The Power of Pygmalion

Acknowledgements

This book is a revised version of my PhD thesis, completed in the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s College London. My first debt is to the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) which awarded me the three and a half year grant that made the completion of this study possible. Two people should be thanked here for being readily available and supportive as I was preparing to embark on this research: Professor Giorgos Magoulas and Professor Despoina Heila-Markopoulou of the University of Athens. But my greatest debt is to Dr David Ricks of King’s College London. David’s enthusiasm and exceptional insight in poetry have guided me in focusing, elaborating and shaping my ideas. What is more, as one of the editors of the series in which this book is published, Byzantine and Neohellenic Studies, he has made a number of improvements on my translations of the poetic texts. I have also greatly benefited from the constructive criticism of the following people: Professor Dimitris Tziovas and Professor Christopher Robinson who examined the thesis; Professor Roderick Beaton who has eagerly shared his expert knowledge of Seferis with me; and Professor Fotis Dimitrakopoulos for his useful suggestions in the IKY reports.

Special thanks are due to my friends, Dr Athina Vogiatzoglou and Dr Georgia Gotsi for the stimulating discussions on Modern Greek poetry and literature in general. Athina’s deep knowledge of Sikelianos and her significant book devoted to his poetry have guided me in my first attempts to understand the intricate and often obscure oeuvre of this important modern Greek poet. Last but not least, I would like to thank Anthony Hirst for his meticulous reading of Chapters One and Four of the thesis. The pleasure of visiting museums and taking photographs has been shared with my friends Nikos Mitrogiannopoulos and Christina Karandoni. I am also grateful to Nikos and Kaiti Papatheofanous for their eagerness to keep me informed about publications related to my work. I would like to make a ←9 | 10→special reference here to my dear teacher and friend, Panagiotis Fotiou. His love of literature – obvious in his published work and in his literary activities in Patras – and our long discussions have guided and inspired me. He was always generous in sharing his knowledge with me during the writing of the thesis, and his untimely death in November 2005 as I was beginning to work on this book has been a shock to all us who knew and admired him and his work. He is bitterly missed.

Preface

For this reason are the works of Pericles all the more to be wondered at; they were created in a short time for all time. Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and at once antique; but in the freshness of its vigour it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought. Such is the bloom of perpetual newness upon these works, which makes them ever to look untouched by time, as though the unfaltering breath of an ageless spirit had been infused into them.1

Plutarch’s description of the sculptural works on the Parthenon sounds almost prophetic to the modern reader. Indeed, from the eighteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth, ancient Greek sculpture has played a central role in the life of the educated people in the West. Its beauty, the pulse of life it has been felt to catch despite its fragmentary condition, the combination, in the most famous works, of maturity and experience in the skill involved with what was interpreted as a youthful and vibrant look and an evergreen spirit, became the starting points of a new aesthetic and a certain way of thinking and feeling.2

This has not failed to have impact on poetry. Minor and major poets of Germany, England and France have responded in verse to works of classical sculpture. Indeed Stephen Larrabee, for example, devoted an entire book to the way ancient Greek marbles inspired ←11 | 12→English poets from the seventeenth century on.3 Quite often, it is true, such poets followed established conventions and fashions. But inspiration became a deeper influence in the Romantic period, when famous works of sculpture such as the Apollo Belvedere and above all the Elgin Marbles marked England’s cultural life and the poetic responses of Byron, Keats and Shelley. As Larrabee shows, in the most interesting cases sculpture becomes an internalized metaphor for poetic creation or a symbol intimately connected with the poet’s attitude towards his own art. Such a relation between poetry and sculpture has been more fully and systematically discussed in recent, highly sophisticated studies, in the context of a growing interest in the poetics of ecphrasis. Scholars examine with great insight poems written in response to a work of visual art, and many interesting analyses have been devoted to ecphrastic poems on sculpture.4

But the association of poetry and sculpture goes beyond the genre of ecphrasis and indeed deserves a separate study. It has been noted, for example, that in the case of poets such as Goethe, Rilke, Yeats or Pound, an acquaintance with and study of sculpture has had a more pervasive and lasting effect than the composition of any particular ecphrastic poem: their poetry has changed its course through the experience of sculpture. No such separate study exists for Goethe and Rilke, but it has been widely acknowledged that the way they perceived poetry radically changed after they got in touch with sculpture.5 They both learned how form tames and shapes feelings ←12 | 13→and ideas, but also what was considered as the organic development of a work of art. The Roman Elegies are the outcome of Goethe’s experience of sculpture. And if Rilke does not restrict himself to ancient Greek sculpture only, it is through two sonnets on Archaic kouroi, and particularly so in the ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, that the impact of sculpture in his work is explicitly acknowledged and in turn has proved most influential. Finally, Michael North has shown how sculpture – and to a great extent ancient Greek sculpture – in its public aspect becomes a central concern in the poetry of Yeats and Pound. The metaphor of sculpture allows both these poets to explore and define the meaning of tradition and the relation of their work to tradition and society.6

And yet, despite its obvious centrality, the relationship between ancient Greek sculpture and modern poetry has never been thoroughly examined with reference to modern Greek poetry. In setting out to provide a discussion of the topic, I have inevitably had to impose an arbitrary time-limit: from the decade in which a preoccupation with sculpture becomes more conscious to the 1950s, when Seferis’ abiding interest closes. Again, my choice of poets has also had to be selective: if the ones chosen are indisputably major figures with closely linked (if not always acknowledged) preoccupations, other poets too in the period use sculptural imagery with some self-referential scope.7

The work of the Greek Romantics has been underestimated in this as in other respects, although it came into being in a period in which neoclassical architecture and sculpture were dominant in a newly founded Greek state that sought to define its identity with reference to classical antiquity. Sculpture in the voluminous poetry of Palamas has hitherto only been discussed with reference to the Parnassians – which, as I argue in Chapter One, is not as important a dimension as one might expect. Savidis openly acknowledges the lack of a study on Cavafy and the visual arts, stating that such a perspective would highlight important aspects of his poetics.8 What is more, the central relevance of sculpture to the poetry of Sikelianos has barely been discussed in the scholarly literature. Finally, apart from occasional references to the importance of statues in Seferis’ poetry, the issue has not been taken up seriously by any critic – despite the fact that the importance of sculpture in Seferis’ work is indeed palpable and the need for such a study explicitly acknowledged.9

This book, then, aims to make a first step towards fulfilling this need. Its aim is to provide a general account of the impact of ancient Greek sculpture in modern Greek poetry between 1860 and 1960, covering the work of some major Romantic poets, Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos and Seferis. It seeks to explain how ancient Greek sculpture is appropriated by these influential poets, and to discuss what this tells us about their poetics and the relationship between them. But a ←14 | 15→few more words of justification are needed as for the choice of this subject.

Introduction
Poetry and Sculpture:Some General Considerations

In his famous essay Laocoon (1766), inspired by the sculpture of that name in the Vatican, Lessing attempted to show how poetry and the visual arts are subject to different laws and consequently should not be compared. The work’s subtitle, On the limits of painting and poetry, clearly reveals his stance. Poetry should remain faithful to the expressive means proper to itself, leaving sculpture and painting to do the same.1 For Lessing, any transgression of each art’s limits inevitably leads to failure and he gives descriptive poetry as an example. Defying Lessing’s theories, modern poets have constantly taken up the challenge of responding to the visual arts in various ways, and sculpture is prominent among them. And in the best cases this response proves to be a significant one because, as this book hopes to show, it can illuminate the poet’s attitude towards his own art. Poetry’s encounter with sculpture helps the poet, in each case, define what Cavafy would call

But in what ways can poetry be connected with sculpture? A poem may be in some formal sense sculptural, or it may include sculpture by using specific vocabulary or imagery taken from this art; or, indeed, it can be both these things at the same time. In the first case, a poem actually made of stone would be the most literal kind of response to sculpture, and this is indeed the case with Ian Hamilton Finlay.2 But the oldest tradition of sculptural poetry is that of the epigrams and epitaphs. As the preposition ‘epi-’ indicates, these poems ←17 | 18→were impressed, carved on the hard surface of metal or marble. So epigrams and epitaphs are literally lapidary verse, an attribute retained by these poetic forms even after they became independent from their original, chiselled setting.3 What may also enhance their sculptural character is the fact that they exhibit an association of simplicity and conciseness of expression with density of meaning and depth of thought, qualities often attributed to works of the visual arts and sculpture in particular. What is more, their immediate visual perception by the reader encourages their comparison with free-standing sculptural works. They must be appreciated in themselves, since they do not depend on any wider context, and their aphoristic style requires that the reader or viewer stands for some time looking at them, reflecting on their message.4

In the case of a poem containing sculptural vocabulary or imagery, however, the relation between poetry and sculpture becomes less literal. The poet is usually impressed by statues, reliefs or groups of sculpture, and in trying to be more vivid in his descriptions, he writes with such works in mind. In periods, especially, which favour a wider acquaintance with the arts (the Hellenistic, the Renaissance and after) this device enhances the iconic power of the description, and it also affords a distinctive kind of pleasure to the readers who delight in recognizing the works hidden behind the poet’s words. From this perspective Webster has discussed the presence of various works of art in the poetry of Theocritus, Callimachus, Herodas and others.5 Larrabee has done the same for English poetry from the Renaissance to the Romantics.6 A vivid example here would be Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, but a subtler one is his description of Haidée in the fourth Canto of Don Juan, discussed in some detail by James Heffernan. As the latter explains: ‘when her father threatens to shoot Juan she stands between them “pale, statue-like, and stern” (4.340). ←18 | 19→When he seizes her, she becomes a Laocoon in his arms, which grasp her “like a serpent’s coil” (4.381).’ Finally, Byron summons up three of the most famous statues of the Vatican to describe the girl when she falls into a coma: