Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sappho
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Standard Name: Sappho
Birth Name: Sappho
Used Form: Sapho
Sappho
, the female poet who stands at the head of the lyric tradition in Europe, has been a major figure of identification, of desire, of influence, of adulation, and of opprobrium in British women's writing, though little remains of her texts. All of her estimated 12,000 lines of verse has been lost except a handful of complete poems and many fragments, either quotations of her work by other writers, or scraps deciphered from papyri used to wrap mummies in ancient Egypt. This mutilated body of work amounts to somewhere around seven hundred intelligible lines.
His long, descriptive title begins: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America; or, Severall Poems, Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, before going to enumerate the major poems...
Textual Production
Mary Bailey
She was mistaken in believing this to be a first: several translations had appeared, often together with the surviving poems of Sappho
and occasionally with other poets as well, as in the version by Thomas Stanley
Textual Production
Clara Reeve
Over the signature C. R., she asserted that women writing were a sign of the rapid progress of the present age towards the refinements of civilization.
The Lady’s Magazine. J. Wheble.
8 (1777): 538
Instead of the single Sappho
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Ann Browne
Sappho
at the Loom again uses the ancient poet as a way of writing about the balance, for a woman, of poetry with more conventional female attributes: 'Tis well to contemplate thee thus: / For...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Naomi Mitchison
Her format here has stories or groups of stories introduced and ended with a poem. Topics range from ancient to contemporary, from sexuality to politics. The first poem has Phaedra
telling her sister Ariadne
about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Germaine Greer
This book sets out to puncture what it regards as a bubble of uncritical admiration for poetry by women for the sake of the authors' gender. It decries the deodorized, depilated and submissive works of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Elizabeth Moody
She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce
), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Carson
For AC
, eros is a three point circuit between lover, beloved and that which comes between them.
Carson, Anne. Eros The Bittersweet. Princeton University Press.
16
In Kafka's story this geometry can be charted in the relationship between the philosoper, the top...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
H. D.
This analysis, or collection of aphorisms, treats the ideal of body-mind synthesis, and explores the springs of creation and imagination, and different forms that these take in men and women. The volume includes The Wise...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anne Carson
The book opens with a sequence of poems, Stops, about love for parents, recognition of approaching death, the the frailty of trivial detail weighted with emotional implication: To my mother, / love / of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho
, the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The historical Sappho
had emerged by this date as a potentially lesbian or bisexual figure, for instance in the work of Swinburne
; Michael Field
's Long Ago was published this same year. Dawson's Sappho...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Caroline Norton
The Picture of Sappho brings the gender and scandal nexus together within a meditation on poetic vocation and expression. As the title suggests, the speaker of the lyric reflects on Sappho
as a culturally produced...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay
, she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
