An Apple Out of Reach: The Unattainable Ideal Beloved and Sappho’s Poetics in the Poetry of Marguerite Yourcenar and Anne Carson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The way the Archaic Greek poet Sappho and her poetry is represented and engaged with in the writing of Anne Carson and Marguerite Yourcenar appears on the surface to be decidedly disparate.However, when the thematic elements of Yourcenar and Carson's respective Sapphic texts are excavated, the two authors in fact demonstrate resemblance, specifically in how they both engage with Sappho and her poetry as a way to push eroticism beyond the profane and into the realm of the sacred.By drawing on criticism of Sappho, moral philosophy, and other writings from Yourcenar and Carson, I argue that both Youcenar and Carson invoke Sappho as an incarnation of the ideal beloved inside the text and in their biographies.Attendant to this argument, I also present a reading of Yourcenar and Carson's Sapphic texts that highlights and then engages with misconceptions of their work and styles by drawing attention to previouslyneglected elements in their writing to draw them closer to a Sapphic 'tradition.' My own poetry, which is appended to the thesis, demonstrates how the imagery and themes discussed in the main body can be applied to articulations of the ideal beloved, even when the poetry is not explicitly Sapphic in origin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".