Lesbian Poetry Essay Research Paper Lesbian PoetrySince

Lesbian Poetry Essay, Research Paper

Lesbian Poetry

Since the beginning of time writers have expressed their deepest thoughts and desires through poetry. In poetry, writers have found that they can express a thought, a memory, a person, a landscape, etc. More often authors write about love, both physical and mental. Found in this genre of love is intimate imagery, suggestive language, and exotic fanticies. Most published love poems express love relationships between men and women but what most anthologies and collections leave out are those that imply relationships involving individuals of the same gender, specifically women. Writers in all literary eras have eloquently described this romantic love between women. A few of the poets who wrote of homosexual love were in fact honored during their life, while others of them in more recent times have risked their careers as writers because they or their material were lesbian.

Sappho was a pioneer in many aspects of Greek culture. One of the great Greek lyrists and little known female poets of the ancient world, Sappho was born soon after 630BC. Aristocratic herself, she married a merchant and had a daughter named Cleis (Robinson 24). Her wealth gave her the chance to live however she chose, and she chose to spend her life studying the arts on the isle of Lesbos which was a cultural center in the seventh century BC. Sappho spent a majority of her time here, but she also traveled extensively through Greece (Robinson 35). She spent time in Sicily too, because she was exiled due to certain activities of her family. The residents of Syracuse were so honored of her presence that to pay homage to her they built a statue of her because she had become a well-known poet (Cantarello 56).

She was determined a lyrist because her poems were to be performed with the accompaniment of a lyre. She wrote her own music and adapted the dominant meter to what is now known as “Sapphic meter,” (Robinson 54). She became one of the Greek lyrists who began writing from the point of view of the individual instead of the view point of the gods and therefore made her contributions to lyric poetry in both technique and style (Robinson 55). She was also the first to write from the first person perspective which she used to speak of love and loss and how it personally affected her (Robinson 60).

Her innovative style was sensual and melodic. She mainly wrote songs of love, yearning, and reflection. The focus of her affections were commonly females, and many times it targeted women who had been sent to her to be enriched in the arts (Robinson 72). Sappho cared for these women, wrote poems of adoration to them, and when it came time for them to leave and marry, she wrote their wedding songs (Cantarella 58). “I have not had one word from her” tells of a sad parting between Sappho and one of her students. She tells her pupil to “Go, and be happy but remember . . . / Whom you leave shackled by love,” (Line 6-7). She also asks a women to come back to her in the poem “Please.” She writes “Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight, / You, my rose,” (Line 1-2). Her poetry was not condemned by her society, although later scholars ridiculed it. This hints that love between two women was not persecuted as harshly in Sappho’s time as it has been in more recent times (Cantarella 81). She has become synonymous with homosexual woman-love to the extent that two popular words describing it, lesbian and Sapphic, have been derived from her name (Robinson 20).

During her time she was honored immensely. Lesbian coins were minted with her picture imposed on them and Plato, the great Greek philosopher, heightened her position from great lyric poet to one of the muses (Robinson 21). More recently, many poets have cited Sappho as a strong influence on their work (Cantarella 56). Given the popularity of her works, it is surprising that just one of her poems is accessible in its entirety; the rest are in fragments of their original form. Though there were possibly complete volumes published at one time, over the centuries due to neglect, natural disasters, and censorship they were lost (Robinson 100). From ancient times up until the present, Sappho has remained an important figure in literature and culture.

It is not very surprising to find lesbian poetry during the nineteenth century, labeled as being the Romantic Period, since throughout this time there was “new emphases on imagination, on feeling,” (Mack 443). Emily Dickinson, a Romantic writer born in Amherst, Massachutteses, attended the Amherst Academy and spent a year at the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary but left because she disliked the religious surroundings (Cody 10-12). While in her twenties she led an active social life though she became more introverted with the passing years (Cody 24). During her thirties she developed the status of a myth because she was rarely seen but when people did catch a glimpse of her, she was wearing white (Cody 30). Although she hardly ever got out she did not withdraw from society on a mental level. Dickinson wrote many letters to correspond with many friends and relatives. The letters which survived her death proved that her letter writing skills were comparable to her talent as a poet (Cody 38). In her writings she is “enigmatic and abstract, sometimes fragmented, and often forcefully sudden in emotion.” She often included her poetry in these letters an