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 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Each issue of To the Imitator was priced at sixpence. One appeared through a trade publisher, James Roberts , and one through a mercury, Anne Dodd . Both these were pamphlet-producers who offered...
Textual Production Maureen Duffy
MD published with Sappho Publications (which also published the lesbian magazine Sappho, 1972-81, on behalf of the London lesbian social club of that name) another volume of poetry, entitled Evesong.
Duffy, Maureen. Collected Poems. Hamish Hamilton, 1985.
prelims, xv
Murdoch, Iris. Living on Paper. Editors Horner, Avril and Ann Rowe, Chatto and Windus, 2015.
401
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Anne Carson
The book opens with a sequence of poems, Stops, about love for parents, recognition of approaching death, the the frailty of trivial detail weighted with emotional implication: To my mother, / love / of...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Caroline Norton
The Picture of Sappho brings the gender and scandal nexus together within a meditation on poetic vocation and expression. As the title suggests, the speaker of the lyric reflects on Sappho as a culturally produced...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Matilda Betham
Catharine Macaulay , she insists, was pleasing and delicate in her person, and a woman of great feeling and indisputable abilities, though the democratic spirit of her writings has made them fall into disrepute.
Feminist Companion Archive.
She...
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...

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