SOURCE: Zonana, Joyce. “Swinburne's Sappho: The Muse as Sister-Goddess.” Victorian Poetry 28, no. 1 (spring 1990): 39-50.

[In the following essay, Zonana highlights poet Algernon Charles Swinburne's identification with Sappho and her apotheosis as the “Tenth Muse.”]

In an important early poem, “Sapphics” (1:333-335),¹ Swinburne introduces a theme that was to dominate both his poetry and prose: Sappho's apotheosis as the tenth Muse, a poet whose “visible song” soars as “a bird soars.” By identifying Sappho as a Muse—and ultimately, as we shall see, as the Muse, not only for him, but for all poets—Swinburne radically redefines the nature of poetic inspiration and the role of a female principle in art produced by men; by elevating a mortal woman into the place normally reserved for immortal goddesses, he expresses his special notion of the relation between humanity and divinity while simultaneously revising the inherited Christian notion of an exclusively male deity. Neither femme fatale nor chaste virgin nor nourishing spiritual mother, Swinburne's Muse is a human sister who manifests “ineffable glory and grace as of present godhead” (“The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 15:33). Her inspiration is neither dangerous temptation nor transcendent revelation, but a steady celebration of humanity, a celebration that makes “each glad limb” of the human body a “note of rapture in the tune of life” (“The Last Pilgrimage,” Tristram of Lyonesse, 4:144).

Throughout nineteenth-century British poetry, one finds a persistent dissatisfaction with inherited notions of the Muse. From Wordsworth's search for a Muse “greater” than Milton's Urania, through Keats's exploration of various female inspirers, to Arnold's choice of a “Muse of Righteousness,” both Romantic and Victorian poets express a longing for a Muse that would firmly connect life and art, art and religion, joining earthly and heavenly sources of inspiration in a new and stable synthesis. Barbara Fass, in her perceptive study, La Belle Dame sans Merci and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Detroit, 1974), has carefully explored the Romantic vision of the Muse as an enchanting and enchanted figure who represents an art that simultaneously transforms and transfixes the poet seeking an ideal not present on earth and only questionably present in heaven. Yet Fass stops short of an examination of nineteenth-century poets' attempts to escape from the paralyzing notion of art as seductive siren. She fails to consider these poets' efforts to locate an earthly Muse who could properly replace Milton's heavenly Urania. Even in the work of Swinburne, who in “A Nympholept” would exclaim that “Heaven is as earth, and as heaven to me / Earth” (6:81), Fass sees only another instance of a failed quest for a union of spirit and sense, “Christian” and “pagan” objects of worship and sources of art.

Yet within the context of nineteenth-century poetry, Swinburne's relationship to his Muse-figure is peculiarly untormented. For Swinburne the goddess of poetry is neither elusive nor seductive, neither pure spirit nor pure sense. As he writes in his study of Victor Hugo's L'Année Terrible, the Muse is “omnipresent and eternal, and forsakes neither Athens nor Jerusalem, Camelot nor Troy, Argonaut nor Crusader, to dwell as she does with equal goodwill among modern appliances in London and New York” (13:249). In “Ave Atque Vale,” he is careful to stress that the “most high Muses” bend “us-ward” (3:49) in their concern for and engagement with human life. Similarly, his Apollo, in “The Last Oracle,” is drawn “Down from heaven” by the “song within the silent soul” (3:2-3). Unlike Arnold's “scornful” and “implacable” young god, Swinburne's Apollo is fit to sing on either Etna or Parnassus. Because Swinburne defines his Muse as an unmistakably human figure who has achieved divinity through her full experience of humanity, he can embrace his art with an unambivalent passion, trusting that it will demonstrate the indissoluble union between “spiritual truth” and “bodily beauty,” expressing “the sweet and sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form and intellectual fire” (“The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 15:13). Not incidentally, he is also able to use his Muse to unify pagan and Christian symbol systems.²

Swinburne develops his myth of the Muse in a group of poems—“Sapphics,” “Anactoria,” and “On the Cliffs”—that revolve around the figure of Sappho, long honored as a figurative “tenth Muse” by poets and critics since Plato, but never before literally perceived and used as such.³ In these poems Swinburne incorporates Sappho's language, translating and interweaving fragments of her work; her voice, like a Muse's, “enters” his. Even more significantly, Swinburne addresses and invokes Sappho here in a manner previously reserved only for sources of inspiration imagined to be genuinely divine—the maids of Helicon for Hesiod and Homer, Jesus for the earliest Christian poets, Urania for Milton, the “dread Power” for Wordsworth, Psyche and Autumn for Keats. Finding in Sappho the “subtle breath and bloom of very heaven itself, that dignity of divinity which informs the most passionate and piteous notes” (“The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 15:33), Swinburne appropriates her as a new goddess who teaches, like his beloved Victor Hugo, that “the vibration of earthly emotion” is the surest means to achieve “a note of divine tenderness” (“L'Homme Qui Rit,” 13:215).

Sappho as Muse challenges tradition not simply in her humanity; she also directly confronts the Western (male) poetic imagination through her fully sexual femaleness. Ever since Hesiod and Homer, the Muse has typically been conceived as a female divinity, although post-Classical writers have been able to accept her as such only after a careful spiritualization and/or disembodiment.⁴ Thus, though Milton's Muse is indeed characterized as feminine, she is divorced from all association with the actual female body. The English poet is not free, as the Greeks had been, to praise the Muses' “tender bodies,” “soft feet,” or “violet” hair.⁵ The Christian Muse is an incorporeal Virgin Mother; and the spiritualization of the ancient Muses is so much a part of the English tradition that Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, sees them, with the Madonna and chivalry, as but another instance of the “feminine ideal” invented by “the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race.”⁶

When nineteenth-century men began their attempts to imagine the Muses once again as physical creatures, they were haunted by fears of sexual seduction by a female whose “earthliness” threatened to consume their own uncertain “heavenliness”; because God and Woman are irrevocably divorced in Christian tradition, the female gender (as much as the pagan origin) of the Muse proved a constant embarrassment to the male writer seeking a divine sanction for his art.⁷ Thus Swinburne's Muse, a mortal woman who unabashedly celebrates her own sexuality, choosing, through her homoeroticism, to accept and love the female body so distrusted by Christian misogyny, poses a unique challenge to the Western artist afraid that the Muse might be an unholy seduction from his chaste worship of a male god. Indeed, the failure of even the most sympathetic critics to perceive Swinburne's redefinition of the Muse suggests how radical is his view of the relationship between woman and god, art and religion. Only recent feminist criticism of the Christian religious tradition enables us to appreciate the implications of Swinburne's “post-Christian” transformation of a divine female source of poetry.⁸

Long recognized as a studied reversal of its original, Sappho's celebrated “Ode to Aphrodite,” Swinburne's “Sapphics” functions as an initiation for both poet and reader into the writer's startling new worship of a human Muse.⁹ Whereas in her own poem, Sappho had appealed for the aid of an Olympian Goddess, Aphrodite, imploring her to descend from heaven to Lesbos, in Swinburne's inversion the Goddess is on earth, pleading with the poet to look at and listen to her. And while in the original poem Aphrodite had promptly responded to Sappho's plea, in the Swinburne poem the mortal refuses the Goddess: Sappho has eyes only for “her chosen, / Fairer than all men,” and for her “newly fledged, … visible song” (1:334-335). Aphrodite flees in horror, even as her doves longingly look “Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder / Shone Mitylene” (1:333).

When she rejects Aphrodite, Swinburne's Sappho also implicitly rejects the “crowned nine Muses,” who, with Apollo, are “sick with anguish,” “stricken at heart,” to hear her independent song—“Ah the tenth, the Lesbian!” (1:334-335, 334). The Muses wax pale to hear Sappho because they know not the “wonderful things,” “full of thunders” (1:334, 335) of which Sappho sings: she feels, loves, and composes as only a mortal can. Similarly, Aphrodite knows not the glory of song—nor the nature of Sappho's love for women. Though Sappho herself had invoked both the Muses and Aphrodite, Swinburne suggests that each alone is inadequate to define fully or account for the choices and achievements of her life and her art. Because she fuses their separate spheres, Sappho rivals and surpasses the very goddesses to whom she is devoted: song and love are inextricably entwined in her work “Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion” (1:335); she is, as Swinburne would later define her, both “Love's” and “Song's” priestess (“On the Cliffs,” 3:310). The gods flee her presence because she is greater than they; she figures precisely as Christ does in the banishing of the pagan gods and the silencing of the oracles. Yet, unlike the victory of the Galilean as it is portrayed by Swinburne in “The Last Oracle,” Sappho's triumph is an affirmation rather than a denial of human power and song.

In “Anactoria,” Swinburne uses many of the same fragments he incorporated into “Sapphics,” though here they enter into a first-person cry of love and longing, rather than a distanced and controlled third-person account of poetic fulfillment. The poem begins with Sappho's account of her vision of Aphrodite—the same vision that forms the context for “Sapphics”—but the poetic persona breaks off in the midst of her recitation to exclaim to her beloved Anactoria:

                                        but thou—thy body is the song,
Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I,
Though my voice die not till the whole world die.

(1:192)

Apparently Sappho is distracted from her vision of Aphrodite into an exploration of art; her equation of Anactoria's body with song does not, however, imply that sexuality replaces creativity, but rather that consideration of one necessarily leads to consideration of the other.¹⁰

Sappho cannot think of Aphrodite or Anactoria without thinking of the Muses, as she reveals again a few lines later:

Ah that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed
To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast!
Ah that my mouth for Muses' milk were fed
On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!

(1:193)

Here Swinburne's Sappho utterly violates the received notion of the Olympian Muses, suggesting that violent (and literally consuming) sexual passion might give the poet access to “Muses' milk.” And though Sappho is willing to allow her own lips to be temporarily “tuneless,” she cannot live (or love) without song, wishing as she does to

Strike pang from pang as note is struck from note,
Catch the sob's middle music in thy throat,
Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these
A lyre of many faultless agonies.

(1:194)

Anactoria's body is to become a lyre, her blood Muses' milk; this does not so much represent a renunciation of art as a transformation of both song and the body. In desiring Anactoria, Sappho does not abandon her desire for the lyre, though she chooses a lyre with a difference, a lyre constructed from the skin of the flayed Marsyas. Her Muse is a Chthonian Muse of flesh, deeply bound to the joy and pain of love; and the product of such inspiration is poetry that shares the concreteness and vitality of its source: “one with all … things,” it “Cleave[s] to men's lives and waste[s] the days thereof / With gladness and much sadness and long love” (1:198).

While “Sapphics” portrays Sappho as a tenth Muse, and “Anactoria” explores the corporeal nature of her inspiration, neither poem places Sappho in specific relation to Swinburne, as his Muse, much less as the Muse of all poets. The explicit fulfillment of this identification does not appear until 1879, in “On the Cliffs” (3:304-317). Although Swinburne does not use the term “muse” in the poem, it is in its entirety an elaborate and self-conscious muse-invocation, echoing the language of Milton's appeals to Urania, as well as Wordsworth's calls to the wind and Keats's pursuit of the nightingale. Like his precursors, Swinburne uses the extended invocation to define carefully the nature of his Muse; like them as well, he places her within the context of both Christian and pagan concepts of divinity and poetry.

Alone in a barren seascape characterized by incompleteness and partiality, the poet opens his invocation with a request for a fulfilling word, one that will make both landscape and speaker whole. Calling at first on the wind, he asks what message it carries from the sea. Suddenly hearing a nightingale, he begins to address it instead, “For but one word … / Is blown up usward ever from the sea” (3:306). The sea's word is a sad one, evoking the pain, loss, and death that haunt human memory; it cannot fulfill the poet's request. But the nightingale takes no “shadow of sadness” on its song (3:307). “With throat of gold and spirit of the sun,” it is identified with the Olympian Apollo, living and singing in an atmosphere above the human realm of passion and pain. Like Keats's (but unlike Arnold's) nightingale, this bird is “not marked for sorrow” (3:308), but neither is it marked “for joy.” For a moment, Swinburne allies himself with this Olympian singer; calling it “sister,” he suggests that it has provided him with the word he has been seeking.

Yet as David G. Riede has pointed out,¹¹ the poet immediately recognizes that such a vision of self and song is incomplete. To be “above” human pain is not to resolve the problem that it poses, but simply to ignore it, and Swinburne, like Arnold and Keats before him, cannot rest with such an easy avoidance. Thus, immediately after his paean to the bird's freedom from human limitation, he plummets, in a movement comparable to Keats's in the “Nightingale” ode, to a passionate recognition of pain: “But me, for me (how hadst thou heart to hear?) / Remains a sundering with the two-edged spear” (3:308). Cassandra's cry leads Swinburne towards Sappho, a poet whose pain, unlike that of the prophetess, has been embodied in significant form, and hence “heard.”

And suddenly Swinburne is addressing Sappho, demanding and expecting a word of her—“Because I have known thee always who thou art” (3:311). This Sappho is, like the bird, a “sister” to Swinburne; also like the bird, she burns with Apollo's eternal fire:

As brother and sister were we, child and bird,
Since thy first Lesbian word
Flamed on me, and I knew not whence I knew
This was the song that struck my whole soul through,
Pierced my keen spirit of sense with edge more keen,
Even when I knew not,—even ere sooth was seen,—
When thou wast but the tawny sweet winged thing
Whose cry was but of spring.

(3:311)

Though originally perceived as a nightingale or a god, Sappho is far more: she is a “soul triune, woman and god and bird” (3:315), representing a principle of poetry more inclusive than that embodied by either the bird or the god alone. And, as in “Sapphics,” Swinburne once again demonstrates the triumph of this mortal singer over the immortal gods of song:

The singing soul that moves thee, and that moved
When thou wast woman, and their songs divine
Who mixed for Grecian mouths heaven's lyric wine
Fell dumb, fell down reproved
Before one sovereign Lesbian song of thine.

(3:313)

Sappho's “ruling song,” the speaker now recognizes, is present, has always been present, even in his barren northern landscape, making “all the night one ear / One ear fulfilled and mad with music” (3:313).¹² All “earth and heaven and sea” are “molten” in this music “made of thee [Sappho]” (3:316). The phrase “of thee” suggests not merely that the music is made by Sappho, but also that it is composed from her own substance which has entered into the substance of the landscape, just as she had longed, in Swinburne's “Anactoria,” to be “molten” into the body of her lover (1:194). As in the earlier poem, Sappho's self and song are one with all things; even more significantly, they make all things one. Sappho is the unifying, “fulfilling” force in the landscape: she cannot be separated from her song, and her song cannot be separated from the landscape, now held together in a new harmony. And it is this “ruling song” that teaches Swinburne his own “song, and the secrets of it”—the secret being simply that “knowing not love nor change nor wrath nor wrong / No more we knew of song” (3:317).

Thus Swinburne completes his identification of Sappho, not merely as his Muse, but as the Muse of all poets and readers of poetry. Sappho, through her uniquely passionate song of pain and joy, makes the souls of all who hear her “sublime”; she is heard by anyone “whose heart was ever set to song”—“even Aeschylus as I” (3:315). Yet she is a Muse who functions quite differently from any encountered earlier in the Western tradition. Like the classical Muses, she is a daughter of Memory, “mother of all songs made” (3:317); unlike them, however, her function is not to erase human memory but to intensify it, not to release her listeners from their cares but to make them more conscious of all their experiences, both pleasurable and painful. Because she has accepted its limitations, time does not touch her; because she has not struggled against them, her loves survive in her songs.

Further, a poet need not invoke her in order to experience or benefit from her; she is continuously present and always accessible, “in the notes of the nightingales, … in the presence of the glory of the sky.”¹³ The poet does not have to seek special inspiration from either the gods or nature; Sappho's song is part of the very substance of the universe. But this cosmic song is not identical to the music of the spheres that Milton had so longed to hear; it is, as Riede points out, akin to Wordsworth's “still sad music of humanity,” or what we might call instead the “music of the elements”—air, earth, and water, fused by fire.¹⁴ To hear this music one need not purify oneself by the study of god or nature, as Milton had suggested; all one need do is live passionately and fully, swim exultingly in the sea of life and death. Such immersion in experience enables one not merely to hear or to sing but to be song, at one with Sappho, at one with nature, at one with divinity.

Sappho, Swinburne tells us repeatedly in “On the Cliffs”—both explicitly and through his carefully worked images of fusion—is “woman and god and bird,” an indissoluble “soul triune.” Thus he transforms the pagan-Christian dialectic that had informed most post-classical approaches to the Muse. Swinburne defines Sappho, an unquestionably pagan poet, as a trinity that transcends—even as it mimics—the Christian mystery of the Triune God. While Milton had to specify that he called on Urania's “meaning, not the name,” and Arnold had to discover a “Muse of Righteousness” identified with the Holy Spirit, Swinburne is free to address his Muse “inly, by thine only name, / Sappho” (3:311). Ignoring the difficulties of the pagan-Christian debate, Swinburne defines his Muse using both Christian and pagan terminology: the “god” who is one with Sappho is God the Father and “Father” Apollo; the “bird” simultaneously Christian Dove of the Holy Spirit and pagan nightingale whose name in Greek is “synonymous with poetry itself and the poet.”¹⁵ And, as a human embodiment of the divine, Sappho evokes both the Christian Incarnation and pagan anthropomorphic deities. Yet for Swinburne, Christ is but the type of Sappho—his incarnation of divinity less complete than her achievement of it, his fusion of man and god less thorough than hers. For as Swinburne makes clear in his comment on Blake's belief that “God only Acts and Is in beings or Men”: “It must be remarked and remembered that the very root or kernel of this creed is not the assumed humanity of God, but the achieved divinity of Man; not incarnation from without, but development from within; not a miraculous passage into flesh, but a natural growth into godhead” (William Blake, 16:259).¹⁶ Thus Swinburne suggests that his new myth transcends—even as it incorporates—those that preceded it.

While Swinburne's trinity differs from the Christian one in its greater emphasis on the human achievement of divinity rather than the divine descent into man, it also introduces an even more radical change: the substitution of “woman” for “man.” Sappho, in clear counterpoint to Christ the son of God, is female, the sister of men. Of course such a choice makes her identification as a Muse more natural; the Muses have almost always been represented as women and sisters (to one another, if not to mortal men). Yet it is precisely this “femaleness” of the Muses that caused such problems for Christian writers, who, despite the example of the Virgin, found it difficult to imagine woman except in connection with sin and deception. Even Milton could not entirely divorce the Muses from the Sirens, and, particularly in Victorian poetry, the Muses were constantly in danger of slipping over into their more sinister relatives. Western writers have sought continually to bring their art into accord with their theology; but if the source of art is imagined to be a female goddess (or, worse, a set of female goddesses), while the focus of religion is a male (or at best sexless) god, then the writer who wishes to maintain allegiance to both art and religion must develop a vision of the female that escapes Christian limits, or a notion of divinity that includes the feminine.

The ability to imagine a female divinity—as well as to perceive the “godliness” of mortal women—may well be dependent, as Mary Daly has argued, on abandoning the belief in a transcendent deity; since Swinburne's “post-Christian” god is nothing if not immanent, the incorporation of woman into the godhead poses no logical problems for him; indeed, it helps to enforce the recognition of god's immanence. And because god and woman are not at odds, Swinburne can love his Muse unambivalently, no longer afraid of an art whose female source might be a worldly temptation or a false divinity.

Yet, although female, Sappho is also “strange,” a “manlike maiden” who fuses qualities typically considered contradictory, and who bears little resemblance to the traditional Western image of woman. Swinburne calls her “maiden” even though she is known to have married and borne a child; deeply identified with women, she is nevertheless termed “manlike,” perhaps for the strength and clarity of her passion and her song (for it is doubtful whether Swinburne, who insisted that “qualities called virtues and vices depend on time, climate, and temperament” [Letters, 1:138], would have branded her “manlike” on the basis of her homoeroticism). But what is this woman whom Swinburne identifies as a god, this Muse who loves women and is neither virgin nor whore, neither good nor bad mother, neither all spirit nor all flesh—in a category of her own that seems to escape the traditional Western dualism of spirit and flesh, male and female, good and evil?

The answer must be Swinburne's own: Sappho is a “sister,” a literally kindred spirit born of the same mother and father—Memory and Apollo—as the poet. Surprisingly, the aspect of woman as man's sister has generally been overlooked by male poets in their conceptions of the female Muse. For this is a female not inherently “other” from the male, evoking neither sexual attraction and fear, nor filial love and terror. She is, indeed, something quite different from the “Swinburnean woman” who has so often been the focus of Swinburne studies,¹⁷ and who so much resembles the anima figure identified by Jungians as the presumed matrix from which the Muse image has emerged. Though Swinburne has rightly been noted for his bold exploration of the nature of woman as “other”—mother and lover, destroyer and healer, femme fatale and grand ideal—what critics have failed to see is that his Muse is not part of this complex. Sappho, though female and god, is not other to Swinburne, male and mortal: her femaleness does not stand in opposition to his maleness, nor her divinity to his humanity. She is not an anima figure, not Hertha, or Dolores, or Proserpine, or the sea—she is, quite simply, his sister, a woman with whom he can unproblematically identify himself.

And it is this that is Swinburne's distinctive contribution to the history of the female Muse: he is the first male poet to imagine her not as other but as image of his own self, a reflecting sister who can be known and loved unambivalently. As god she is not distinct from humans; as woman she is not apart from men. Swinburne does not, however, define his relationship with the Muse as sexual. By choosing Sappho, whose desire was directed towards omen, and by defining her as sister, Swinburne avoids the implication that this human Muse and her poet might themselves engage in a sexual relationship. Yet by celebrating a Muse whom he defines as having found inspiration in her own sexuality, Swinburne suggests a new model for creativity, and a new vision of personal and artistic integration. Male and female, “spirit” and “sense,” are fused, and the artist need not seek outside him (or her) human self for inspiration. Swinburne's vision of the Muse makes room for (is in fact dependent upon) both female creativity and female sexuality. His identification of Sappho as Muse thus offers a unique resolution to the dilemma of the Victorian artist; recognizing that woman and art need not be other to man or god (or the moral life), Swinburne suggests that only through recognition of the sister-Muse can the brother (or sister) poet recognize and fully express his or her own “present godhead.” Poetry written under the inspiration of such a Muse neither escapes nor transforms the human condition; rather, it reflects and celebrates it for what it is: “the sweet and sovereign unity of perfect spirit and sense, of fleshly form and intellectual fire” (“The Poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” 15:13).

Notes

1. All citations from Swinburne's poetry and prose are taken from the twenty-volume Bonchurch edition, The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise (London, 1925). Volume and page number are given parenthetically in the text. The edition of the letters, also cited parenthetically, is Cecil Y. Lang, ed. The Swinburne Letters, 6 vols. (New Haven, 1959-62).

2. In this achievement, Swinburne to some extent echoes Keats, who, as Helen Vendler has shown in The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, 1983), creates a thoroughly human, thoroughly divine goddess of nature and art in “To Autumn.” Swinburne's Muse, however, unlike Keats's was a historically real mortal woman before becoming an “immortal.”

3. In “Sapphistries,” Signs 10 (1984):43-62, Susan Gubar explores women writers' uses of Sappho as a figurative, if not literal Muse. Gubar's article is groundbreaking, though she is on familiar territory when she censures Swinburne for creating a “passionately depraved” Sappho who functions as a “lesbian femme fatale” (p. 49). As I hope to demonstrate, Swinburne's myth of Sappho as Muse defuses the myth of the femme fatale that had entrapped many of his fellow nineteenth-century poets.

4. For an instructive analysis of the early Christian response to women, a response that can also be traced in early Christian treatments of the Muse, see Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church,” in her Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1974), pp. 150-183. See also Elaine Pagels' recent study, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York, 1988) for a careful analysis of the early Christian perception of women and their relations to divinity.

5. See, e.g. Hesiod's Theogony, in Richmond Lattimore, trans., Hesiod (Ann Arbor, 1959), p. 123. See also Pindar's Pythia 1 in The Odes of Pindar, ed. Lattimore (Chicago, 1947), p. 43.

6. Matthew Arnold, The Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, 1960-78), 5:208. See also my “Matthew Arnold and the Muse: The Limits of the Olympian Ideal,” VP [Victorian Poetry] 23 (1985): 59-74.

7. Ernst Curtius, in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (New York, 1953), has carefully traced the development of what he calls the topos “Contrast between Pagan and Christian poetry” (p. 235); studies of English Renaissance poetry, most notably John M. Steadman's Milton's Biblical and Classical Imagery (Pittsburgh, 1984) have applied Curtius' analysis to a developing English tradition. Certainly, the “pagan-Christian” dichotomy is significant, even within the nineteenth century. Yet the terms of the opposition may obscure an even more fundamental conflict: pagan gods were both male and female, while for the Christian, there is only one God, and He is a male Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The consequences of this opposition—between female and male concepts of divinity—have only begun to be explored.

8. See, e.g., Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston, 1984). It is worth noting that in Pure Lust, as well as in her most recent work, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (Boston, 1987), Daly makes abundant references to the Muses, whom she sees as essential images enabling women's renewed “participation in Powers of Be-ing” (Pure Lust, p. 148).

9. See Jerome J. McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago, 1972), pp. 112-116. McGann's reading of “Sapphics” is similar to my own, though he does not emphasize the significance of Swinburne's decision to make Sappho a Muse. For other observations on Swinburne's aesthetics, as embodied in this poem and others, I am indebted to Robert L. Peters, The Crowns of Apollo: Swinburne's Principles of Literature and Art, A Study in Victorian Criticism and Aesthetics (Detroit, 1965); Meredith B. Raymond “Swinburne Among the Nightingales,” VP 6 (1968): 125-142, and her Swinburne's Poetics: Theory and Practice (The Hague, 1971); and, especially, David G. Riede, Swinburne: A Study of Romantic Mythmaking (Charlottesville, 1978).

10. David A. Cook, “The Content and Meaning of Swinburne's ‘Anactoria,’” VP 9 (1971): 77-93, has argued that the poem shows that “for Sappho, art is a mere bauble in the presence of sex,” and that the progress of the poem demonstrates that art is possible for Sappho (and, presumably for Swinburne) only when sexuality is renounced (p. 86). As Thaïs E. Morgan has observed, in “Swinburne's Dramatic Monologues: Sex and Ideology,” VP 22 (1984): 175-195, Cook's is the consensus view of the poem. Morgan, as I, finds instead that “Anactoria” expresses Swinburne's view of the possible—and desired—conjunction of art and sexuality.

11. David G. Riede, A Study of Romantic Mythmaking, pp. 131-132.

12. Swinburne's language here specifically echoes Keats's Mnemosyne speaking to Apollo in Hyperion: A Fragment. Indeed, much of Swinburne's characterization of Sappho as Muse recalls Keats's attempts to define a humanized divinity who will function as a source and subject of poetry—Psyche in “Ode to Psyche,” Apollo and Saturn in Hyperion: A Fragment, Moneta and Mnemosyne in The Fall of Hyperion, Autumn in “To Autumn.” Each of these figures in Keats functions in ways comparable to Swinburne's Sappho, mixing pleasure and pain, love and song, mortal and immortal. Yet the important difference is that Keats's figures are drawn from the realm of myth rather than human history, and thus their “apotheosis” is neither as dramatic nor as transformative as Sappho's.

13. “Dedicatory Epistle,” The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols. (London, 1904), 1:11.

14. For another view of Swinburne's relation to Milton, see William Wilson's excellent discussion in “Algernon Agonistes: ‘Thalassius,’ Visionary Strength, and Swinburne's Critique of Arnold's ‘Sweetness and Light,’” VP 19 (1981): 381-395.

15. H. W. Garrod, “The Nightingale in Poetry,” in his The Profession of Poetry and Other Lectures (Oxford, 1929), p. 134.

16. These lines came to my attention as cited by McGann, pp. 299-300.

17. See, e.g., Antony H. Harrison's categorization in “The Swinburnean Woman,” PQ [Poetry Quarterly] 58 (1979): 90-102. Interestingly, Harrison fails to include Sappho among Swinburne's women.