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 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
Textual Production Anne Carson
AC 's translations from Greek manage to incorporate some of the quirkiness of her original texts and titles. She titled If Not, Winter. Fragments of Sappho, 2002, from a poetic scrap that leaves the...
Textual Production Catherine Carswell
Few of CC 's poems survive, but in 1916 she was regularly sending poetry to Lawrence for critique. She was clearly choosing bleak material: his comments use the word stark three times in two sentences...
Textual Production Sarah Lewis
The American Sarah Lewis published her play Sappho , A Tragedy in Five Acts (which was reviewed in England and France, as well as the United States).
At least two sources, American Women...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Christine de Pisan
This is another important work on the social position of women, which musters all the strategies of late-medieval rhetorical debate in discussing such topics as female education and the institution of marriage. It praises distinguished...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anna Hume
AH 's version of Petrarch is both forceful and stylistically elegant, even when dealing in conventional style with the pangs of love. Her opening lines have a vigorous forward movement which is perhaps superior even...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sarah Lewis
The Last Hour of Sappho, in which the poet kills herself for love of Phaon, is a precursor to Lewis's five-act tragedy about Sappho, which was published a quarter-century or more later. SL sets...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Dacier
She did not adopt, however, her father's concept of Sappho. She says that she will defend Sappho's reputation against her detractors, and does so by a version of the great poet which is quite different...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Ann Browne
In 1840 MAB published in three of the Dublin University Magazine's monthly issues. Her Sketches from the Antique—Second Series (in September) centres on women in antiquity. The Victor Virgin describes girl athletes racing; although...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Ann Browne
Sappho at the Loom again uses the ancient poet as a way of writing about the balance, for a woman, of poetry with more conventional female attributes: 'Tis well to contemplate thee thus: / For...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Catharine Amy Dawson Scott
The historical Sappho had emerged by this date as a potentially lesbian or bisexual figure, for instance in the work of Swinburne ; Michael Field 's Long Ago was published this same year. Dawson's Sappho...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Naomi Mitchison
Her format here has stories or groups of stories introduced and ended with a poem. Topics range from ancient to contemporary, from sexuality to politics. The first poem has Phaedra telling her sister Ariadne about...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Elizabeth Moody
She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Carol Rumens
Its tributes to earlier women poets are grounded in Portrait of the Poet as a Little Girl (a belated, oblique answer to James Joyce ), which concludes on the patrilineal prize / which she, disarmed...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Germaine Greer
This book sets out to puncture what it regards as a bubble of uncritical admiration for poetry by women for the sake of the authors' gender. It decries the deodorized, depilated and submissive works of...

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