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
Leisure and Society Rumer Godden
Her literary standards of judgement were high. Among women poets she accorded major status only to Sappho , Christina Rossetti , Emily Dickinson —not Elizabeth Barrett Browning —and to the more recent Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore .
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
218 and n
Leisure and Society L. E. L.
Soon after LEL left her mother's house, rumours of an illicit relationship with Jerdan began. The Sunday Times of 5 March 1826 intimated that a well-known English Sappho had produced a child two years previously...
Leisure and Society Felicia Hemans
She wrote of Paganini 's playing that its predominant expression was that of overpowering, passionate regret . . . it seemed as if the musician was himself about to let fall his instrument, and sink...
Literary responses Laurence Hope
A number of evaluations of Hope's work appeared at her death. Thomas Hardy 's obituary for her, printed in the Athenæum, praised the tropical luxuriance and Sapphic fervour of The Garden of Káma...
Literary responses Fidelia
Next month commentators were busy. Jane Brereton as Melissa addressed both Elizabeth Carter (whom, in her turn, she supposed to be an anonymous male writer) and Fido, whom she assured that Fidelia ought to...
Literary responses Kathleen Raine
Graham Greene responded to this book with what he called an enthusiastic if ignorant howl. Though he had already seen and admired some of her poems, he wrote, he had not realised the quantity of...
Literary responses Judith Cowper Madan
JCM reaped a good deal of praise during her lifetime, but most of it must have been of questionable value to her as a poet. Pope 's To Erinna is typical in casting her as...
Literary responses Lady Caroline Lamb
When Glenarvon first appeared, said Lady Caroline, William Lamb admired it so much that it was instrumental in bringing the separated couple back together.
Morgan, Sydney Owenson, Lady. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs. Editors Dixon, William Hepworth and Geraldine Jewsbury, AMS Press, 1975, 2 vols.
2: 202
Joanna Baillie discerned its author's ability, but added, Her...
Literary responses Judith Cowper Madan
Roger Lonsdale in 1990 followed Falconer Madan in supposing that her child-bearing and the influence of John Wesley and the Methodists amounted to sufficient explanation for her ceasing to write. Valerie Rumbold suggested in 1996...
Literary responses Mary Whateley Darwall
Before the appearance of her first book, Mary Whateley was celebrated by a Walsall poet, Stephen Chatterton , for excelling Sappho 's odes. During the same period, in 1861, the Gentleman's Magazine published an exaggerated...
Literary responses Anna Seward
The Critical praised her lively glow of imagination, and bewitching harmony of numbers
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
53 (1782): 230
in the poem it printed; it cited her previous elegies on Cook and André, and called her our modern...
Literary responses Edna St Vincent Millay
William Marion Reedy , who read this collection in proof, thought it splendid work—all shot through with brightness; the air of the open world in it too.
qtd. in
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
186
By this year, wrote Griffin Barry ...
Literary responses Mary Savage
The notice in the Critical Review reprinted MS 's prefatory essay on recent female improvements: Instead of the single Sappho of antiquity, we can muster many names of equal, and some of superior value, in...
Literary responses L. E. L.
The volume firmly established her trademark theme of the doomed romantic female poet, and this persona was strongly identified with LEL herself. Her Victorian biographer Laman Blanchard claimed that LEL and Sappho were voted one...
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, 1809, 2 vols.
71
In 1990 Donna Landry wrote of her complex contradictions under the heading...

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