Classical Association Conference, University of Edinburgh
Abstract
The way in which a poet’s life and actions are written about and understood can radically change the way their poetry is read. Likewise, the writing produced by a poet can alter the way in which we can understand their biographies and the stories that are told about them.
Sappho was no different. By taking two very different forms of writing about Sappho’s sexuality, my paper will assess the disparity between how she was written about in the small biographies, ‘Lives’ which accompanied the first English translations of her work in the early- and mid-eighteenth century, alongside the erotic pamphlet ‘The Sappho-an’. The biographies cover a period from 1713 to 1760, and are by George Sewell, John Addison and Francis Fawkes. These show how the life of Sappho, and explicitly her sexuality, was viewed through the eyes of someone working closely with her poetry or translating it. The anonymously-authored ‘Sappho-an’ from 1749 is not fettered by the weight of Sappho’s poetic text and re-imagines her in an entirely different, and more sexual, setting.
The tension between the ways in which these different genres discuss aspects of Sappho’s sexuality and sensuality creates a figure of the poet that is at once chaste but promiscuous, hetero- but homosexual, ‘real’ and yet mythologised. Alongside these conflicting ideas about the poet, there are also themes which create a wider idea of Sappho and her persona that can be found in both these types of writing, such as pedagogy and deep sensuality.
By re-thinking the ways in which Sappho’s persona was constructed through these two different genres, modern readers are able to gain an insight into the reasons why authors and contemporary readers made their decisions about Sappho’s life and how they each created their own, individual ideas of who Sappho was and what she loved.
Harriet Lander 