Search Results

“... of the classics, particularly of lines that have come to us partially or paraphrased, like much of Sappho. It’s intriguing to think that Twombly might be trying to capture this lure of the fragmentary; certainly the intellectual discursiveness prompted by his work says something about our continuing desire to romanticise the past. But although he admired the ...”

“... Didion, the recondite references Franny keeps dropping – she looks down on ‘all poets except Sappho’, and namechecks Manlius while sipping a martini – were proof that Salinger’s writing was essentially ‘self-help copy … for the upper middle classes’. Why is it that unhappy narrators are often know-it-alls? Perhaps Frankie can’t help it. Her ...”

“... of the fragments of Archilochos (the first work by Davenport I encountered and was gripped by), Sappho, and his own masterpiece, A Geography of the Imagination. The letters display an intellectual exhilaration about academic discoveries and connections across genre, across eras: the melding of the present with the past is critical to both. The two men ...”

“... made it too ringingly portentous; instead, it is as light and as true and beautifully ordered as Sappho on the evening star. Most of Jennings’s work does not operate in this intensely sustained way. She likes to write short, conventional lyrics on themes such as her own childhood, artists, friends, sickness and health, seasons. She recalls that an early ...”

“... multiculturalism, where literature flourished: Anaximander was perhaps a generation younger than Sappho and Alcaeus, from nearby Lesbos.It’s hard to overstate how completely Homer dominated Greek intellectual culture at this time. He was seen as the fount of all knowledge: not only myth, history and theology, but ...”

“... ordered, comprehends everyone you might, after considerable searching, expect, including Sappho, Katherine Philips and James Kirkup (represented by two poems and a note simply stating why the text of the blasphemy-case poem is not printed), and some (to me at least) surprises, such as Wordsworth, Alcuin, Edmund Waller and Sir John Waller ...”

“... the female. Against this background stand a few prominent figures or individual utterances – Sappho the poetess, Philaenis the grande cocotte, Cornelia mother of the Gracchi, St Perpetua the martyr. But if there is a history to be written of the career woman in Antiquity, we lack the means to write it. Deconstruction is the best course, and the editors ...”

“... that he lives too long, but that he loses his youth: not dying merely prolongs that horror. The Sappho fragment recently recovered from the wrappings of a mummy includes the story as an illustration of its sad central truth: ‘Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.’ Zeus’ beloved Ganymede has no problem with immortality. Eternal, and eternally ...”

“... reasonably well with that of a thousand or two thousand years ago: Wyatt, Wang Wei, Propertius, Sappho. He is a plain-spoken metaphysical, purveying a teary elegance, clarity in confusion, insouciant reflection, irreducible unguardedness. There are many places one might begin with Hugo Williams: symmetry, dexterity, humour, found poems or ...”

“... The island of Lesbos: talk about a small world. Pick up any edition of Sappho’s fragments and the same old names keep coming up: Erinna, Gongyla, Attis, Kleis, Anactoria. You would think that after two thousand years these girls would be ready to quit the scene, but no, here they come again – a bit leathery from all the centuries of tennis and golf, but still the only game in town ...”

“... opens up into a dream-vision journey through the underworld in which the poet is accompanied by Sappho. I don’t know whether this is written in any direct response to Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, but its final depiction of the fading Sappho’s poetic laying-on of hands may be read as an oblique riposte to that ...”

“... the Cather-Lewis apartment in Greenwich Village. Visions of accomplished, larger-than-life women (Sappho, actresses, Wagnerian singers) deeply affected her fiction. In an astute reading of Cather’s early journalism and literary criticism, O’Brien traces the change from her initial Victorian view of art as masculine – she keenly admired Stevenson and ...”

“... by replication, whether seeking mechanical ways of copying sculptures – he cemented a bust of Sappho between metal plates, spending hours painstakingly drilling into her face and breast to get a perfect simulacrum of the stone poet – or lambasting his children for their departure from his patriarchal model. In a startling combination of the fantasies of ...”

“... unifying factors. The name is a pseudonym, alluding to the most famous female poet of antiquity, Sappho of Lesbos, or (and?) to the Greek verb lesbiazein, ‘to fellate’. The woman in question was almost certainly Clodia, the wife of Q. Caecilius Metellus Celer, consul in 60-59 BCE. If the identification is correct, Catullus was moving in exalted ...”

“... who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than names, such as Sappho or Menander, slowly acquired an oeuvre, as scattered fragments were lovingly pieced together. The new discoveries prompted classicists to ask what the differences were between ‘flower and fungus, wreath and rubbish’, as Sir Leslie Shane put it in ...”