Sappho(s)

Page duBois
University of California-San Diego, USA

Introduction
Sappho’s is the only woman poet’s work of any length that survives from ancient Greece.
Her work looks back to Homeric epic, engages with the poetry of her contemporaries,
archaic Greek lyricists, and survives not only through the memory and acknowledgment of
other ancient writers, but also through the fragments of her verses that were preserved in the
Egyptian sands. Her place in world literature is assured not only by her great poetic gifts,
but also by the connections we can draw between her words and the wider Mediterranean
and beyond, into a long history of allusion and homage. Her work touches on European
beginnings of literariness, on Asian contacts and influences, and sets same-sex female desire
at the very origins of Mediterranean civilization. Although there are controversies about
her person, about the degree to which we can discern an “author” in the fragments that
have survived, the work itself sets a high standard for the poetics that follow, in terms of
form, intensity, and the play between intimacies and ritual. The ancient literary theorist
Longinus justifiably calls her work “sublime.”
One of the Lesbian lyric poet Sappho’s most haunting fragments has been listed as num-
ber 48, preserved in a letter written by the Roman emperor Julian, the apostate who tried
to turn the Roman Empire back from Christianity to “paganism,” or the polytheist wor-
ship of many gods. He writes to Iamblichus, long dead, but a model of pagan philosophy,
and cites these lines from Sappho:

you arrived, and I was yearning after you,

and you cooled my heart, which was burning with desire
(Daley 2011)
A Companion to World Literature. Edited by Ken Seigneurie.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118635193.ctwl0040
2 Lyric Poetry

It’s difficult to convey the complexity of the ancient Greek fragment, embedded in this
letter to an imaginary audience. The sounds in Greek echo and repeat and rhyme internally,
creating a tight weave of great intensity. For example, in the Greek, the ending of the word
ego, “I,” rhymes with that of “yearning,” potho, so that the voice in the poem, the speaker,
the singer of these brief and fragmentary lines, in some sense becomes yearning itself. This
skill at compression is one of the great gifts of Sappho’s poetry, among those which lead the
ancient literary theorist Longinus, author of a treatise on “the sublime,” to praise Sappho,
and to preserve one of her most influential poems, of which more later. Sappho was not
just an erotic poet; she also wrote poems for ritual occasions, to be performed by choruses,
hymns to the gods, songs for wedding celebrations. But one crucial element of her legacy
in the history of world literature is her ability to capture the paradoxical, contradictory
nature of desire, and to recollect and recreate the experience of yearning in verse, even in
the tiny fragment cited by the last pagan emperor of Rome.
We can imagine the person Sappho, and others, including dramatists, novelists, and
scholars, have done so, and attributed a biography, a life, loves, a marriage, a suicide to the
figure imagined. But it might be best rather to imagine a network, a set of associations
that lead out from a set of poems, that allow readers, and listeners, audiences ancient and
modern, to connect with these verses, through appreciation of their beauty, imagination
of their creator, or tracking of their influences through many centuries. In what follows, I
will try to lay out some of the threads of this network, but without assuming that this can
ever be an exhaustive study of the figure of Sappho.

The Life of Sappho

Sappho seems to have spent most of her life on the eastern Mediterranean island of Lesbos,
near the coast of what is now Turkey. Much of what we think we know of Sappho’s life
comes from later sources in antiquity, and their reliability is questionable, since some of
their information comes hundreds of years after the time of her life. Some of it may be drawn
from the poetry itself, a notoriously suspect source, since ancient authors would extrapolate
from what they read into the situations obliquely represented in some of her most famous
poems. Although new poems have surfaced in recent years, in papyrus fragments, of which
more later, they do not offer much more information about the facts of her life. Some of what
we already think we know has been confirmed to a degree by recent findings, for example
a poem that addresses a brother, a brother who had already been known through mention
of him in the work of Herodotus, a fifth-century bce historical writer. Yet we cannot be
sure, of course, of the realities of the situation depicted even in the poem recently found on
a papyrus. Such are the difficulties of crafting a biography for archaic poets and others; the
temptation to draw a full portrait of the sort modern writers have is often irresistible, and it
is especially strong in the case of Sappho, whose life as a female, and same-sex lover, makes
her such a rarity in the history of premodern world literature. Some scholars have argued
that her biography is irrelevant to the literary qualities of her poetry, which continued to
be highly respected, especially in Greek antiquity, so that the details of her history, her
family, marital entanglements, relationships with others need not be pinned down in order
to appreciate her poetry.
 Sappho(s) 3

I will simply note here some of what is reported about her, urging a skeptical attitude
on the part of the reader concerning more dubious aspects of the biography. Sappho is said
to be the daughter of a man named Scamandronymus. His name suggests a river in Asia
Minor, that is, Western Asia, so this may either indicate that he lived in, came from, or
was from a family that had not always inhabited the island of Lesbos. Her mother was
named Kleis, although this too has been called into question, since one of the poems of
Sappho speaks of a girl, some say a daughter, some a slave, named Kleis. The fragment
(131), from a handbook on poetic meters, says that she has a beautiful pais, that is, “a girl,”
or a slave, and that she wouldn’t trade all of Lydia, a country in Asia Minor, for this adored
person.
According to these later sources, Sappho was born at a date that we can calculate, using
other reference points, at about 612 bce, that is “before the common era,” that is, before
the Western calendar’s year one. She had three brothers, one of whom is mentioned by the
ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and whose name also appears in that recently discovered
papyrus fragment that had lain unnoticed in a German library. This brother appears to have
been troublesome to the family, to have squandered his money on a slave/hetaera (a paid
companion, resembling a geisha), and to have returned penniless to Lesbos after buying
the freedom of Rhodopis, the rose-faced girl, in Egypt. Some reports concerning Sappho
in antiquity call her a lover of women. And an ancient source claims that she was short,
dark, and most unpleasant to look at. Much of this information comes to us very late, from
800 years after her lifetime. She may have been involved in aristocratic power struggles in
the Lesbian city of Mytilene, and spent time in exile on the island of Sicily. The Roman
orator Cicero mentions a statue depicting her there.
Another part of the network of information with Sappho at its heart describes a
desperate love affair with a ferryman, Phaon. She desired him, it is said, but he did not
reciprocate her desire, and in despair she threw herself from “the white rock,” and died.
The classical scholar Gregory Nagy has written eloquently about the significance of this
mythic episode, which he links to very ancient ideas about the death of the sun, its falling
into the sea every evening, and being reborn every morning (Nagy 1996). Aphrodite,
goddess of eros, of sexual desire, was associated with the evening and morning stars. Nagy
connects the mythic pattern with very ancient Indo-European, prehistoric patterns of
worship that have left their traces in Vedic Sanskrit culture as well as in the poetry of
Sappho. The literariness of Sappho thus implies a worldliness, currents that connect her
with the cultural legacies of prehistoric peoples, nomads who may have inhabited Central
Asia and wandered early in human history into Europe and South Asia, and that came
in her case to produce a narrative concerning her erotic life. The story of Phaon served
as a background for subsequent heterosexualization of Sappho. Although she had been
known as a lover of women in the archaic and classical Greek worlds (seventh to third
centuries bce), generations that followed, some of them affected by cultural disapproval
of eroticism in general, or homoerotic attachments in particular, began to emphasize her
love for Phaon, the ferryman, and her suicide. Thus the life, the figure of Sappho, could be
considered to be almost imaginary, imagined, an absent center around which a network of
associations grows up over many centuries. The tradition attributes poems to the woman,
but it is difficult to disentangle the poems from the legacy of narratives concerning
her life.
4 Lyric Poetry

Homer
One salient strand in the network of literariness at the heart of which we find the name
Sappho is the name Homer. Homer, a name which in Greek means “hostage,” became
the site where which the ancient Greeks collected crucial narratives concerning their past.
The writing down of some of these narratives assured their survival in the traditions of
Western literature, as the first European poems, but in fact, like most artifacts from the
ancient Mediterranean, their reference extends to Asia and Africa, perhaps more even than
to mainland Greece itself. Homer himself was said to have been born on one of the Greek
islands near the coast of western Asia. The extant poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, focus
on events that occurred at Troy, in Asia, and on the voyage of return of one of the Greek
warriors who fought in the Trojan War, Odysseus. We know of other narrative strands from
this tradition, which preserved these stories orally, because they are summarized or referred
to in other ancient texts, but these are the poems that have come to represent “Homer” for
later generations. Although there may be countless references to these other narratives, to
the coming of the Amazons to help the Trojans, for example, we lack the poems themselves
in which these episodes are told. All becomes a crucial matrix not only for classical Greek
tragedy, but also for the poets of Sappho’s generation, who inherited the epic poems of
Homer, found the complexities of Bronze Age warrior culture there, models of aristocratic
ethics and behavior, and a vast number of poetic resources as well.
We might call Sappho’s relationship to the Homeric poems intertextuality, if there were
in fact texts to be considered. But we have very little of the epics later referred to as Homeric
poems, and we have very few fragments of Sappho’s verse. Yet there are moments in which
we find the Sapphic verses alluding to aspects of the Troy narratives, or obliquely respond-
ing to the warrior ethos that governs much of the Homeric universe. For example, one of
Sappho’s fragments (number 44 in the conventional listing of the poems) concerns the wed-
ding of Hector and Andromache. Hector was a favored offspring of the king of Troy, Priam,
one of 50 sons and 50 daughters. Andromache was a prize; she came to Troy after her fam-
ily had been annihilated by the Greek army, and its great hero Achilles. In a famous scene
in the Iliad, Hector leaves the battlefield and visits his wife and infant son Astyanax. The
legend goes that after Achilles killed Hector, the child was thrown and killed, down from
the battlements of Troy, and Andromache became the slave of Achilles’ son Neoptolemus
(and the subject of a later Greek tragedy by Euripides). In the Iliad, Hector speaks of his
fear that Andromache will become a slave of the Greeks, her “day of freedom” taken from
her. Sappho’s poem, quite fragmentary, refers to happier times, the day of their wedding:
Andromache comes to wed, and is called “delicate, graceful” and “quick-glancing.” In the
poem there are bracelets, elaborate robes, trinkets, drinking-cups, and ivory, as Andro-
mache comes, and maidens greet her, along with charioteers, music, maidens singing in a
chorus, echoes in the sky, myrrh and frankincense mingling, older women crying out, and a
song to Apollo in praise of the god-like Hector and Andromache. Sappho’s joyous wedding
song, though, must be heard against the backdrop of the epic story, the defeat of Troy in
the war to come, the death of Hector and their son, and the enslavement of the bride.
Sappho’s embeddedness in this literary tradition inherited from the epic narratives, the
poems of Homer sung in aristocratic courts, can be seen in her allusions to the language of
the battlefield in the Iliad. Fragment 31, preserved in the treatise on the sublime attributed
 Sappho(s) 5

to Longinus, is spoken in the voice of the poet, who expresses psychic and physical distress
at the sight of a beloved woman laughing with a man seated near her. The poet describes
a trembling heart, speechlessness, a broken tongue, fire beneath the skin. In language that
recalls Homer’s descriptions of warriors in distress in battle, the first-person singular in
this poem, the “I”, says that she cannot see, that her ears buzz, that sweat pours from her,
or that she experiences cold, that she trembles, that she is “greener than grass” at this sight.
She is just a little short of death. This poem has had great influence in the history of poetry,
in part through its account of these physical symptoms, and their paradoxical nature, the
simultaneous freezing and burning at the sight of the beloved. These impossibilities, heat
and frost taking over the body at once, a poem in words that recount speechlessness, become
characteristic of erotic intensity and suffering in the work of later poets. The intensity of
the battlefield has been transferred to the universe of erotic desire.
This literary transfer is most evident in fragment 1, found in a text called “On Literary
Composition,” written itself by a later author, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in
Rome in the first century bce. He cites Sappho’s poem as an example of “polished and
exuberant composition.” In a poem structured in some ways like a hymn, a ritual prayer
to the goddess Aphrodite, goddess of sexual desire, among other domains of existence,
the voice in the poem, the poet, Sappho, addresses the goddess Aphrodite, naming her,
praising her, begging her not to “tame” her. She asks Aphrodite to come, as she had in
the past, leaving Zeus’ golden house on Olympus, flying down to earth in a chariot drawn
by sparrows, and addressing Sappho with a smile on her face, asking what was troubling
her, what she wanted. Aphrodite speaks, in the poem, in this scene remembered from a
past visit: “Whom again do I persuade / to take you back into her love? Who, / Sappho,
is doing you wrong? If she runs off, soon she’ll be chasing. / If she refuses to accept gifts,
she’ll give them. / If she doesn’t love, soon she will love, / even unwillingly” (Daley 2011).
The voice in the poem recalls these past favors, given by this goddess of love (and of war),
and begs the goddess to come again. And most significantly, especially given the literary
matrix of the Homeric poems, especially the Iliad, where so much of the action takes
place on the battlefield, the voice in this poem requests: su d’auta / summakhos esso, that is,
“you yourself / fight on my side [be my summakhos].” Summakhos means “fellow-fighter,”
“martial ally,” “battle-mate,” the one who fights alongside. Sappho takes the martial
context of Homeric epic, and turns it to the domain of eros.
This poem seems to undermine scholars who have argued, in the context of the history of
sexuality, for a more reciprocal, gentler environment for female same-sex eros in the ancient
Greek world. In this poem, the goddess will force the object of desire not only to comply
with the desires of Sappho, but to pursue her. The metaphor of pursuit and flight, crucial
to the battlefield but also to the language of male homoerotic courtship in this culture,
appears here in this the first poem of the Sapphic corpus that comes down to us.

Archaic Lyric Poetry

Another of the many strands of literariness in which the fragments of Sappho are entangled
is the group of archaic lyric poets of her day. Some of the poets in the centuries after the
supposed composition of the Homeric epics (the eighth century bce) wrote in verse forms
used for insults, for reflections on warrior life. The most significant parallel to the work of
6 Lyric Poetry

Sappho is that of the poet Alcaeus (Alkaios in Greek). A contemporary of Sappho, he lived
like her on the island of Lesbos, is alleged to have become entangled in the complicated
internal political struggles of the island, in which aristocrats competed with each other
for hegemony, and tyrants, usurping monarchs, sometimes replaced traditional aristocratic
governance. Alkaios wrote of these struggles, of the city-state as analogous to a ship at sea
tossed by waves, threatened with capsizing. He describes an archaic great hall gleaming
with bronze weapons, and exile from the city. One of the most fascinating aspects of the
set of fragments attributed to Alcaeus concerns the radically different attitude he exhibits
toward the legendary beauty, Helen “of Troy,” that is, the daughter of Zeus and Leda,
conceived as Zeus raped Leda in the form of a swan. She gave birth to two eggs, one con-
taining the twins Castor and Pollux, the other Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra and her
sister Helen, who married Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. According to legend, many
suitors pursued Helen, and swore to avenge her husband if any man tried to abduct her.
Paris, also called Alexander, one of Priam’s 50 sons, arrived at the home of Menelaus and
stole Helen away to Troy. The Greeks assembled and sailed to Asia, besieged Troy, won
their famed victory, destroyed the city, and took Helen back.
Attitudes toward Helen herself varied. She appears in the Iliad as the unwilling subject
of Aphrodite, who leads her back to the bed of Paris. In the Odyssey, when she claims to
have supported the Greeks all along, when a captive in Troy, her husband Menelaus reminds
her of how she stood beside the “Trojan” horse, the huge figure of a horse the Greeks left
behind as they pretended to abandon the battlefield before the battlements at Troy. She, her
husband recalls, imitated the voices of the wives and women of the Greek warriors, testing
the horse to see if it contained the Greeks hidden inside, as it did. Odysseus, inside, forced
them not to respond to Helen’s cries. Even in Homer, her reputation is ambiguous at best.
At the hands of Alcaeus, and more and more as literary works refer to Helen, she becomes
a dangerous if not malevolent actor, the destroyer, cause of a terrible war. Alcaeus describes
her as a doer of evil deeds, and compares her to the lovely Thetis, mother of Achilles in
his fragment 42, which ends with the indictment: the Trojans and their city died for the
sake of Helen. In the fragment later editors numbered 283, found in papyri from ancient
Egypt, Alcaeus denounces her more forcefully. He calls her “maddened,” ekmaneisa, using
the language later deployed to depict the ecstatic female worshipers of the god Dionysus.
She was driven mad by her Trojan lover, left her child and her husband’s bed. And the
fragment ends with “dark-eyed” warriors trampled in the slaughter. Helen is guilty, crazed
by her deceiver lover, abandoning family and home, and responsible for the deaths of the
many Trojan warriors and ultimately for that of Achilles himself, killed on the battlefield
by her lover Paris.
Sappho represents Helen very differently. In fragment 16, like many others found on
an Egyptian papyrus, she presents a definition, a proto-philosophical question on value, a
mythic example to prove her point, and a celebration of a beloved woman:

Some men say an army of cavalry, others, a mass of footsoldiers,

And still others a host of ships, to be the most beautiful thing
upon the dark earth. But I say that thing is
Whatever one loves.
(Daley 2011)
 Sappho(s) 7

The poem asserts the claim that is easy to understand, for everyone, because the woman
who surpassed all others with respect to beauty, Helen, left the best of husbands, and went
sailing off to Troy, remembering neither child nor her dear parents. But (something, some-
one) led her away. The poem here breaks up into a fragmentary state, indecipherable even
by experts in reading the fragile, eroded surface of plant material that is an ancient papyrus.
But it returns to the name Anactoria, who is not present. And the poem continues:

I would rather see her lovely footstep

And the radiant sparkle of her face,
Than the chariots of the Lydians, and the footsoldiers
in their armor ...
(Daley 2011)

Then the fragment turns fragmentary and indecipherable again.

This poem is remarkable not only for its mastery of sound, so apparent in the ancient
Greek, but also in its structure, as it returns to the horsemen and infantrymen listed at its
beginning, having visited Helen, exemplary of the power of eros, or its goddess Aphrodite,
perhaps, to turn even the most renowned beauty ever away from familial duty. Helen can
serve as the witness of what is “the most beautiful thing,” being herself surpassingly beau-
tiful. Sappho, too, against the backdrop of the epic, invoked by these warriors, and by the
mention of the black earth, said again and again to hold the dead and buried Greeks and
Trojans, chooses not the anonymous array of fighters, but her own beloved, an individual,
the girl, or woman, Anactoria.

Sappho’s Works
The ancients knew nine books of Sappho’s verse, of which most has been lost, like much of
ancient writing. She was called “the tenth Muse,” and her works were collected according
to their meters by Alexandrian scholars. Many of these were performed by a solo singer;
others were hymns to the gods, wedding songs, called epithalamia, and some of the extant
works were composed for choral performance. Such poems are linked to other such early
Greek poets as Alcman, who wrote partheneia, or “maiden-songs,” to be performed by a
female chorus in the city of Sparta, sung and danced on ritual or festival occasions (Calame
1997). Sappho’s poetry invokes a network of female deities, including Hera, Aphrodite, the
Graces, and the Muses. She may have been the subject of comedies written in the classical
Athenian period, mocked for her erudition or her Lesbian desire for her own gender, but as
noted earlier, her work was greatly admired by many, including Longinus.
As noted above, recently new fragments attributed to Sappho have surfaced in papyrus
collections, giving further support to the recognition of Sappho as one of the greatest of
ancient poets. These poems sometimes supplement fragments already known to readers, or
confirm such information as Herodotus’ naming of her brothers in his Histories. One of the
most evocative of these poems (fr. 58) has the poet herself deploring her graying hair, her
loss of agility, and acknowledging the inevitability of old age and death, recalling the tale
of Tithonus, the mortal taken up by the goddess of the Dawn, Eos, who won immortality
for him from Zeus, but failed to ask for eternal youth. “For a human being, it’s not possible
to be ageless.”
8 Lyric Poetry

The term “lyric” refers to poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, although the
designation comes to signify songs sung to other stringed instruments or to the flute.
Sappho’s works include, as noted above, choral works as well as “monodic,” solo pieces. She
is thought to have been at the center of a network of girls, or young women, some of whom
she mentions by name, sometimes as objects of scorn, or of desire. The choral elements of
Sappho’s verse, hymns, that is prayers, may be replicated in such verse as the first fragment,
the prayer to Aphrodite, or the second fragment, which also summons Aphrodite from
Crete to the enchanted grove of the singer. Her reputation in antiquity rests on a great
body of work to which we have little access, but the intensity and beauty of the solo,
erotic verse command the respect of later generations. These poems often offer a complex
temporality, a gaze at the past of pleasure, intimacy, and female comraderies, and a longing,
a yearning, in Greek pothos, for that lost time (duBois 1995). Fragments 94 and 96, from a
sixth-century parchment, reveal these themes:
I wish I were dead! Literally. Dead.
She was weeping. She was going away from me.
Over and over, she said this to me:
“O how sublime, what we have experienced,
Sappho, and yet I am forced to leave you behind.”
And I could only reply by saying these things:
“Farewell. Go now, and remember
me. For you know how we cared for you,
and if not, well, that’s why I want
to remind you ...
... and those beautiful things we felt.
For the many crowns of violets
and roses and of crocuses intertwined,
... you put around yourself at my side,
And the many garlands woven from
flowers ...
circling your delicate neck
and with so much ... fragrant oil,
precious ... queenly ...
you anointed yourself.
and on soft beds
for your tender ...
you would satisfy your desire ...

and there was ... nor any

sacred place ...
from which we were absent,
no grove ... no dance
sound.
(Daley 2011, 94)
 Sappho(s) 9

Fragment 96 recalls a woman who has left the singer behind, stands out among the women
of Lydia, in Asia Minor, land of the war chariots of fragment 16, and as the moon rises over
flowers, feels her heart gnawed by pain. There is voluptuous pleasure recalled in yearning,
and a sense of loss that results in magnificent verse in recollection. These are the poems
that establish Sappho as one of the greatest erotic lyricists of all world literature.

Sappho’s Literary Legacy

Most of Sappho’s verses, highly esteemed in antiquity, have been lost over the centuries,
some only very recently discovered on fragments of ancient papyrus dug up from the sands
of Egypt. The representation of Sappho was transformed radically by the Roman poet Ovid,
who in his Heroides spoke in her voice of her unrequited love for the man, Phaon, and of her
imminent suicide. The understanding of Sappho in the post-Renaissance world was for a
long time focused on her death, on the romance of her yearning for this man, and on the
ways in which she stood for passionate and doomed eros rather than for “lesbianism.” Sap-
pho was seen not just as an exemplary female poet, but also and perhaps especially as a tragic
figure. Visual artists represented Sappho, often with the male object of her unrequited love,
Phaon, as in the work of the neoclassical painter David, who painted them together in 1809.
The poem now listed as fragment 31, preserved in the work of the ancient literary
theorist Longinus, was long known, admired, and translated again and again in the
centuries that followed the classical Greek era. Poets were dazzled and influenced by the
poem’s portrait of a lover gazing at her beloved and at a rival, and by the embodiment of
erotic distress in the form of trembling, blindness, loss of hearing, heat and cold, nearness
to death. Yopie Prins has written of the profound effects of reading Sappho on poets of the
Victorian age (Prins 1999).
The American poet Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who published as H.D., was, among
others, profoundly influenced by Sappho’s fragments. As a young woman she met William
Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, to whom she was briefly engaged. After
moving to London, she came to know the imagist poets, and Pound championed her work.
She had affairs with both women and men, and married the poet Richard Aldington; but
her most enduring relationship was with Annie Winifred Ellerman, the English novelist
known as “Bryher.” Bryher, like H.D., married and had male lovers, but the two saw them-
selves as Lesbian lesbians as well; Bryher’s memoir is entitled The Heart to Artemis. H.D.’s
sensuous life was unconventional, full, complex, and polymorphous, marked by attach-
ments to lovers of both genders, and by erotic suffering, it seems. H.D. was analyzed by Sig-
mund Freud, and later wrote of the experience in her Tribute to Freud. And while attracted
to Japanese poetry, and the haiku, H.D. along with the other imagists early on began to
derive inspiration from classical Greek poetry, and especially the archaic lyrics of Sappho.
The most explicit acknowledgment of H.D.’s fascination with Sappho comes in the text
entitled “The Wise Sappho,” written in 1920 but published in 1982 by City Lights Books,
from a manuscript in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.
H.D. begins this short essay by recalling the judgment of the Alexandrian poet Meleager,
in “The Garland,” where he weaves into his wreath concerning Sappho: “few, but roses.”
H.D.’s Sappho is not the worshiper of the Olympian gods, but a petulant, nervous Sappho,
10 Lyric Poetry

lashing out at her companions. She stands in the wind from Asia, in a western gale. H.D.
admires her poetic craft, sees her “artistic wisdom,” but questions her emotional, personal
wisdom, finding immoderation and inconstancy in love in her poetry. H.D.’s own epitaph,
inscribed on her grave in the family plot in Pennsylvania, reveals her debt to Sappho:

So you may say,

Greek flower; Greek ecstasy
reclaims forever
one who died
following intricate song’s
lost measure.

H.D. may have lacked the ecstatic identification with the ancient Lesbian poet that some
feminists, lesbians, and women poets have felt over the centuries, but her poetics, her sense
of Sappho as tortured, ironic, and not broken, persist in her verse and prose.
The American feminist and lesbian poet Judy Grahn published a set of essays called The
Highest Apple, in 1985, invoking Sappho in her title. Part III of this text is entitled “To
Surface with Lesbian Gods.” She lists the many gods of Sappho’s world, and continually
refers to her present as she reads Sappho’s fragments, writing of the lost old gods, and their
possible reclamation in modern lesbian poetry.
The influence of Sappho on twentieth-century women’s writing extended beyond the
Anglophone world. Alejandra Pizarnik, born in Argentina in 1936, lived in exile in Paris
and committed suicide in 1972. Her work explores eroticism, ecstasy, and depression, and
her verses echo some of Sappho’s themes: the archaic Greek lyricist’s delight and suffering in
same-sex desire, and the fragmentary form in which we must read her poems. For example,
in the poem entitled “Lovers”:
a flower
not far from the night
my mute body
opens
to the delicate urgency of dew

or the poem translated as “Dawn”:

Nude dreaming a solar night.

I have lain down animal days.
The wind and rain erased me
like a flame, like a poem
written on a wall.

These beautiful, anguished, Sapphic poems, difficult to find in English, were translated by
Frank Graziano, Maria Rosa Fort, and Suzanne Levine (Graziano 1987).
Cristina Peri Rossi, a Uruguayan writer born in 1941, was also exiled, and lives in Spain.
Her novel Ship of Fools satirizes dictatorships, embraces feminism, and addresses pederasty.
The book Evohé: poemas eroticos, published in Montevideo in 1971, takes its title, as she says,
 Sappho(s) 11

from “the onomatopoeic cry of the bacchantes during the feasts and rites paying homage to
Bacchus, the god of revelry and wine” (Peri Rossi 1991). She uses the term, however, as “an
amorous cry: the book proclaims love between two as a form of the Absolute as opposed to
the orgy of multiple partners” (7). She also notes that when first published, Evohé “provoked
a considerable scandal. Conditions at the time – just before the military dictatorship – were
not favorable to poetry or to erotica. Later, EVOHE was banned entirely, along with the rest
of my books” (8). Peri Rossi sets a fragment of Sappho as the epigrammatic prelude to her
book: “‘Once again Eros, loosener of limbs, tortures me, sweet and bitter, invincible crea-
ture” (9). These poems of Peri Rossi were translated by Diana P. Decker. Marked by humor,
defiance, and lesbian eros, Peri Rossi’s verses constitute a brilliant, bravado “translation” of
Sappho into another world.
These two women writers, poets of Latin America living in Europe, exemplify not only
a complex trans-Atlanticism, but also a moving negotiation of the difficulties of same-sex
love in contemporary societies, and the conscious and deliberate deployment of the rich
literary legacy of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho, excavated, rediscovered, inherited
from the ancient Mediterranean.
SEE ALSO: Introduction to World Literature Third Millennium bce to 600 ce; Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey;
From Epic to Lyric; Reading Ancient World Literature, Passionately; Heroism, Myth, and Memory Across
Cultures; Modern Poetry as a Global Phenomenon

References
Calame, Claude. 1997. Choruses of Young Women Symbols of Greek Lyric.” In Reading Sappho: Con-
in Ancient Greece, translated by Derek Collins temporary Approaches, edited by Ellen Greene,
and Janice Orion. Lanham, MD: Rowman & 35–57. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Littlefield. Peri Rossi, Cristina. 1991. Evohé: poemas eroti-
Daley, John, with Page duBois. 2011. Poetry of Sap- cos/Erotic Poems, translated by Diana P. Decker.
pho. San Francisco: Arion Press. Washington, DC: Azul Editions. First published
duBois, Page. 1995. Sappho Is Burning. Chicago: Montevideo, Uruguay, 1971.
University of Chicago Press. Prins, Yopie. 1999. Victorian Sappho. Princeton, NJ:
Graziano, Frank, ed. 1987. Alejandra Pizarnik: A Princeton University Press.
Profile. Durango, CO: Logbridge-Rhodes.
Nagy, Gregory. 1996. “Phaethon, Sappho’s Phaon,
and the White Rock of Leukas: Reading the

Further Reading
Carson, Anne. 2002. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Greene, Ellen, ed. 1996a. Reading Sappho: Contempo-
Sappho. New York: Knopf. rary Approaches. Berkeley: University of Califor-
Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.). 1982. Notes on “Thought & nia Press.
Vision” and “The Wise Sappho.” San Francisco: City Greene, Ellen, ed. 1996b. Re-Reading Sappho: Recep-
Lights Books. tion and Transmission. Berkeley: University of
Grahn, Judy. 1985. The Highest Apple: Sappho and California Press.
the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. San Francisco: Spin- Greene, Ellen, and Marilyn B. Skinner, eds.
sters, Ink. 2009. The New Sappho on Old Age: Textual and
12 Lyric Poetry

Philosophical Issues. Washington, DC: Center Skinner, Marilyn B. 2005. Sexuality in Greek and
for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard Roman Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
University. Williamson, Margaret. 1995. Sappho’s Immortal
Johnson, Marguerite. 2007. Ancients in Action: Sap- Daughters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
pho. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Press.