"The Sappho Companion" by Margaret Reynolds

Hunchbacked English poet Alexander Pope (who translated Ovid's Sappho poem) showed just how flexible Sappho references could be when he got into a terrible feud with famous intellectual beauty Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in the 18th century. He had once adored her and compared her verses to Sappho's. The precise nature of their quarrel remains a mystery, but he began to revile her in the press, accusing Lady Mary of being "greasy," syphilitic and a whore -- all under the name of Sappho, although it seems that everyone who read these attacks knew exactly whom he was talking about. Lady Mary displayed an ambivalence toward Sappho common in women of literary ambition: She countered the insults but didn't disavow the sobriquet -- it was flattering after all to be likened to the greatest female poet of all time, even if that meant also assuming the mantle of infamy that came with it.

As often as not, even those who didn't quite understand the precise nature of Sappho's sexual inclinations still believed her to be a sexual deviant of some kind. She was frequently portrayed as a heterosexual prostitute, or as an unattractive older woman chasing after a gorgeous boy. One of the delights of Reynolds' "Companion" is that it collects all sorts of not necessarily sterling but nevertheless fascinating ephemera along with the work of major writers. Besides veiled slanders, like Pope's, directed at various well-known literary ladies by men who owed them money or had been romantically spurned, there are librettos for lurid and sentimental stage productions in which lovers titillatingly recline on bowers and everyone dies in the end by preposterous means.

One jolly-sounding poetess wrote a comic poem in which the lovelorn Sappho gives up her books in order to "cultivate the culinary arts" ("Teach me more winning arts to try/to salt the ham, to mix the pie") and win Phaon's love. And there are some downright dirty verses in which Sappho complains that Phaon once but no longer "clap'd my Buttocks, o're and o're agen" and, in another burlesque, a more knowing gentleman sympathizes with the "fair maid" who "must bear/When some rough marksman to a hair,/Shoots at the little crack." You don't find this stuff in the Norton Anthology.

In the 19th century, the Romantics, who loved a towering, rocky, gloomy cliff -- especially with a thinly clad woman at the brink of it -- had more sympathy for Sappho and her terrible, if entirely mythical, doom. Disheveled, with her now-useless lyre (emblem of her art) cast thoughtlessly aside, she was the embodiment of the passions' toll on the sensitive spirit. Around the same time, a book called "La Nouvelle Sapho" became a perennial bestseller in the booming underground pornography market; it offered a confidential account of a lesbian cult that conducted their "unnatural" rites under a bust of the poet who gave their sexual orientation its name. The decadents, particularly Baudelaire and Swinburne, loved Sappho, whom they saw as a sublimely immoral voluptuary. Poet George Moore wrote a verse drama in which she is a heartless dominatrix who permits a girl who is in love with a youth who is himself in love with Sappho to impersonate her in order to spend one night with the man; the condition is that the girl must first sleep with Sappho and, second, agree to kill the youth in the morning.

Both of these images of Sappho -- the victim of love and the titillating libertine -- were preferred by men; women tended to see her as an inspiring, if also cautionary, figure. When contemporary novelist Jeanette Winterson imagined a cranky reincarnated Sappho returning to contemporary times, she has her say, "I have a lot of questions, not least WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?" The complaint works both literally and figuratively: Most of Sappho's work was lost, the papyri it was written on used for compost and tinder, but by the dawn of the 20th century even what survived of her verse had been eclipsed by her reputation.

Yet some of the most sensational depictions of Sappho do have a seed in her writings. She is a poet of desire, who nakedly voices both its delights and its pains. She describes love as a "limb-loosening King," and in perhaps her most famous fragment, in which she watches with keen envy the young man who sits next to her beloved at a feast, she suffers what has since become the prototypical case of lovesickness:

... At mere sight of you
my voice falters, my tongue
is broken.

Straightway, a delicate fire runs in
my limbs; my eyes
are blinded and my ears
thunder.

Sweat pours out: a trembling hunts
me down. I grow paler
than dry grass and lack little
of dying.

That translation is William Carlos Williams', and surely Winterson's Sappho cannot fairly accuse the modernist poets of the early 20th century of neglecting her verse. Ezra Pound idolized her poetry, and H.D. patterned her entire ouevre and perhaps a good deal of her personal life on Sappho's. If the Lesbian poet has since become too crude a symbol of female homosexuality (Winterson, a Sapphic sexual outlaw herself, was probably jeering at this p.c. appropriation), she has survived much more burdensome typecasting. In the end, her poems are the one constant thing, and they've already proven themselves immortal.

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)