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
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...
Wealth and Poverty Elizabeth Singer Rowe
She gave away (on religious principles) half her annual income (she owned some property at Ilchester, her birthplace) as well the only recorded instance of earnings from one of her books. On the whole she...

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Texts

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