Women Born Before The 19th Century

"Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)"

"Frederick Tennyson, The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcaeus (1890) p. 91"

"H. T. Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, 2nd ed. (London: David Stott, 1887)"

"J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1st series, 1873; 2nd series, 1876; revised 1883)"

"D. G. Rossetti, Poems (1870; 2nd ed., 1881)"

"Edwin Arnold, The Poets of Greece (London: Cassell, Fetter, and Galpin, 1869)"

"Thomas Moore, Evenings in Greece (1826) p. 18"

"Ambrose Philips, Pastorals, Epistles, Odes, &c. with Translations from Pindar, Anacreon, and Sappho (1748)"

"John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, [with] the Odes, Fragments and Epigrams of Sappho (London: J. Watts, 1735)"

"William Bowles, in Poems by Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, collected by N. Tate (London: J. Hindmarsh, 1685) p. 85"

"Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd: or, A Tale of Robin Hood (1641) act 2, sc. 5"

"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."

"Non veniunt in idem pudor atque amor."

"Of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses."

"And of the flowers of Sappho few, but roses."

"Ἐπιδειξαμένου γὰρ αὐτῷ τοῦ Μυρρινουσίου Φαίδρου λόγον ὑπὸ Λυσίου τοῦ Κεφάλου συγγεγραμμένον ἐρωτικόν, οὐκ ἔφη θαυμάζειν, πλῆρες τὸ στῆθος ἔχων ὥσπερ ἀγγεῖον ἀλλοτρίων ναμάτων, ἤ που Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς (οὕτω γὰρ αὐτὴν ὀνομάζων χαίρει διὰ τὴν ὥραν τῶν μελῶν, καίτοι μικρὰν οὖσαν καὶ μέλαιναν), ἢ Ἀνακρέοντος, φησίν, τοῦ σοφοῦ."

"Mascula Sappho."

"We knew...that Sappho had written love poems to women in 600 B.C."

"(What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?) Sappho, what else did you write?"

"One of the earliest -- and perhaps the first -- rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho...Much of Sappho's poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer. Though Attic poets and playwrights tried to destroy her by attacking her as a courtesan or "Lesbian" pervert, the German classical scholar, Welcker, in his Kleine Schriften, declares that such attacks were sheer calumny. Nor did they succeed in their aim. More than twenty centuries have honored the "sweet singer" of Aeolia."

"I wanted to hear Sappho’s laughter and the speech of her stringed shell.What I heard was whiskered mumble- ment of grammarians:Greek pterodactyls and Victorian dodos."

"When Judy Grahn wrote of the Greek poet Sappho she suggested that she was not the first woman poet in Western civilization, not a solitary female voice rising out of an otherwise barren plain. On the contrary, Grahn said, hers was the surviving voice, the last voice in a long line of women poets and artists-Sappho's works so badly fragmented because they were systematically destroyed. Grahn wrote: “And what was the nature of Sappho's wealth? She praised it often enough: love, beauty, grace, flowers, appropriate behavior to the gods, lovely clothing, intelligence, tenderness. Her poems are filled with the color purple, the color gold, the sun, flowers, especially the violet and the rose, and altars, deer, groves of trees, and the stories of the gods. Love, she said, is a tale-weaver. Wealthy? We own no kind of money that would buy us Sappho's wealth. In her world, women were central to themselves; they had to have been to write as she did. She lived on an island of women, in a company of women, from which she addressed all creation. And oh, how they listened.”"

"When everybody says "lesbian," a word connected with Sappho and the island of Lesbos, that automatically means that your forefathers and foremothers are European, that George Washington is the father of our country and Columbus discovered America-all false assumptions."

"Sappho thou coverest, Æolian land! The Muse who died, Who with the deathless Muses, hand in hand, Sang, side by side! Sappho, at once of Cypris and of Love The child and care; Sappho, that those immortal garlands wove For the Muses’ hair! Sappho, the joy of Hellas, and thy crown,— Ye Sisters dread, Who spin for mortals from the distaff down The threefold thread, Why span ye not for her unending days, Unsetting sun, For her who wrought the imperishable lays Of Helicon?"

"Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modem lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but flame. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading."

"To have beauty is to have only that, but to have goodness is to be beautiful too."

"The moon has set, And the Pleiades. Midnight. The hour has gone by. I sleep alone."

"When wrath runs rampage in your heart you must hold still that rambunctious tongue!"

"Neither honey nor bee for me."

"Evening, thou that bringest all that bright morning scattered; thou bringest the sheep, the goat, the child back to her mother."

"If you are my friend, stand up before me and scatter the grace that's in your eyes."

"The lovely-voiced harbinger of Spring, the nightingale."

"I have a fair daughter with a form like a golden flower, Cleïs the belovedest, above whom I [prize] nor all Lydia nor lovely [Lesbos]."

"Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bitter-sweet."

"Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go? I am gone and never come back to you. I never return."

"As the hyacinth which the shepherd tramples on the hill Lies upon the ground and lying bloometh purple still."

"Like the sweet apple reddening on the topmost branch, the topmost apple on the tip of the branch, and the pickers forgot it, well, no, they didn't forget, they just couldn't reach it."

"Sweet mother, I truly cannot weave my web; for I am o’erwhelmed through Aphrodite with love of a slender youth."

"Truly, I wish I were dead. She was weeping when she left me, and said many things to me, and said this: "How much we have suffered, Sappho. Truly, I don't want to leave you.""

"Do thou, O Dica, set garlands upon thy lovely hair, weaving sprigs of dill with thy delicate hands; for those who wear fair blossoms may surely stand first, even in the presence of Goddesses who look without favour upon those who come ungarlanded."

"O dream on your black wings you come when I am sleeping.Sweet is the god but still I am in agony and far from my strength.for I had hope (none now) to share something of the blessed gods,nor was I so foolish as to scorn pleasant toys.Now may I have all these things."

"Of course I am downcast and tremble with pity for my state when old age and wrinkles cover me,when Eros flies about and I pursue the glorious young. Pick up your lyreand sing to us of her who wears violets on her breasts. Sing especially of her who is wandering."

"But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead."

"A handsome man guards his image a while; a good man will one day take on beauty."

"I loved you, Atthis, once, long, long ago... You seemed to me a small, ungainly child."

"Eros has shaken my mind, wind sweeping down the mountain on oaks."

"The stars hide away their shining form around the lovely moon when in all her fullness she shines (over all) the earth."

"Look at him, just like a god, that man sitting across from you, whoever he is, listening to your close, sweet voice, your irresistible laughter And O yes, it sets my heart racing— one glance at you and I can't get any words out, my voice cracks, a thin flame runs under my skin, my eyes go blind, my ears ring, a cold sweat pours down my body, I tremble all over, turn paler than grass."

"Some say cavalry and others claim infantry or a fleet of long oars is the supreme sight on the black earth. I say it isthe one you love. And easily proved. Didn't Helen, who far surpassed all mortals in beauty, desert the best of men, her king,and sail off to Troy and forget her daughter and her dear parents? Merely Aphrodite's gaze made her readily bend and led her farfrom her path. These tales remind me now of Anaktoria who isn't here, yet I for onewould rather see her warm supple step and the sparkle in her face than watch all the chariots in Lydia and foot soldiers armored in glittering bronze."

"Come hither from Crete to this holy temple, where is your graceful grove of apple-trees, and altars smoking with frankincense. In it cool water sounds through apple-boughs; all the place is shadowed with roses, and from the quivering leaves sleep comes down. In it a meadow blossoms with spring flowers, where horses pasture, and there the breezes breathe sweetly....There, Cyprian, take chaplets and pour softly in gold cups nectar mingled with our feasting."