SOURCE: “Passionate Beauty: Carman's Sappho Poems,” in Canadian Poetry, Vol. 27, Fall, 1990, pp. 40-45.

In the following essay, Nelson-McDermott reevaluates Carman's collection, Sappho Poems. He explains that previous critics have tended to discuss the Sappho poems in terms of Carman's “feminine” sensibilities; by contrast, Nelson-McDermott closely examines “Lyric LIV,” from Sappho Poems, in terms of its aesthetic qualities as a poem.

D.M.R. Bentley opens his “Preface: Minor Poets of a Superior Order” with a passage from Wallace Stevens:

At the library yesterday, I skipped through a half-dozen little volumes of poetry by Bliss Carman. I felt the need for poetry—of hearing again about April and frogs and marsh-noises and the “honey-colored moon”—of seeing—“oleanders /Glimmer in the moonlight.” You remember the fragments of Sappho. Carman has taken these fragments and imagined the whole of the poem of which each was a part. The result, in...