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
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...
Literary responses Frances Ridley Havergal
The Reverend Charles Tennyson Turner offered high praise for several of FRH 's poems and noted that Miss Havergal, Sappho and Mrs Browning constitute my present female trio. There may be others lying perdues to...
names Anne Bradstreet
  • BirthName: Anne Dudley
  • Married: Bradstreet
  • Pseudonyms: A Gentlewoman of those Parts
    Those parts of course signifies America.
    ; The Tenth Muse
    AB did not choose but was given this nickname, which had been bestowed originally...
Other Life Event Alison Uttley
She had precognitive dreams, including one about Sappho .
Performance of text Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB 's Equivoque, a play about Sappho , was privately performed in her garden.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce, 1980.
249
Performance of text Maureen Duffy
MD wrote a dramatic monologue to be spoken by Sappho (whose poems she had just been writing about), which was performed in London in 2010.
Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
19
, No. 2, 13 Feb. 2012.
244
Author summary Sarah Lewis
Sarah Anna Lewis was a mid-nineteenth-century American poet who is today better known for her association with Edgar Allan Poe than for her writings. She began her career with frequent periodical publications, then published four...
Author summary Michael Field
As MF , Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper published twenty-seven tragedies, mostly verse dramas on historical or classical subjects. Only one of their plays was staged, and it received poor reviews. Their unique literary...
Publishing Maureen Duffy
After this came Paper Wings, published in late 2014 in a limited edition of 100 copies in spiral binding. This resulted from an installation of the same title, shown by Enitharmon Press in an...
Publishing Michael Field
Printing of the book was limited to one hundred copies. (Robert Browning received no. 2.) It was beautifully bound in vellum and printed in two ink colours: MF 's poems in black and Sappho

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