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 Judith Cowper Madan
The poem in its later version, headed with a quotation from Virgil , opens: Unequal, how shall I the search begin, / Or paint with artless hand the awful scene?
Concanen, Matthew, editor. The Flower-Piece. Walthoe, 1731.
130
JCM calls on the...
Textual Features Jane Barker
JB makes a pretence that the main story, the on-again off-again love of Bosvil and Galesia, is related by Galesia, in the garden at St Germain in about 1688, to someone called Lucasia (a name...
Textual Features Brigid Brophy
There is a strong flavour of Kafka about this comic parable both of a family and of a state. The royal family of Evarchia (somewhere in contemporary Middle or Eastern Europe) has an authoritarian father...
Textual Features Barbarina Brand Baroness Dacre
An epilogue by Thomas Moore sounds flippantly critical of Bluestockings (not the historical group of this name, but in the more general sense of intellectual women). A speaker appears wondering much what little knavish sprite...
Textual Features Frances Burney
The Woman-Hater again features Lady Smatter. This time she drops nearly five times as many authors' names as in The Witlings; only one, Sappho , is that of a woman.
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...
Textual Features Lady Margaret Sackville
She set most of her early poems in exotic places. More than one critic has heard the influence of Sappho in what are sometimes called LMS 's Hellenic verses. In A Hymn to Dionysus...
Textual Features Natalie Clifford Barney
In L'amour défenduNCB defends the proposition that only love is important, not the sex to whom it is directed.
Barney, Natalie Clifford, and Karla Jay. A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney. Translator Anna Livia, New Victoria Publishers, 1992.
85
She argues that every person possesses both masculine and feminine principles: We should not...
Textual Features L. E. L.
LEL's poetic persona in her title poem is deeply indebted to Germaine de Staël 's highly influential Corinne (1807), which depicts the contemporary woman artist as a spontaneous performer of verse to her own musical...
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...
Textual Features L. E. L.
However, LEL's version of the narratives of her female precursors presents a complex layering of voices framed by that of her Florentine improvisatrice. Even though the speaker has poured [her] full and burning heart /...
Textual Production Elizabeth Singer Rowe
Jane Turell of Massachusetts (a generation younger than ESR , the daughter of her old admirer Benjamin Colman ) emulated Rowe so single-mindedly that Melanie Bigold feels she became a kind of American Rowe. She...
Textual Production Anne Carson
AC 's poetry collection Men in the Off Hours, 2000, variously inhabits the minds (and bodies) of Tolstoy , Lazarus, Freud , Catullus , Sappho and Emily Dickinson , not to mention the French...
Textual Production Christina Rossetti
In Sappho, as also in another poem on the Greek lyricist written two years later, fifteen-year-old CR signalled her interest in the female poetic tradition.
Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Editor Crump, Rebecca W., Louisiana State University Press, 1979–1990, 3 vols.
3: 392, 423
Textual Production Mary Robinson
MR issued one of her best-known works, a sequence of forty-four erotic sonnets entitled Sappho and Phaon.
Robinson, Mary. “Introduction”. Perdita: The Memoirs of Mary Robinson, edited by Moses Joseph Levy, Peter Owen, 1994.
xiii

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