Archaic Torso of Apollo

"Archaic Torso of Apollo" is a sonnet with the rhyme scheme AbbA CddC EEf GfG.

[1] It is an ekphrasis—a rhetorical genre from ancient Greece that describes inanimate objects—of an archaic Greek sculpture of Apollo, of which only the torso and crotch area survive.

The poem argues that although the head is missing, the characteristics of the remaining body give an impression of what the complete statue must have been like.

[6] The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk used the final line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo" in the title of his book You Must Change Your Life, published in 2009.

The archaeologist Ulrich Hausmann [de] argued in 1947 that the poem's subject was the Miletus torso (c. 480–470 BC), a sculpture of a young man at the Louvre.