Sappho Quotes
More Sappho Quotes
I am a passionate admire of Sappho, but that has to be one of the stupidest sentences I have ever seen in a scholarly book.
camille paglia— p. 204, on John Winkler’s claim that “Sappho’s consciousness is a larger circle enclosing the smaller one of Homer,” in Winkler’s Constraints of Desire.
Art thou the topmost apple The gatherers could reach, Reddening on the bough? Shall I not take thee?
bliss carman— Translation of Sappho, 53.
Belove' d, what are names but air? Choose thou whatever suits the line; Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage or Doris, Only, only call meThine.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— 1799 'Names', a translation from G E Lessing's German original (first published in the Morning Post,1803).
Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save That beast imbued with such immortal fire? Could she not live who life eternal gave?
Rochdale— 1812-18 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 39.
How should they know that Sappho lived and diedFaithful to love, not faithful to the lover,Never transfused and lost in what she loved,Never so wholly loving nor at peace.
sara teasdale— Sappho (Rivers to the Sea)
Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowingFrom the immense blue circle of the sea,And the soft thunder where long waves whiten —These were the same for Sappho as for me.Two thousand years — much has gone by forever,Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men —But here on the beaches that time passes overThe heart aches now as then.
sara teasdale— The Unchanging
Sappho and Emily Dickinson are the only woman geniuses in poetic history.
camille paglia— p. 203 (Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf)
The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."
kenneth rexroth— The Greek Anthology (p. 59)
Some thoughtlessly proclaim the Muses nine: A tenth is Sappho, maid divine.
— In Greek Anthology.
Ah! replied my gentle fair, Beloved, what are names but air? Choose thou whatever suits the line: Call me Sappho, call me Chloris, Call me Lalage, or Doris, Only, only, call me thine.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, What's in a Name.
Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.
— Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae (1990), p. 672
