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.
Circular portrait from a fresco in ancient Pompeii, popularly identified as Sappho though it probably portrays a high-society Pompeian lady. She is clad in blue, green, and purple, with a gold net over her short, curly hair, and large gold hoop earrings. She holds a wax tablet and a stylus ready for writing. bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbNaples National Archaeological Museum.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Ann Yearsley
In the added lines AY modifies her original opinion that true friendship is impossible if the friends are not equals in rank. In the last of these poems (a complex discussion of the issue of...
Literary responses Ann Yearsley
Elizabeth Isabella Spence , reporting on a visit to Bristol, mentions AY as an example of an obscure woman writer of genius.
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
71
In 1990 Donna Landry wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...
Intertextuality and Influence Lady Mary Wroth
Interspersed in the body of Urania are fifty-nine poems and sonnets. As printed, the book concludes with three sonnet sequences comprising a further eighty-three sonnets and eighteen songs, in a freshly paginated section. These sequences...
Textual Features Jeanette Winterson
The novel's three apparently unconnected characters are breast surgeon Handel (erstwhile boy chorister, castrato, and Catholic priest; not the same as yet reminiscent of George Frederick Handel ), Picasso (a young woman whose family opposes...
death Anna Wickham
Although AW 's suicide came with little warning, she showed, in an unfinished autobiography written more than ten years earlier, a portentous awareness of a tradition of suicide among women poets: There have been few...
Textual Features Anne Wharton
AW 's To Mrs. A. Behn likens her to Sappho .
Textual Features Rosamund Marriott Watson
Her introduction demonstrates a good knowledge of ancient Greek poetry and its publication history. In addition to selections by Plato and Theocritus , the book includes single poems by Sappho and Erinna .
Watson, Rosamund Marriott, editor. Selections from the Greek Anthology. W. Scott.
xi-xii
Intertextuality and Influence Anna Jane Vardill
Her Attic Chest poems have an erudite flavour. She replies to Anacreon , writes A New Epistle from Sappho to Phaon, and signs other poems Aulus Gellius (author of the Latin Attic Nights)...
Textual Features Anna Jane Vardill
AJV translates from Sappho , Anacreon , Alcæus , Theocritus , Horace , and more recent poets: Petrarch and Camoens . She includes several charity poems: the one already published in aid of the Refuge for the Destitute
Education Alison Uttley
At Manchester, AU lived in the women's residence, Ashburne House. Formative teachers in her life included Hilda Oakeley
Oakeley, a Somerville College graduate and a close friend of Eleanor Rathbone , had a great impact...
Other Life Event Alison Uttley
She had precognitive dreams, including one about Sappho .
Characters Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan
In the society that Morgan depicts, the Irish Catholic gentry are mostly absent, scattered in European exile. The peasantry, dirt-poor but generous-hearted, include Tim O'Leary, schoolmaster of a hedge school, scholar and expert in Irish...
Textual Production Stevie Smith
Someone suggested that SS should translate Sappho , but she responded that I can't make head nor tail of that ancient girl.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage.
294
In 1960 she was working on a book about Hell for André Deutsch Limited
Textual Production Edith Sitwell
ES loved Christina Rossetti from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein . As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho . . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti and...
Textual Production Arabella Shore
It reprints some old and presents some new work, including a version of the popular Last Song of Sappho. Death and Immortality, the lead piece in the collection, was the last she had...

Timeline

Later 8th century BC: This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's...

Writing climate item

Later 8th century BC

This time probably saw the genesis of Homer's Iliad, though few dates are more hotly argued over, and the very existence of Homer as a person who created (traditional, formulaic, oral) epicpoems is arguable.

1555: French poet Louise Labé (c. 1520-1566), a...

Writing climate item

1555

French poetLouise Labé (c. 1520-1566), a salonnière in the city of Lyons, daughter and wife of rope-makers, published her Oeuvres at Lyons.

1691: William Walsh published anonymously A Dialogue...

Writing climate item

1691

William Walsh published anonymously A Dialogue Concerning Women, Being a Defence of the Sex, Written to Eugenia.

1764: German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch...

Writing climate item

1764

German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch first reached print with four separate publications at Berlin, most importantly a collection, Auserlesene Gedichte (edited for publication by J. G. Sulzer ).

1886: Eva Hope's Queens of Literature of the Victorian...

Women writers item

1886

Eva Hope 's Queens of Literature of the Victorian Era singled out Mary Somerville , Harriet Martineau , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Charlotte Brontë , George Eliot , and Felicia Hemans .

1968: Peter Jay founded Anvil Press Poetry, which...

Writing climate item

1968

Peter Jay founded Anvil Press Poetry , which by the early twenty-first century was based in Greenwich in south-east London, and described itself as England's longest-standing independent poetry publisher.

April 1972: Sappho began monthly publication in London...

Building item

April 1972

Sappho began monthly publication in London as one of the few magazines written for and about lesbians.

November 1981: The lesbian magazineSappho ended publication...

Building item

November 1981

The lesbianmagazineSappho ended publication in London.

1992: The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated...

Writing climate item

1992

The city of Leiden in the Netherlands initiated its Tegen-Beeld , or Wall Poems, by painting on a wall a poem by Marina Tsvetajeva or Tsvetaeva: the design is important as well as the words.

April 2016: A bot, or Twitter account programmed to issue...

Writing climate item

April 2016

A bot, or Twitter account programmed to issue a piece of writing divided into fragments of 140 characters or less, entitled Sappho @sapphobot, was launched this month and became Twitter's most popular poetry bot (apart from...

Texts

Burn, Andrew R., and Sappho. “Foreword”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone and Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. vii - xiii.
Burn, Andrew R. et al. “Introduction”. Lyrics in the Original Greek, translated by. Willis Barnstone, New York University Press, 1965, p. xvii - xxxi.
Sappho, and Anacreon. Les Poésies d’Anacréon et de Sapho. Translator Dacier, Anne, D. Thierry and C. Barbin, 1681.
Sappho, and Andrew R. Burn. Lyrics in the Original Greek. Translator Barnstone, Willis, New York University Press, 1965.