SOURCE: Davenport, Guy. Review of Eros the Bittersweet, by Anne Carson. Grand Street 6, no. 3 (spring 1987): 184-91.

In the following review, Davenport asserts that Eros the Bittersweet is a “brilliant essay” and observes that Carson's writing “teaches us ancient verities in a bright new way.”

Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's artist named for an artificer who wore wings, a symbol of transcendence, escape and freedom, says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, using words whose meanings were shaped by Aristotle, Scholasticism and modern science, “The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like that to the cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful...