandra and her Censors: Greek Poetry since
1967 (Ithaca, NY, 1998), offers one of the most engaging studies of post-
1967 Greek poetry with special emphasis on the work of three female poets,
namely Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina.
372 e fi s pe n tz o u
ì ÝíÆ ó÷ïØíß ìÆ%ìÜ%Øíï
Á Á Á Á ÁÁ
˜åí ìðï%åßò
ïýôå ìØÆ â%ï÷Þ íÆ æıªßóåØò óôï ÷Ý%Ø óïı,
ïýôå ìØÆ åºÆ%ØÜ ìÆ%ªÆ%ßôÆ:
Á Á Á Á Á:
ˆØÆ ôÆ äåìÝíÆ ÷Ý%ØÆ óïı, ðïı Ý÷åØò
üóïıò ðﺺïýò ÆØþíåò óå ªíø%ßæø,
óå ºÝø ªıíÆߌÆ:
Óå ºÝø ªıíÆߌÆ
ªØÆô åßó ÆØ÷ìܺøôç:
Everybody calls you a statue, I call you a woman. You adorn a park. And
you deceive from the distance. Someone might think that you have sat up,
recollecting a beautiful dream you have had, ready to dash into living it. But
the dream becomes clear once one draws near: Your arms are tied behind
you with a marble rope. . . . You cannot weigh in your hand even a rain-drop
or a tiny daisy. . . because of your tied hands, which you have had for as
many centuries as I know you, I call you woman. I call you woman because
you are captive.25
Every classical woman lives in a metaphorical gaol for Dimoula,
trapped in forms and meanings created by others for her and in spite
of her. From afar, such women are often proverbially attractive, like
Helen. But Dimoula knows that their fame is also their prison,
immobilized as they are in an expressionless posture that immortal-
izes their confinement. In a slightly earlier example of the same
aversion, Katerina Aggelaki-Rook provides a striking reversal to
the pivotal myth of Iphigeneia, the daughter of Agamemnon and
Clytemnestra. In her ‘Refusal of Iphigeneia’, the young girl dares the
unthinkable;26 she refuses to be sacrificed, not because she is afraid
to die, but because she cannot see the rationale of men’s military
world. She cannot make sense of the necessity of the Trojan War, of
so much upheaval in a world of ‘vineyards’, ‘fields’, and ‘olive-
groves’, where ‘geraniums grow big and unfettered in wood-carved
loggias’.
25 And not just for the modern Greeks: cf. Menelaus in Euripides Helen
703–6, 806–8, 947–9, unwilling to let go the memory of the Trojan War,
and Helen in it.
26 Unlike her famous counterpart in Euripides’ homonymous play.
helen in modern greek poetry 373
It is this inflexible but also incomprehensible logic of myth that
often seems to frustrate the Greek women poets of this period.
These frustrations and the corresponding absence of myth from
contemporary Greek women’s poetry emerge centre stage in Karen
Van Dyck’s study of some characteristic samples of female poetic
discourses from Greece during the last thirty or so years.27 Her
explanations for the dearth of myth in these discourses centre on
the overwhelming certainties traditionally associated with Greek
myth. Myth, she explains, provides explanations for the world
and shelters us from the chaos we fear by providing an illusion of
external order, even if a disturbing one. Yet myth can also be
repressive, for in sheltering us it also seals the fate of the world.
For Van Dyck, the contemporary Greek women poets strive to reach
‘the edge of myth’, beyond its repression and towards their own
more fluid kind of writing.28 The inflexibility associated with clas-
sical Greek myth seems to be peculiarly associated with modern
Greek reception. Undoubtedly modern Greek literature has been
refreshed and enriched through its intimacy with ancient myth. Yet
my commentaries above suggest that this very same intimacy can
carry certain penalties. This is all the more apparent when we
compare our Greek examples with the reception of classical myth
in other national literatures, as indeed we learn from Rowena
Fowler’s and Greg Staley’s essays in this volume.29
27 Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks’.
28 Christopher Robinson’s ‘Helen or Penelope? Women Writers, Myth,
and the Problem of Gender Roles’, in Mackridge (ed.), Myth in Modern
Greek Poetry, 109–20, is a study of myth in the poetry of women from an
earlier generation such as Zoe Karrelli and Melissanthi. As such it provides
an interesting prequel to Van Dyck’s, that follows immediately afterwards
in the same volume, as he maps out the challenging dilemmas of the slightly
older women who try to blend two conflicting urges in their poetry: their
wish to partake of mainstream Greek expression, which traditionally val-
orized the Greek myth, and their desire to register their dissatisfaction with
Greek myth which, they feel, boycotts their efforts to find a personal voice.
29 In Fowler’s study, metamorphosis and shape-shifting, two major
drives in classical myth, become positive expressions of women’s aversion
to fixity and finality. In Staley’s examination of American nation-building
374 e fi s pe n tz o u
the modern greek helens
And yet, although thwarted, Helen comes back in rather unex-
pected forms in this body of female poetry. The latest threads of
her long history in Greek letters are found in this poetry, and they
are invested with remarkable positive energy. Ritsos’ Helen longed
for life after the Great War, but she was a figure implicated in grand
causes, and so her life in Sparta could only be a crushing delusion, a
disappointing aftermath, monotonous and incredibly boring. It
could, however, be suggested that such introspective, ‘aftermath’
scenes do not sit comfortably in modern Greek poetry. Most of the
greatest modern Greek poets of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies were writing against a background of wars, occupations, and
ethnic conflicts. This perpetual state of instability kept Greece in
constant and urgent need of a strong front and a robust sense of
collective identity that could respond to any immediate threat or
danger. Our adoring poets of the 1950s wrote against this back-
ground too. Unsurprisingly, the female voice was often suspended in
this literature of sustained emergency, whose reflexive reaction was
to return to the classical, the secure, the long-established, in a quest
of male bonding.
But as Ritsos’ Helen ‘dies’, a new cohort of confident female
poetic voices emerges. These voices produce the kind of positive
meaning that was not available to the Helen of the male poets
(including Ritsos), a Helen trapped in grand narratives of the na-
tion. The female personae know how to claim successfully a life
‘after war’, since they build it on a very different foundation. Above
all the life they envisage is not framed by a big vision; its ultimate
goal has little to do with victory, gallantry, or fame.
The ad hoc anthology that follows should be read with the
analysis of Ritsos’ Helen suggested earlier in this essay in mind.
The excerpts are brought together intentionally; as a whole they can
be seen to produce a counter-monologue with concerns strikingly
similar to Helen’s.
literature, the fantastic elements of myth, broadly alien to the rationalism at
the heart of an emergent national psyche, nevertheless feed an alternative
dimension of that same psyche, to be valorized in later American (especially
feminist) history.
helen in modern greek poetry 375
ÔÆ ìÜôØÆ ÆªÆðïýí
í ÆïóØþíïíôÆØ
ó åºÜ÷Øóôåò ðôı÷Ýò
ôïı ï%Æôïý Œüóìïı
åíþ ìÝóÆ ôï å%ªÆóôÞ%Ø
å%ìçíåýåØ ôØò åØŒüíåò
Á Á Á:
ˆå%íþíôÆò ôÆ ìÜôØÆ
îå÷íØïýíôÆØ ó ÝíÆ óýííåï
ó ÝíÆ ŒïììÜôØ íå%ü
ð Æóô%ÆðïâïºÜåØ
ŒÆØ ôÆ ðÜåØ
ðå% Æð ôçí ïìï%ØÜ ôøí ôïðßøí
óå ôüðï
üðïı ï ïÿƺìüò åßíÆØ ï Œüóìïò:
The eyes love to concentrate on tiny folds of the visible world while, inside,
the workshop interprets the images . . . As they grow old, the eyes linger on a
cloud, a little patch of water that glints, and leads them beyond the beauty
of the scenery to a place where the eye is the world. (From ‘Stories of
the Eyes’ (Éóôï%ßåò ìÆôØþí), in The Triumph of a Steady Loss
(ˇ ¨%ßÆìâïò ôçò óôÆÿå%Þò ÆðþºåØÆò), 1978, by Anghelaki-Rook)
***
Ôï ŒåÜºØ ìïı 媌ºØìÆôßæåôÆØ óôï ÜäåØï
ÆäåØÜæïıí ôÆ ôïØ÷þìÆôÆ Æðü ð%üóøðÆ
ôÆ óçìÜäØÆ ôøí ŒÜä%øí, ôÆ ŒÆ%ØÜ
ìÝíïıí
ìÆæß ìå ôØò Æ%Æ÷íØÆóìÝíåò ßíåò,
ôÆ ºåðôÜ íÞìÆôÆ ôïı åªþ ìïı:
‚íÆò ÆÝ%Æò Ý%÷åô Æð ôÆ âÜÿç
ŒÆØ óôÝŒåôÆØ ðßóø Æðü ÆıôØÜ ŒÆØ ìÜôØÆ
óıªŒ%ÆôçìÝíïò
ìÆ ïâå%üò, ô%þåØ ôïıò â%Ü÷ïıò
ôïı åªøØóìïý ìïı
Þ ìƺƌþíåØ ŒÆØ ŒÜíåØ ôï Œåíü
åıºïªçìÝíï:
My head gets used to the empty, the walls are emptied from faces, the prints
of the nails remain together with the cobwebbed fibres, the delicate threads
of my Ego. Wind comes from deep down, restrained but terrible, he eats
away the rocks of my pride, or softens and makes the void blessed. (From
‘My Head’ (Ôï ÷åÜºØ ìïı), as above)
***
376 e fi s pe n tz o u
Ì ß ºÆ:
—Ýò ŒÜôØ, ïôØäÞðïôå:
ÁÁÁÁÁ
—åò ŒýìÆ , ðïı äåí óôÝŒåôÆØ:
—åò âÜ%ŒÆ , ðïı âïıºØÜæåØ
Æí ôçí ðÆ%Æï%ôþóåØò ìå ð%ïÿÝóåØò:
—åò óôتìÞ ,
ðïı øíÜæåØ âïÞÿåØÆ üôØ ðíߪåôÆØ,
ìçí ôç óþæåØò:
—åò
äåí ÜŒïıóÆ :
Speak. Say something. . . . Say ‘wave’ as it does not stop, say ‘boat’ which
sinks if you overload it with intentions. Say ‘moment’ that cries help as she
drowns, don’t save her, say ‘I did not hear’. Drag a word from the night, at
random . . . (from ‘The Periphrastic Stone’ (˙ ðå%Ø%ÆóôØŒÞ ðÝô%Æ) in The
Little of the World (Ôï ºßªï ôïı Œüóìïı, 1971) by Kiki Dimoula)
***
`í ìå âªÜºåØò Æðü ôïýôç ôç óåðôÞ
ÓØøðÞ ìïı
¨ÜìÆØ ÝíÆ łÜ%Ø ðåÿÆìÝíï
Ýîø Æðü ôç ÿܺÆóóÆ ðåôÆìÝíï
˚ÆØ ÜôÆï:
ÌÝóÆ ìïı åßìÆØ ìØÆ ÆººØþôØŒç
‚íÆóô%ç íý÷ôÆ
Ôï äÝíô%ï ôï åŒóôÆôØŒü
Ôï äåüìåíï:
ÁÁÁÁÁ
— ºïıôß æø,
Öôø÷ÆßíïíôÆò Æðü ºüªï ŒÆØ øíÞ:
If you take me out of this venerable silence of mine, I will be like a dead fish,
dragged out of the sea, unburied. Inside, I am a different, starry night, a tree
ecstatic, supplicating. . . . I am getting richer, as I get poorer in words and
speech. (From the ‘Case of Silence’ (—å%ßðôøóç óØøðÞò, 1968) by Maria
Kentrou-Agathopoulou)
***
Óı÷íÜ âºÝðø ôï ð%üóøðï ìïı
üðøò ÿÆ ôï Ýâºåðåò åóý
ŒÆØ äåí åßíÆØ Æıôü
helen in modern greek poetry 377
ðïı åóý åß÷åò ªíø%ßóåØ:
Á Á ÁÁ
Ôï ìïíÆ÷ØŒü ð%üóøðü ìïı:
Á Á ÁÁ
…÷Ø: ôï ð%üóøðü ìïı [åßíÆØ]
ÁÁÁÁÁ
`ıôü ìå ôï ïðïßï ðå%ÆóôØŒÞ ðå%ðÜôçóÆ
ŒÆØ üôÆí óôÜÿçŒÆ
äåí ıðÞ%Œå ŒÆíåßòÁ
¯ßíÆØ ôï ܪ%Øï ð%üóøðï
ôøí ÷ÆìÝíøí óôتìþí
I often look at my face as you would look at it, and it is not the face that you
had met . . . my solitary face. No, my face is the one with which I went past
walking and when I rested nobody was there. It is the rugged face of
moments lost. (From ‘The Meeting with a Poem’, ÓıíÆíôçóç ðïØÞìÆôïò,
1982) by Nana Isaia)
***
ÕðÞ%îÆ ðå%ßå%ªç ŒÆØ ìåºåôç%Þ:
˛Ý%ø . . . ¸ßªï Æð üºÆ:
ôÆ ïíüìÆôÆ ôøí ºïıºïıäØþí üôÆí ìÆ%ÆßíïíôÆØ,
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
—üóï åýŒïºÆ ªı%ßæåØ ç ŒºåØäÆ%ØÜ ôøí ÆØóÿçìÜôøí
ì ÝíÆ ïðïØïäÞðïôå ŒºåØäß ôçò ºçóìïíØÜò:
…÷Ø, äåí åßìÆØ ºıðçìÝíç:
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
—å%ðÜôçóÆ ðïºý óôÆ ÆØóÿÞìÆôÆ,
ôÆ äØ÷Ü ìïı ŒÆØ ôøí ܺºøí,
ŒØ Ýìåíå ðÜíôÆ ÷þ%ïò ÆíÜìåóÆ ôïıò
íÆ ðå%ÜóåØ ï ðºÆôýò ÷%üíïò:
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
ÖïâÞÿçŒÆ ôç ìïíÆîØÜ
ŒÆØ ÆíôÜóôç÷Æ Æíÿ%þðïıò:
ÁÁÁÁÁÁÁ
…÷Ø, äåí åßìÆØ ºıðçìÝíç:
Óå óøóôÞ þ%Æ íı÷ôþíåØ:
I have been curious and studious. I know. . . a little about every-
thing. . . . The names of the flowers when they wither. . . how easily the
padlock of feelings turns with whichever key of forgetfulness. No, I am
not sad. . . . I walked for long along the feelings, mine and the others’, and
378 e fi s pe n tz o u
there was always space amongst them for the wide time to pass. . . . I was
afraid of loneliness and imagined people. . . . No, I am not sad. The night
falls at the right time. (From ‘I Have Gone Past’ ‘(—Ý%ÆóÆ’, 1971) by Kiki
Dimoula, Little of the World collection as above)
***
Writing ‘out of myth, next to myth, at the edge of myth, despite
myth’,30 the female poets offer a liberating antidote to Helen’s soul-
destructive anxieties. Seeking to articulate an identity based on
personal and private experience, these more recent voices often
define themselves through the present, the tiny details of the every-
day, confidently oblivious of the grand scheme of things that so
tortured Helen in Ritsos’ poem. They do not panic in an empty
room; for them an empty room can be a ‘room of their own’, free of
the furnishing of history, where they can write their selves unfet-
tered by the burden of the past. Unlike Helen, who despairs of the
servants reading her books with mistakes, these women do not fret
about the deceptive accuracy of speech. They are happy with the
transience of the words, as they do not feel compelled to trumpet to
the world some sacred Truth. Sometimes, they may even discover
wealth in silence—where Helen was suffocated by it—as they are
not on a mission to represent anything. Unlike Seferis’ classical
figures, noted above, they show us the inside of their mask, and
confidently demonstrate the others’ ignorance. They acknowledge
sorrow in many forms, but they are not sad that the day draws to a
close.
The new Helen is tentative, and knows how to make sense and
construct meaning through incompletion, misunderstanding, in-
stability, and contradiction. She is also not one but many. The old
Helen, crushed by the enormity of the expectations built around her,
can now be found in many soliloquies, many consciences, many
attempts at self-definition. The ‘monologue’ I assembled from frag-
ments (with the outburst of Ritsos’ Helen in the background) indi-
cates that in the contemporary Greek female poets’ idiom, one voice
seems to start just as another stops. In their corpus, Helen recog-
nizes parts of herself in the others. Her sense of self is grounded in
connectivity and not in defensive isolation.
30 Van Dyck, ‘Bruised Necks’, 128.
helen in modern greek poetry 379
The messages from this metamorphosed Helen resonate broadly.
In the context of the new-found political stability that succeeded the
dictatorship, Greek myth as a vehicle for collective identity seems to
be losing its dominance in recent literature. As political emergencies
recede, and more insidious anxieties emerge, the pedigreed certain-
ties of myth fall some way short of responding to an era that is
forced to coexist with the undecided. I wonder whether this is not a
sign of a growing realization that modern Greek identity and rep-
resentation is becoming a personal, private matter, free of (as well as
deprived of) the assistance of the time-honoured, collective values
that supported this identity for so long. If gender plays into this
interpretation, it is not a matter of crude biology. Ritsos, deprived of
voice and in exile, was clearly able to convey with admirable sensi-
tivity female loss and inner female longings. Yet it may be that
women, traditionally deprived of a public voice, are better adjusted
to explore this quiet, inner realm, and in doing so they may even
have some capacity to change the political landscape. Through the
multiple correspondences between Helen’s last monologue and the
new monologues of contemporary Greek women poets, we may
hear the beginnings of a new story. History might be made, they
seem to tell us, without the help of a thousand ships.
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15
‘This tart fable’: Daphne and Apollo
in Modern Women’s Poetry
R o w e n a Fowler
Contemporary women poets offer us a serious, engaged, and for-
mally satisfying encounter with classical myth. The past is revealed
as a constant presence which the poet must both escape and con-
front; as Jorie Graham writes in ‘Euridyce on History’: ‘not to
touch. j To touch. j For the farewell of it. j And the further replica-
tion’ (Swarm, 110). If myth is something we can call on to give voice
to our own concerns, it also calls on us to bear it witness; to Eavan
Boland the figures of myth appeal directly, ‘crying remember us’
(‘Suburban Woman: A Detail, III’).
My essay seeks to account for the continuing vitality of one
particular myth by exploring how the story of Daphne and Apollo
provides an insight into women’s experience as subjects and makers
of poems. I trace a body of women’s writing that keeps faith with its
original inspiration while discovering women’s physical, emotional,
and intellectual experience at the heart of myth: in the ambiguous
relationships of female figure and natural landscape, movement and
stasis, aversion and desire. The two poets my essay discusses in
detail, Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland, claim the artistic and
interpretative powers of metamorphosis: to transform and be
382 r o w e n a f o w l e r
transformed. In their work, classical myth, as allusion or persona,
enables an individual lyric voice to be heard even as it mutes the
sense of an intrusively autobiographical speaker.
One formulation of the function of myth in modern writing has
been to ‘comprehend history, understand violence and question
traditions’.1 Myth, as both theme and method, was at the heart of
Modernism; its central trope, metamorphosis, shaped and defined
Modernist texts from The Waste Land and Ulysses to The Tower
and Mrs Dalloway. Male writers turned themselves into trees to find
a momentary respite from time and history or to tap for themselves
the dryad’s mysterious privileges of access: ‘I stood still and was a
tree amid the wood, j Knowing the truth of things unseen before’
(Pound, ‘The Tree’). The prestige and influence of Modernist ap-
propriations remained so powerful that it was difficult for their
successors to deploy myth otherwise than ironically or nostalgically.
As I have argued elsewhere,2 Virginia Woolf’s sense of exclusion
from a classical education gave her a special relationship with the
Greek world which was both distant and intimate, a way of think-
ing about myth untinged by belatedness or irony.
Sylvia Plath’s engagement with the classical tradition indicated
both an accommodation with Woolf’s distinctive version of Mod-
ernism, and a fresh departure. Her recourse to metamorphosis as
the source of artistic power may fail her at times (‘On the Difficulty
of Conjuring Up a Dryad’) or, perhaps more disturbingly, run amok
(‘On a Plethora of Dryads’), but remains essential to a mature poem
such as ‘Tulips’, which, with no explicit classical references, never-
theless grows directly out of the metamorphic tradition. To with-
draw into impregnability would be at the same time to retreat
altogether from the human condition; should we preserve our vir-
ginity at the cost of our humanity? Plath’s now-classic poem of
sexual demurral, ‘Virgin in a Tree’,3 finds no comfortable answers
in the Daphne/Syrinx myth:
1 Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (Princeton, 1971), 416.
2 On Woolf and metamorphosis see my ‘Moments and Metamorphoses:
Virginia Woolf’s Greece’, Comparative Literature, 51 (1999), 217–42.
3 Collected Poems (London and Boston, 1981); Plath’s poem was written
in response to Paul Klee’s etching Jungfrau tra¨ umend (also known as
Jungfrau im Baum) (Paul-Klee-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum, Bern).
.1. Paul Klee, Jungfrau im Baum (Virgin in a Tree), 1903. (Paul-klee-Stiftung, Kunstomuseum
384 r o w e n a f o w l e r
How this tart fable instructs
And mocks!
Feminist scholarship and criticism of the 1970s addressed the
ways women seemed to be fixed in myths in attitudes of beauty
and blame, the occasion of men’s wars and obsessions. It looked
again at the configuration of classical landscapes, whether in the
Ovidian tradition (woman transformed into landscape) or in post-
Ovidian metamorphoses of that tradition (landscape eroticized as
woman). It questioned the convention whereby women’s bodies
provide images for men’s minds. The project for both readers and
writers was then (in the words of Margaret Homans) to gain access
to ‘the real powers of actual women emerging from male fear and
envy’ and ‘to recover women’s voices that have been lost or repressed
but only in such a way as to avoid replicating the structures that
brought about the repression in the first place’.4 Women were drawn
to particular female figures—Persephone, Antigone, Philomela—
and to patterns and situations which can be re-written or reversed:
‘it is not Orpheus who turns back to Euridyce, but rather she who
turns away from him, because she wants to go deeper into the living
cave’.5 They spoke as strong women (Amazons) or vulnerable men
(Philoctetes); they tended to prefer Sybils to Muses and to reject the
vigil at the loom in favour of the voyage out.
Of all mythic patterns, metamorphosis continued to hold out the
most allure for women poets, who responded in two broadly dis-
tinct modes. On the one hand we can recognize a renewed depth of
feeling and a return to sonority and lyricism and to a literate,
cultured, readerly style. The characters of the myth may be
re-imagined in ways which encourage self-identification without
overt autobiographical or confessional reference. Such poems need
not be read dramatically or ironically, but neither do they claim to
voice a specific or identifiable contemporary personality. In Linda
Pastan’s ‘Sacred to Apollo’, for example, there is no available dis-
tance between the author and the lyric ‘I’; the poet enters into and
expresses herself as and for Daphne:
4 ‘Feminist Criticism and Theory: The Ghost of Creusa,’ Yale Journal of
Criticism, 1 (1987), 153–82.
5 Gayle Green and Coppe´lia Kahn, Changing Subjects: The Making of
Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York, 1993), 102.
d a p h n e , a p o l l o , a n d m o d e r n w o m e n ’ s p o e t r y 385
. . . I feel the green root
of the bay, nourishing
or aching with the season.
Louise Glu¨ ck approaches the myth from a rather different angle,
speaking in a dramatized lyric voice which invests all the poem’s
emotion in the bond between Daphne and her father, Peneus, and
prompts the reader to look afresh at the rejected and perplexed
Apollo:
When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. Reader,
pity Apollo: at the water’s edge,
I turned from him . . .
(‘Mythic Fragment’)
The second mode of women’s poetry was more directly linked to
the rise of feminist criticism and was fuelled by overtly political
strategies of reclamation, revision, and impersonation. At its cru-
dest, the result was a particular kind of urgent but often ephemeral
and metrically undemanding poem, drawing on the alternative en-
ergies of goddesses and Amazons and offering a right of reply to the
silent or muted victim. In such poems, as Alicia Ostriker has pointed
out, there was ‘no trace of nostalgia’6—but although they made an
immediate impact, especially in performance, they do not necessar-
ily stand up well to rereading or reflection. An example might be the
early work of the post-Beat poet Anne Waldman, with her invoca-
tion to a menacing tutelary Artemis: ‘Command your spike deep in
my heart j So I may ride, hunt, speak, shine’ (‘Artemis’). Much of
Waldman’s energy has been generated by her relationship to classical
literature and myth, which she continues fiercely to oppose and
rewrite, as in her rambling epic Iovis: ‘A. needed a woman
and caressed a tree’ (‘Letter to Miss Idona Hand’, l. 145).
In the last two decades of the twentieth century the two modes
have both converged and evolved in unexpected ways. One kind of
poem springs from a post-modern fascination with the new disem-
bodied technologies and media: here the tone is cool, wise-cracking,
6 ‘The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmak-
ing,’ Signs, 8 (1981), 68–90.
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Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought
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