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 Bailey
She was mistaken in believing this to be a first: several translations had appeared, often together with the surviving poems of Sappho and occasionally with other poets as well, as in the version by Thomas Stanley
Textual Production Anne Bradstreet
His long, descriptive title begins: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America; or, Severall Poems, Compiled with Great Variety of Wit and Learning, Full of Delight, before going to enumerate the major poems...
Textual Production Stevie Smith
Someone suggested that SS should translate Sappho , but she responded that I can't make head nor tail of that ancient girl.
Smith, Stevie. Me Again. Editors Barbera, Jack and William McBrien, Vintage, 1983.
294
In 1960 she was working on a book about Hell for André Deutsch Limited
Textual Production Edith Sitwell
ES loved Christina Rossetti from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein . As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho . . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti and...
Textual Production Jane Porter
In 1800 appeared a pamphlet essay which may be by JP or to her and her sister : A Defence of the Profession of an Actor.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts: A Catalogue of Books By, For, and About Women of the British Isles, 1696-1892. Stuart Bennett Rare Books & Manuscripts, Feb. 2007.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Thomas McLean
Textual Production Natalie Clifford Barney
NCB , under the pseudonym Tryphê, published Cinq petits dialogues grecs, the first of which celebrates Sappho 's love for women.
Tryphe is a Greek word whose meanings include softness, luxuriousness, and wantonness.
Crane, Gregory, editor. Perseus Digital Library. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Causse, Michèle. Berthe ou un demi-siècle auprès de l’Amazone. Tierce, 1980.
248
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. University of Texas Press, 1986.
284
Textual Production Arabella Shore
It reprints some old and presents some new work, including a version of the popular Last Song of Sappho. Death and Immortality, the lead piece in the collection, was the last she had...
Textual Production Alexander Pope
His early translation Sapho to Phaon—which, like Ovid 's original, represents the woman poet as despairingly in love with a man who has rejected her—appeared in print in 1712 in the eighth edition of...
Textual Production Emily Dickinson
Their correspondence began when ED responded to an article Higginson wrote in the Atlantic Monthly entitled Letter to a Young Contributor, which was mostly devoted to describing the proper way to submit an unsolicited...
Textual Production Martha Fowke
It has recently been suggested among scholars that MF is the hitherto unidentified author of another and larger group of poems in the Barbados Gazette. Bill Overton thinks it possible, Phyllis Guskin thinks it...
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 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 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 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 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

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