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Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne's “Homopoetics”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Paula Blank
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Abstract

If recent studies of homosexuality in Renaissance literature have helped to challenge the modern idea of an essential sexual identity, I aim to challenge the idea that homosexual desire has its source in sexual “sameness,” in an identity with another. Donne's “Sapho to Philaenis” participates in a common Renaissance discourse of likeness in love; his Sappho appeals to physical identity—the “sameness” of the bodies of two women—as the basis of an idealized passion. But in “Sapho to Philaenis” difference emerges as the only inviolable, invariable feature of erotic experience with another, and sameness is exposed as rhetorical rather than material, a contingency produced by Donne's comparative method. By comparing Sappho to Philaenis, Donne's poem suggests that sameness has to do not with the “nature” of homosexuality but with a cultural “homopoetics” that makes such likenesses and produces sexual identities.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 110 , Issue 3: Special Millennium issue , May 1995 , pp. 358 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1995

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