In the following excerpts, Snyder examines how Sappho's lyric poetry recontextualizes the patriarchal and heterosexual world of the Homeric epic, also surveying several of her lesser-known poetic fragments.
In the following essay, Gregory reveals how H.D. evokes the erotic lyricism of Sappho and the elemental power and imagery of the sea in the poems of her Sea Garden.
In the following essay, Lardinois questions modern historical reconstructions of Sappho as either a school-mistress or a symposiast, claiming instead that the historical evidence is most consistent with her occupation as an “instructor of young women's choruses.”
In the following excerpt from her monograph containing feminist, materialist, and historicist approaches to Sappho, Dubois uses the example of Sappho's fragmentary poem no. “31” to suggest the central importance of fragmentation and dismemberment to our modern, theoretical understanding and reconstruction of the antique past.
In the following essay, Peterson notes the literary influence of Sappho's poetry on Alfred, Lord Tennyson and, more broadly, on the “feminine” tradition in nineteenth-century English lyric verse.
In the following essay, Warren details the influence of translated Sapphic poetry on such writers as Catullus, Charles Baudelaire, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, with a principal focus on Sappho's poem known as “Phainetai moi.”
In the following essay, Miller applies a Bakhtinian theory of lyric dialogism to Sappho's fragment number “31” and Catullus's translation of this poem, in order to suggest that the two works reflect radically different genres of composition.
In the following essay, O'Higgins explicates the Sappho poem referred to as “Phainetai moi” (fragment no. “31”) in the context of a verse response by Catullus.
In the following essay, DeJean probes Ovid's fictionalization of Sappho in his Heroides as an abandoned woman who kills herself because of unrequited love.
In the following essay, DeJean concentrates on Sappho's resistance to the objectifying male erotic gaze in favor of a poetic vision that reflects feminine desire.
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.”
In the following essay, Nelson-McDermott reevaluates Carman's collection, Sappho Poems. He explains that previous critics have tended to discuss the Sappho poems in terms of Carman's “feminine” sensibilities; by contrast, Nelson-McDermott closely examines “Lyric LIV,” from Sappho Poems, in terms of its aesthetic qualities as a poem.
In the following excerpt, Bevington explores Elizabethan dramatist John Lyly's version of the Sappho myth—derived from Ovid—in his 1584 play Sappho and Phao.
