Sappho Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Eileen Gregory

Critical Essay by Eileen Gregory

SOURCE: Gregory, Eileen. “Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H. D.'s Sea Garden.” Contemporary Literature 27, no. 4 (winter 1986): 525-52.

In the following essay, Gregory explores the poetry of Sappho in terms of its influence on Hilda Doolittle, characterizing the Greek poet's work as “the timeless matter of ephemeral feeling.”

If we accept Sappho as a great erotic poet, Paul Friedrich suggests, “then her body becomes an icon for a myth of the inner life” (113). What are the contours of the myth seen through this female “body” of language? What is that interior landscape of Lesbos, and how is it present in H.D.'s Sea Garden? I would like to evoke Sappho herself, as her poetry—in translation—can render her presence, and to evoke as well H.D.'s Sappho. H.D.'s specific meditation on the Greek poet, recently published as “The Wise Sappho,” has great resonance in the world of Sea Garden.¹...
(read more)