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 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.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House.
186
By this year, wrote Griffin Barry ...
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...
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...
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 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.
218 and n
Intertextuality and Influence Natalie Clifford Barney
Rewriting Ovid , NCB attributes Sappho 's death to her love for Timas, a young female disciple, instead of Phaon.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce.
249
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. Yale University Press.
2: 226
The text incorporates quotations from Sappho , together with footnotes in Greek and critical commentary.
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press.
291
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Maureen Duffy
Living her afterlife on Mount Parnassus, Duffy's Sappho is familiar with women poets who have written in English: her favourite is Aphra Behn .
Duffy, Maureen. “My Life with Aphra Behn”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
19
, No. 2.
244
Intertextuality and Influence Maria Barrell
The range of styles is wide: from sentiment to burlesque. Poems of sentiment include an epitaph on a woman who died of a broken heart. Others construct a narrative for Maria: she gently and...
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Lennox
The leading topics of these poems are love-relationships and women. The opening poem, A Pastoral, from the Song of Solomon, is erotic in tone. It ends: For Love's as strong as Death, and pow'rful...
Intertextuality and Influence Eavan Boland
Here she retains her focus on history and on women's lives. The relation between the two is paradoxical. Mise Eire (meaning I am Ireland)
McEvoy, Anne. Conversation about Eavan Boland with Isobel Grundy.
opens: I won't go back to it.
Boland, Eavan. Outside History. Norton.
78-9
Yet in...
Intertextuality and Influence Rosalind Coward
With essays under such titles as Ideal Homes, Kissing, Naughty but Nice: Food Pornography, and Men's Bodies, Female Desire interrogates the matter-of-fact details and events of everyday life, revealing the complex...
Intertextuality and Influence Sally Purcell
On a Cenotaph quotes a phrase from Baudelaire 's poem Lesbos: the shocking juxtaposition of a dead body with adoration in le cadavre adoré di Sapho . Though SP supplied notes to some things...
Intertextuality and Influence E. B. C. Jones
The book positions itself in relation to cultural, social and emotional markers that are not those of a majority in later times. Helen and Felicia read Northanger Abbey aloud, and Helen admits it to be...

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