Essay on Anne Carson, Sappho, & Virginia Woolf, With Poem



Today I read an essay on Slate.com about Anne Carson. The essay was all about the mention of her book Eros the Bittersweet on a TV show called The L-Word. What would Anne Carson think of this show? What would she do today if she were me? I don’t have her book, Men in the Off-Hours to refer to since it is packed already. I think Anne Carson would be amused by the TV show and is probably sitting in her sparse office right now typing away on her lap top some new great work of literature.

The only books that are not packed are sitting in two neat stacks on my desk.

The Unpacked Books

1. Gravity & Grace by Simone Weil
2. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
3. Mixed Plate by Faye Kicknosoway
4. Boccaccio’s Famous Women
5. Plays, Prose, Writings & Poems by Oscar Wilde
6. The Penguin Book of The Beats edited by Ann Charters
7. Dispatch Detroit edited by Christine Monhollen
8. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
9. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
10. The Tempest by William Shakespeare


The essay on Anne Carson stated that she is concerned with eros, irony, Artaud, Stein, TV, classicism and Sappho, to name a few. Consequently, Sappho appears in Chapter 47 of Boccaccio’s Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown, 193):

Sappho, Girl of Lesbos and Poetess

Sappho was a girl from the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. No other fact has reached us about her origin. But if we consider her métier, we will see restored to her part of what time has destroyed: namely, that Sappho must have been born of honorable and distinguished parents, for no ignoble soul could have wanted to write poetry, nor could a vulgar one have actually done it.

We do not know when Sappho lived. She was, however, of such a noble disposition that, in the bloom of youth and beauty, she was not satisfied solely to write in prose. Spurred on by a wider spiritual and intellectual fervor, Sappho studied diligently and ascended the steep slopes of Parnassus. On that lofty summit, with happy daring she joined the welcoming Muses. Wandering through the laurel grove, she arrived at the cave of Apollo, bathed in the Castalian spring, and took up Phoebus’ plectrum. As the sacred nymphs danced, this young girl did not hesitate to strike the strings of the resonant cithara and bring forth melodies, something that seems extremely difficult even for the most skilled of males.

In short, Sappho’s art reached such heights that her poetry, renowned in ancient testimony, is still famous in our own day. A bronze statue was erected and dedicated to her, and she was included among the famous poets. Such glory neither the crowns of kings nor pontifical mitres nor even the conquerors’ laurel can surpass.

But, if the story is true, Sappho was as unhappy in love as she was happy in her poetic craft. Either because of his wit or good looks or because of some other charm, she became infatuated with a young man (better still, fell prey to an intolerable pestilence). He, however, did not reciprocate her passion. Lamenting his stubborn resistance, Sappho is said to have composed mournful verses. I should have thought that these would be elegiac distichs, since they are appropriate to such subjects, had I not read that Sappho scorned the verse forms used by her predecessors and wrote a new kind of verse in a completely different meter which is called ‘Sapphic’ after her.

But to what effect? The muses, it seems, should be blamed: they were able to move the stones of Ogygia when Amphion played the lyre, but they were unwilling to soften the young man’s heart when Sappho sang.


With the idea in mind that Boccaccio was a man and susceptible to “heavy-handed moralizing as foreign to modern taste as it is possible to be” (Brown, xxii), one might excuse the lamenting rather than exhilarating note that he ends on in his history of Sappho. That the muses were “unwilling to soften the young man’s heart when Sappho sang,” seems like a dig against the Great Woman poet, and it makes me wonder if Boccaccio harbored jealousy for this woman who occupied a profession so similar to his own.

Curiosity spurring me onward, I pick up Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to find mention of Sappho, and I do on page 109:

Moreover, if you consider any great figure of the past, like Sappho, like the Lady Murasaki, like Emily Bronte, you will find that she is an inheritor as well as an originator and has come into existence because women have come to have the habit of writing naturally; so that even as a prelude to poetry such activity on your part would be invaluable.

In addition to the Sappho mention in Woolf’s book, I found notes from a telephone conversation I had with K. Mulcrone about Graduate School and New York City, among other things. She mentioned in the talk, the name of Sophia Coppola, a young director who recently won an Oscar for her film Lost in Translation, a film for which she wrote the screenplay. Having written a screenplay myself, I can appreciate the arduous labor involved and think again that I would like to read the Lost in Translation screenplay. In Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, she mentions again and again the possibilities for Shakespeare’s sister, if only she had become a writer. Shakespeare did indeed have a sister; unfortunately she didn’t write a single word because she died young and it was outside the realm of possibilities for a girl of her social standing to become a writer. What a woman writer needs, Woolf declared, is 500 pounds a month and a room of her own. I’m sure Sappho and Anne Carson would agree.

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Bouquet of Snapdragons with Cattail


Yellow: I had a meeting in Brussels today.
Purple: I had an almond-cheese Danish.
Pink: I had a dream about salmon.
Red-Orange: I had buttered toast.

Red-Orange: What do you think of O’Hara?
Pink: What do you think of O’Keeffe?
Purple: What do you think of da Vinci?
Yellow: What do you think of Matisse?

Pink: I am of Israel.
Purple: I am of Spain.
Red-Orange: I am of Mexico.
Yellow: I am of Maine.

Cattail: 35 Snapdragons surround me
And I the only brown!