[In the following essay, Peterson notes the literary influence of Sappho's poetry on Alfred, Lord Tennyson and, more broadly, on the “feminine” tradition in nineteenth-century English lyric verse.]

In 1830, on a summer tour in southern France and the Pyrenees, Alfred Tennyson wrote the poem now known as “Mariana in the South.” When Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson's travelling companion on that tour, sent a copy of the poem to their mutual friend W. B. Donne, he included a paragraph of critical commentary that has since become part of Tennyson studies—although, as I shall argue, in a strangely half-acknowledged way. Hallam noted that the poem was a “pendant to his [Tennyson's] former poem of Mariana, the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness”; that the southern Mariana required “a greater lingering on the outward circumstances, and a less palpable transition of the poet into Mariana's feelings”; that this lingering on the external was appropriate, for “when the object of poetic power happens to be an object of sensuous perception it is the business of the poetic language to paint”; and that Tennyson's technique was sanctioned by “the mighty models of art, left for the worship of ages by the Greeks, & those too rare specimens of Roman production which breathe a Greek spirit.” Hallam's commentary ends with a comparison of Tennyson's poetry to “the fragments of Sappho, in which I see much congeniality to Alfred's peculiar power.”¹

What has come down in critical studies—as, for example, in the great Ricks edition of Tennyson's poetry—is the association of “Mariana in the South” with Sappho's fragment “1.”

The Moon has set
And the Pleiades
It is midnight
The time is going by
And I sleep alone.(2)
Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ πληiαδεs, μέσαι δέ
νύκτεs, πάρα δ' ἔρχετ' Ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

This certainly was, for the nineteenth century, the great Sapphic fragment of “desolate loneliness” and unquestionably an influence on Tennyson's lyric. But, following Hallam's lead, I want to associate Sappho's fragments not only with “Mariana in the South,” but also with the original “Mariana” and, more generally, with Tennyson's early lyrics. I pursue this association not so much to trace Tennyson's debt to Sappho or his interest in archaic Greek poetry, though these are important matters, but rather to suggest how a conception of Sappho and Greek lyric poetry—a conception Tennyson shared and worked out with Hallam—helped him understand his role as a poet and his place in the English poetic tradition.

Tennyson's interest in Sappho began early in his career and lasted long. In the 1827 volume, Poems by Two Brothers, he quoted a line from the Ovidian ode, “Sappho to the absent Phaon”—“Te somnia nostra reducunt [You my dreams bring back to me]”—as an epigraph to his own lyric, “And ask ye why these sad tears stream.” Very late in his career, in the 1886 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Tennyson referred to Sappho simply (and supremely) as “the poet,” alluding to her fragment on Hesperus, “Féσπερε, πάντα φέρων, ὄσα φαίνολιs ἔσκέδασ' αὔωs, / φέρειs οέν, φέρεσ αέγα, φέρεισ ἄπυ ματέρι παι̑δα,” in the line “Hesper, whom the poet call'd the Bringer home of all good things” (185). And, throughout his work, he regularly quoted or praised Sappho—as, for example, in The Princess, where Lady Psyche cites Sappho as one who “vied with any man” in “arts of grace” (2.147-48), or in the Idylls of the King, where Elaine's lament echoes the bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho's fragment, “Εροσ δαὖτέ μ' ὀ λυσιμεληs δόνει, / γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον”: “Love, art thou sweet? Then bitter death must be: / Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me.”³

Tennyson seems also to have had a lifelong obsession with the technicalities of Greek poetry, including Sapphics and Anacreontics. In December, 1863, William Allingham witnessed a dinner conversation, continued for three nights running, in which Tennyson discoursed on “Classic Metres.” (“Mrs. T.,” Allingham reports, “confessed herself tired of hearing” about the subject).⁴ Another friend, Mrs. Montagu Butler, recorded in her 1892 diary that Tennyson had told her that the Sapphics of Horace were “uninteresting and monotonous,” whereas “the metre was beautiful under [Sappho's] treatment”; “the discovery for which he always hoped the most,” Mrs. Butler added, “was of some further writings of Sappho.”⁵

It was in the early 1830s, however, during his time at Cambridge and his friendship with Hallam, that Tennyson showed the most concentrated interest in Sappho's poetry, and this interest marks the short lyrics of his 1830 Poems Chiefly Lyrical and the 1832 Poems. In the 1830 volume Tennyson paraphrases (and disagrees with) Sappho's fragment on Hesperus in his “Leonine Elegiacs”:

The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
Thou comest morning or even; she cometh not morning or even.
False-eyed Hesper, unkind, where is my sweet Rosalind?

(13-16)

He repossesses and augments Sappho's fragment “1” in “Mariana” and again, in the 1832 Poems, in “Mariana in the South.” Moreover, as Stephen C. Allen has recently argued, another of Sappho's fragments—”Sweet mother, I cannot weave my web, broken as I am by longing for a boy, at soft Aphrodite's will”—influenced Tennyson's conception of “The Lady of Shalott,” in which a female artist, like Sappho's speaker, is overcome by the onset of Love.⁶ Finally, in the 1832 Poems, Tennyson includes two adaptations of the famous Sapphic ode “φαίνεταί μοι κήνοs ἴσοs θέοισιν / ἔμμεν Ὤνηρ [Peer of the gods he seems to me]”: an extensive translation-adaptation in “Eleanore” (122-44) and a partial borrowing in “Fatima” (15-19). Indeed, when Tennyson published “Fatima” in 1832, he did so without a title and with only an epigraph repeating the opening words of Sappho's ode: “φαίνεταί μοι κήνοs ἴσοs θέοισιν / ἔμμεν Ὤνηρ.”⁷

Admittedly, the 1830 and 1832 Poems contain many other allusions, classical and modern, a point to which I shall return. Even so, the density of the allusions to Sappho in 1830-1832 marks her profound influence and presence in these early volumes of Tennyson's poetry. Given this presence, we may surmise that Sappho—both the poet and her poetry—provided Tennyson with a means for pursuing his own poetic agenda and locating his place among English poets. Nineteenth-century myths of Sappho also, I believe, allowed Tennyson to work out a model of influence that enabled poetic production—and that enables us to revise our current discourse about poets and their literary relations, particularly in the early Victorian period.

(RE)POSSESSING SAPPHO: SOME USES OF SAPPHIC LYRIC

That Tennyson used Sappho as a vehicle for self-definition is not, of course, unprecedented in literary history. As Joan deJean has argued for French literature, male poets have frequently used Sappho's poetry as an initiatory vehicle or an object of exchange. In Fictions of Sappho, deJean posits a triangulation of desire in which young male poets compete for recognition and priority by translating Sappho's lyrics and thus taking possession of her voice.⁸ Typically, the site of this competition is Sappho's second ode, in French known familiarly as “A l'aimee,” what we know in English (thanks to Swinburne) as the “Ode to Anactoria,” what Tennyson translated partially in “Eleanore” and “Fatima”:

Just like a god he seems to me
That man who sits
Across from you so closely
Attentive to your sweet words.
Φαίνεταί μοι κήνοs ἴσοs θέοισιν
ἔμμεν Ὤνηρ, ὄστιs ἐναντίοs τοι
ἰζάνει, καὶ πλυσίον ὖδυ φωνεύσαs ὑπακούει.(9)

In this male competition, a poem of sapphic desire—a female speaker gazing at a man gazing at her beloved—gets translated into a heterosexual triangle of desire—a male speaker gazing at another man gazing at his beloved. The woman, whether the woman in the poem or the female poet Sappho, becomes the object of homosocial exchange between men.

Although we might apply deJean's model directly to Tennyson's case, perhaps by viewing Sappho as his means for circumventing Romantic influence and gaining priority over his immediate poetic predecessors, I believe that the Tennyson-Sappho relationship operates on slightly different terms. For one thing, as Hallam suggests and as the 1830 volume bears witness, it was not Sappho's odes but the shorter fragments that were seminal to Tennyson's development. Today we refer to all Sappho's lyrics as fragments, but in the nineteenth century it was customary to refer to the two odes—the “Ode to Aphrodite” and the “Ode to Anactoria”—and to the rest as fragments.¹⁰ In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions, fragment “1” was “Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα,” the lyric that inspired “Mariana” and “Mariana in the South”; fragment “3” was “Γλύκεια μα̑τερ,” the fragment relevant to “The Lady of Shalott.”¹¹ It was the fragmentary nature of Sappho's poetry, the sense of lyric possibilities limned but not fulfilled, that attracted Tennyson. Frederick Tennyson, the poet's brother, expressed a simple version of this attraction in his own expansion of Sappho's lyrics, The Isles of Greece (1890): comparing Sappho's fragments to “muscatel grapes shaken from the vine”—“they leave such a delicious flavour on the tongue, that we long to pluck, if possible, the entire bunches from which they have fallen”—he noted the irresistible urge to manufacture what could not be gathered: “What is a Poet to do under these circumstances, but imagine what they might have been when full-orbed perfect compositions?”¹²

Alfred Tennyson's attraction to Sappho's poetry was more complex, less a desire to complete the fragments themselves than to fulfill the lyric tradition Sappho had begun. Whereas the epic tradition of Homer had been adapted and expanded by multiple successors (Virgil, Spenser, Milton, to name only the most obvious), the lyric tradition had seen no successors to Sappho—at least not as Hallam and Tennyson interpreted that tradition. When Hallam tried to give W. B. Donne examples of other lyrics “which breathe a Greek spirit,” he could think of only two: “the divine passage about the sacrifice of Iphigenia in Lucretius” and “the desolation of Ariadne in Catullus”; he did not even consider English poems as possible candidates.¹³ According to Hallam, however, Tennyson possessed a “peculiar power” that made him heir to an ancient, original lyric voice. We know that Tennyson was frustrated by the lack of space available in the epic tradition: “Why should any man / Remodel models?” the poet Everard Hall asks in “The Epic”; the result can only be “faint Homeric echoes.” Given the fragmentary state of Sappho's oeuvre, he had ample space to develop a lyric strain.

It was not simply the fragmentariness of Sappho's poetry, but its particular techniques and its place in literary history that must also have fascinated Tennyson. Tennyson's development of the lyric depended on his sensitivity to “impressions of sense” and on his reading of Sappho as a poet of sensation, of “sensuous perception” (the phrases are Hallam's). Archaic Greek poetry was generally believed to concentrate on the particular, the concrete, and the sensual. Sappho's lyrics in particular were viewed as emerging at a historical moment when the ancient Greek lyricists, only having recently learned to distinguish outside phenomena from inner perceptions and reactions, “busied themselves with studying this relationship of inner and outer, and were led naturally to a preoccupation with the particular feeling or experience.”¹⁴ We can see the focus on the particular, concrete, and sensual in Sapphic fragments like these:

(1) Thus at times with tender feet the Cretan women dance in measure round the fair altar, trampling the fine soft bloom of the grass.

(2) A broidered strap of fair Lydian work covered her feet.

(3) Come, goddess of Cyprus, and in golden cups serve nectar delicately mixed with delights.

(4) Now Eros shakes my soul, a wind on the mountain falling on the oaks.

(5) And round about the [breeze] murmurs cool through the apple-boughs, and slumber streams through quivering leaves.¹⁵

In such verses the natural world serves not as symbol but provides objects of and occasions for “sensuous perception.” The Sapphic preoccupation with the relation between inner feelings and outer phenomena is especially evident in the final two fragments, as well as in the fragment that inspired the Mariana poems—“The Moon has set, and the Pleiades; it is midnight, the time is going by, and I sleep alone”—in which the loneliness of the speaker heightens (or is heightened by) her sensitivity to external phenomena. This relationship—between outer object and inner perception, between sensation and consciousness—was Tennyson's forte; he, like Sappho, was to be the leading “poet of sensation” of his age.

Sappho's historical and generic relation to epic poetry provided Tennyson, moreover, with a means of comprehending (perhaps rationalizing) his own ambivalent relation to the epic tradition. Frank M. Turner has shown that the Victorians regularly and rigorously compared themselves to the Greeks.¹⁶ The general view of classical Greek poetry held that a Lyric Age had succeeded the Epic Age, that Homer (his Iliad, his Odyssey, plus other now-lost epic poetry) was followed by lyricists like Alcaeus and Sappho, and in that succession came a shift in poetic interest. The epic age was “the age of heroism, aristocracy, and the equation of external appearance with reality,” whereas the lyric age focused on “the world of the individual, the πόλιs [city-state], and the discovery of inner life and emotions.”¹⁷ This critical view became even more dominant after the discovery of Sappho's fragment “16”:

Some say that an army of cavalry
Others that infantry
And others that a fleet of ships
Is what is most desirable
On this dark earth
But for me it is whatever
Inspires one's passionate love.(18)
οἰ μὲν ἰππήων στρότον, οἰ δὲ πέσδων
οἰ δὲ νάων φαι̑σ' ἐπὶ γα̑ν μέλαιναν
ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, ἔγω δὲ κη̑ν ὄτ-
τω τιs ἔραται.

Although in 1830 Tennyson could not have known this poem of stark contrast between war and love, epic conquest and lyric passion, he would have shared with Hallam and his contemporaries a historical sense of lyric developing after and out of epic.¹⁹ And, by comparing himself with Sappho, he would have located his place in the progress of literature.

“The age in which we live comes late in our national progress,” Hallam wrote in his 1831 review of Tennyson's Poems Chiefly Lyrical in the Englishman's Magazine. In modern criticism, that lateness has routinely been associated with “belatedness,” with coming at the end of an exhausted poetic tradition, when “that first raciness, and juvenile vigour of literature … is gone, never to return.”²⁰ In Hallam's scheme of literary history, however, coming late meant something more. The historical distance between Homer and Sappho (the eighth century bce to the sixth century bce) was roughly the same as the distance between the English Renaissance epicists and Tennyson—a comparison which meant that Tennyson must acknowledge historical context in imagining his poetic career.²¹ Hallam's view of literary history explains, in part, his comment in the 1831 review that “the French Revolution may be a finer theme than the war of Troy; but it does not so evidently follow that Homer is to find his superior.”²² Hallam's point is not simply that Homer represents the golden age of epic, but rather that poets must know their place in a “national progress” and work accordingly.

(RE)IMAGINING SAPPHO: SOME VERSIONS OF INFLUENCE

Thus far I have been arguing that Tennyson's relation to Sappho operates in terms different from those developed by Joan deJean, that Sappho helped Tennyson comprehend his lyric sensibility and his place in poetic history. I want also to acknowledge the relevance of deJean's model to Tennyson's early lyrics, however, even as I modify her notions of poetic influence. Consonant with deJean's model, Tennyson did turn a sapphic triangle of desire into a heterosexual triangle, and he did finally use Sappho's second ode as a means of expressing male (poetic) desire. It is of course the case that all English versions of Sappho prior to Swinburne's depict heterosexual (not sapphic) love—whether the translations by Ambrose Philips (1711), John Addison (1735), and Thomas Moore (1800), or the fictions of Sappho by Mary Robinson (1796), John Nott (1803), and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1824).²³ Tennyson could hardly have done otherwise, given the biographical information and the state of the editions available to him.²⁴ Thus, in translating and adapting Sappho's second ode in “Eleänore,” he turns a lyric of female passion into one of male desire:

But when I see thee roam, with tresses unconfined,
While the amorous, odorous wind
          Breathes low between the sunset and the moon;
          Or, in a shadowy saloon,
On silken cushions half reclined;
          I watch thy grace; and in its place
          My heart a charmèd slumber keeps,
          While I muse upon thy face;
          And a languid fire creeps
          Through my veins to all my frame,
Dissolvingly and slowly: soon
          From thy rose-red lips MY name
Floweth; and then, as in a swoon,
          With dinning sound my ears are rife,
                    My tremulous tongue faltereth,
          I lose my color, I lose my breath,
          I drink the cup of a costly death,
Brimmed with delirious draughts of warmest life.
          I die with my delight.

(122-40)

Here it is a male poet who feels physical ravishment, while the female beloved is scarcely allowed to speak, allowed only to utter the poet's name, an utterance that causes her (temporary) silence but ultimately produces his (immortal) lyric. In this heterosexual version of Sappho, Tennyson inscribes common nineteenth-century gender dichotomies: female muse/male poet, female silence/male voice, female erotic object/male gaze. We might even add that in “Eleänore,” perhaps the last of Tennyson's youthful Sapphic borrowings, Sappho becomes the object of exchange between men—not the object of competition between male poets, but the object of bonding between Tennyson and Hallam, the poet and the critic who had shared her lyrics during 1830 and 1831.

That bonding may, as the deJean-Sedgwick model implies, have homosocial elements—in that Tennyson transforms a homoerotic desire for Hallam into a socially-acceptable form of love via his public, heterosexual translations of Sappho's poetry and Hallam's official, public discussions of Shelley and Keats, not the dangerous Sappho, as the dominant poetic influences. Indeed, if we follow Richard Dellamora's line of argument in Masculine Desire, we might see the homoerotic interest of Tennyson and (or for) Hallam implied by their mutual interest in Sappho and then by Tennyson's decision to “normalize” that interest into poetic versions of heterosexual love. That Hallam discussed Tennyson's affinities with Sappho in a private letter to a mutual friend, but not in his public 1831 review in the Englishman's Magazine, might further support this interpretation.²⁵

Despite these possibilities, it may be more useful critically to replace the competitive “masculine” model that deJean posits with an alternative “feminine” model of influence that Sappho offered to Romantic and Victorian poets. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the Greek poetess emphasized her educative function, the role of her academy in Greek culture and her personal role as an intellectual exemplar for Lesbian women. In her 1796 Sappho and Phaon, for example, the poet Mary Robinson viewed Sappho as an original and originating figure, one who fulfilled the criteria for Romantic artistry yet added the specifically female features of nurture and community to the myths of becoming a poet: “Sappho undertook to inspire the Lesbian women with a taste for literature; many of them received instructions from her, and foreign women increased the number of her disciples.” The amateur classicist John Nott similarly imagined scenes of intellectual and pedagogical exchange in his prose fiction, Sappho, After a Greek Romance (1803), which depicts the lovelorn Sappho living in Sicily among a community of philosophers, poets, and critics; within this community, she composes and recites her two great odes.²⁶

Nott's vision of artistic community and poetic influence varies from Robinson's on one significant point: for Nott, Sappho becomes part of an already-existing male community of philosophers and littérateurs, one which invites her participation because she so evidently possesses genius; for Robinson, Sappho represents the founder of an exclusively female community, one which educates and produces other female poets and readers. For Nott, Sappho is an anomaly, a gifted woman living among men; for Robinson, Sappho is the supreme poet but still representative of other women writers. In both cases, however, the function of the artistic community is the same: to nurture poetic production, to provide what we might designate “feminine” support.

There is good historical evidence to suggest, in other words, that Tennyson and Hallam conceived of influence (or, at least, some poetic influence) as following this more gentle, encouraging, educative Sapphic mode—a mode that would have been emotionally as well as intellectually important to Tennyson who, in the 1830's, was known to be sensitive to negative criticism.²⁷ Current critical models tend to emphasize the competitive element, the “anxiety of influence” articulated so forcefully by Harold Bloom: the “battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads.”²⁸ In a recent essay on Maud, however, Leslie Brisman provides a basis for analyzing Tennysonian influences more subtly and accurately. Differentiating between Byronic and Keatsian influence in Tennyson, Brisman suggests that the former be associated with “masculine” terms like “force, aggression, explosiveness, acquisitiveness, and institution,” the latter with “feminine” terms like “balance, responsiveness, perseverance, the accumulative, and community.” According to Brisman, Tennyson conceived of his relation to Byron and Keats differently and thus treated their poetic texts differently: “Tennyson turned to Keats as a woman writer turns to a woman writer.”²⁹

What Sappho—the poet and her poetry—enables us to see is that Tennyson not only invoked a feminine model in his relation to Keats, but that he learned this mode of poetic influence from a woman writer, one the ancients considered the tenth Muse, the 19th-century the greatest lyricist of all time. If we have come, in the late twentieth century, to associate a feminine mode of influence with Keats, Tennyson's immediate predecessor, it is because we have forgotten Sappho and her heirs. But our association derives as much from critical myth as it does from literary history. Privately, in the letter to W. B. Donne, Hallam noted Tennyson's affinities with and inheritance from Sappho; publicly, in the 1831 review in the Englishman's Magazine, he linked Tennyson only to the male poets of the prior generation, Keats and Shelley. Whatever the reason for this discrepancy between private and public, whether happenstance or rhetorical moderation (it was, after all, audacious to compare a young poet with the great Sappho, known to the ancients as “the poetess,” “κατ'ἐξοχήν, ἡ ποιήτρια” just as Homer was known as “the poet”) or even a desire to keep shared intellectual pleasures secret, the fact is that Hallam's public omission of Sappho began an all-too-successful critical tradition of denying women writers' influence and recognizing only Tennyson's male predecessors.³⁰

This tradition has become most forceful in the criticism surrounding “Mariana,” Tennyson's greatest poem written under Sappho's influence. The Victorian critic John Churton Collins noted, in his now notorious Illustrations of Tennyson (1891), that, despite Tennyson's intimation of his debt to Shakespeare, the more ancient debt was to Sappho: “Probably the four exquisite lines in which Sappho appears to be describing some Mariana of antiquity were not without their influence on him.” Collins then quoted the fragment “Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα” as Tennyson's primary source.³¹ Perhaps because no critic wants to be associated with a man whom Tennyson called “a louse on the locks of literature,” Collins's critical knowledge has been virtually ignored.³² Modern criticism of “Mariana” recognizes allusions to Homer and Euripides (Kincaid), Virgil (Bloom), Samuel Rogers (Ricks), Wordsworth (Thomson), Keats (Hollander, Bloom, Tucker), Shelley (Bloom), and obviously Shakespeare—but except for Robert Pattison's wide-ranging Tennyson and Tradition, it ignores Sappho.³³

(RE)POSSESSING SAPPHO: TENNYSONIAN VERSIONS

If Hallam's critical writings—and our own—fit the model of masculine competition and domination that deJean posits, Tennyson's poetic borrowings fit less readily. “Eleänore,” the single poem in which a male speaker assumes Sappho's words and voice, is unusual among Tennyson's adaptations, for in most he gives voice to female desire. Tennyson's Sapphic lyrics tend not to silence the female voice as do the French translations that deJean cites. Unlike his male counterparts, who typically use Sappho's words to express male desire for the female sex and male competition for female objects, Tennyson's poems most frequently choose female speakers: Mariana cries “He cometh not,” the southern Mariana bemoans that she must “live forgotten, and love forlorn,” and Fatima assumes Sappho's voice:

Last night, when some one spoke his name,
From my swift blood that went and came
A thousand little shafts of flame
Were shivered in my narrow frame.

(15-18)

Such adaptations of Sappho represent a new strain in the English lyric. Whereas other poets made the lyric voice essentially masculine, Tennyson experimented with a feminine voice and developed a tradition more ancient and original than did any other English poet, including Shelley and Keats, under whose influence he allegedly languished.³⁴

That Tennyson meant to explore a feminine lyric tradition is demonstrated further, I believe, by the many other, non-Sapphic allusions in the 1830 and 1832 volumes, especially in the “lady” poems. These allusions—to Spenser's Claribel, Shakespeare's Mariana and Isabel, Keats's Madeline, Irving's Anacaona—all suggest a poet looking for hiatuses in the masculine traditions of epic and drama, searching for unexplored territory in a literary tradition “late,” as Hallam put it, “in our national progress.” If, in classical scholarship, Sappho had been called “κατ'ἐξοχήν, ἡ ποιήτρια” and her supremacy in the lyric domain unquestioned, in the 1830's Tennyson seems to have been eager to explore that feminine domain, willing to question or abandon the masculine.³⁵

And yet, to give the argument one more twist, it may be that Tennyson's exploration of the Sapphic strain represents the most devastating attempt to subsume the female voice in English literary history. It may be that his exploration became the exploitation I have been attempting to deny. Prior to Tennyson, at least in England, only female poets had assumed Sappho's persona or used her words to develop a specifically feminine lyric. In the first decades of the nineteenth-century, Sappho became the inspiration for a self-consciously feminine literary agenda, with women writers in England and on the continent modeling their professional lives on hers. Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon used Sappho to lament her own lost loves, as well as to further her literary career and legitimize her poetry (In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, as her subtitle puts it).³⁶ For Robinson, Sappho represented “the unrivalled poetess of her time,” a “lively example of the human mind, enlightened by the most exquisite talents,” and thus a model for a Romantic poetess like Robinson who wished to assert her genius and superior literary taste. Sappho was also, Robinson noted, an inspiration to “my illustrious country-women,” who, “unpatronized by courts, and unprotected by the powerful, persevere in the paths of literature.”³⁷

Two such countrywomen were the second-generation Romantic writers Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Felicia Hemans, both of whom used Sappho, in combination with Madame de Staël's fictional Corinne, as a model for their professional careers. As Angela Leighton has shown, Landon enacted the Sappho-Corinne myth in her life and art.³⁸ Known to readers as L.E.L., Landon made her name writing verses about slighted and unrequited love, wearing her hair à la Sappho, as young Disraeli described it, and making the heroine of her widely-popular The Improvisatrice (1824) a modern Sapphic artist.³⁹The Improvisatrice begins with its poetess-heroine singing “a last song of Sappho” and ends with her Sappho-like death of unrequited love. Landon's later poem “Sappho” depicts a successful poetess, “upon whose brow the laurel crown is placed,” falling desperately in love with Phaon and learning that “genius, riches, fame, / May not soothe a slighted love.”⁴⁰

Hemans also developed a series of lyricizing women who, like most English Sapphos, lament their losses in love and life. Hemans's “Last Song of Sappho” (1828) is representative, as Lawrence Lipking has argued, of the Romantic tendency to depict Sappho in “isolation from any human or natural community”: “The Romantic Sappho stands alone.”⁴¹ Such isolation, as Angela Leighton has further noted, is the feminine consequence of the Romantic male quest: “The man aspires, but the woman mourns; he scales the heights, but she longs for home.”⁴² Tennyson develops this feminine perspective, introduced by Hemans and Landon, when he creates such Sapphic figures as Eleänore, Fatima, and the two Marianas who, obsessed by heterosexual passion, live in isolation and seem oblivious to—indeed, seem to exist without—families or friends.

Tennyson's contemporaries recognized the link between Greek and contemporary women writers. When in 1833 Father Prout contributed his sketch of Landon to the “Gallery of Literary Characters” in Fraser's Magazine, he compared Landon's poetry to Sappho's. Defending Landon against critics who thought she wrote too much (and too exclusively) about love, he argued that her choice had good feminine precedent:

How, Squaretoes, can there be too much of love in a young lady's writings? Is she to write of politics, or political economy, or pugilism, or punch? Certainly not. … We think Miss L.E.L. has chosen the better part. She shews every now and then that she is possessed of information, feeling, and genius, to enable her to shine in other departments of poetry; but she does right in thinking that Sappho knew what she was about when she chose the tender passion as a theme for woman.⁴³

Even classical scholars made this sort of connection. In an 1832 article for the Edinburgh Review, the classicist D. K. Sandford surveyed the achievements of “Greek Authoresses,” beginning with Sappho and regularly comparing Greek with modern female poets. His introduction, for instance, draws the line of female genius “from Miriam the prophetess to Mrs Hemans,” “from the days of out-poured inspiration to those of hot-pressed twelves”; he calls the Greek poetess Erinna, who achieved fame “when scarcely more than a year past seventeen,” “the Fanny Kemble of ancient days”; and he explains the rivalry of Pindar and Corinna (and Corinna's victory) by comparing these Greek poets to Robert Burns and Letitia Landon:

Partly, says Pausanias, her beauty, and partly her Æolian dialect, made her successful with an audience, whose eyes and ears were thus alike regaled. We can believe him. Burns, in his most inspired mood, would have had little chance with a southern tribunal, beside the English strains of L.E.L.⁴⁴

For Sandford, such comparisons come naturally, presumably because he had learned them from contemporary female poets who self-consciously presented themselves as Sappho's heirs.

One might argue, then, that Tennyson, by developing his Sapphic affinities, took over the strain that Robinson and her female successors, Hemans and Landon, meant to claim. By creating and speaking for his abandoned women, his Marianas, Fatimas, and Oenones, Tennyson entered the domain of contemporary women poets and assumed their poetic voices. That takeover launched him to preeminence as a lyricist, allowing him to create poetry that consciously developed and counterpointed feminine and masculine strains. It allowed him to mix his “lady” poems with more masculine subjects like “The Poet,” “The Mystic,” or the philosophical “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind” in the Poems of 1830 or with the Homeric epic monologues “Ulysses” and “The Lotos-Eaters” in the Poems of 1832. Later, it allowed the mixing of masculine narrative and feminine lyric in The Princess (1847) and of masculine and feminine speakers in In Memoriam (1850). But it also gave to a male poet what female poets might have achieved for themselves—that is, if literary history had remembered the Sapphic tradition of which they and he were a part.

Notes

1. Letter to William Bodham Donne (13 February 1831), in The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1981), 401-2.

2. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Longman, 1969), 362. Subsequent references to Tennyson's poetry are to this edition; line numbers cited parenthetically in text. Biographers like Robert Bernard Martin (Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980], 120) have expanded the literary associations to include the geographical, suggesting that “the Pyrenees provided [Tennyson] with a local habitation for the classical myth and poetry which he had loved since childhood, and which were to suggest much of his best work. The miles of uninhabited mountains, little changed in the generations that they had been known, stood in for those of Italy and ancient Greece.”

   Classicists no longer attribute this fragment to Sappho, but its influence on Tennyson's Marianas is still relevant since in the nineteenth century it would have been considered authentic. Throughout this essay I have used Henry Thornton Wharton's Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation, 4th ed. (London: John Lane, 1898) for texts and translations, except where noted. Although Tennyson could not have known this edition till late in his life (it was first published in 1885), Wharton's is the best nineteenth-century English edition available and includes the Sapphic poems commonly known to Victorians.

3. “Lancelot and Elaine” (note 2), 1003-4. Wharton (note 2) translates this Sapphic fragment (no. 40): “Now Love masters my limbs and shakes me, fatal creature, bittersweet.” The Sapphic allusions I cite were first noted by Wharton, John Churton Collins in his Illustrations of Tennyson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), or David M. Robinson in Sappho and Her Influence (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1924).

4. William Allingham, A Diary, ed. H. Allingham and D. Radford (London: Macmillan, 1907), 93-95.

5. H. Montagu Butler, “Recollections of Tennyson,” in Tennyson and His Friends, ed. Hallam Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1911), 216.

6. “Γλύκεια μα̑τερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τòν ἴστον, / πόθῳ δάμεισα παι̑δοs βραδίναν δι' Αφρόδιταν.” See Stephen C. Allen's “Tennyson, Sappho, and ‘The Lady of Shallot,’” Tennyson Research Bulletin 2 (1975): 171-72.

7. Collins noted many of these allusions in his Illustrations of Tennyson (note 3), including those in “Mariana,” “Eleänore,” and “Fatima.” Ricks includes most in his notes to The Poems of Tennyson (note 2), but not the important use of fragment 1 in “Mariana”—perhaps, as I shall argue below, because Tennyson so vehemently objected to Collins's commentary on that poem.

8. Joan deJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. the introduction, 1-28. See also Lawrence Lipking, “Sappho Descending,” in Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 57-126, for a more varied survey of the figure and poetry of Sappho in the Western literary tradition.

9. Translation by Terence DuQuesne in Sappho of Lesbos: The Poems (Thame, Oxon: Darengo, 1990), 38. Following the definitive Lobel and Page edition, de Jean refers to this poem as “fragment 31.” I follow nineteenth-century practice here in referring to it as Sappho's second ode, the first being the “Ode to Aphrodite.”

10. See, for example, the preface to Arthur Henry Hallam's Remains, new ed. (London: John Murray, 1869), xxxvi, in which a memoirist refers to Hallam's interest in “the short poems and fragments of Sappho,” and Swinburne's 1866 “Notes on Poems and Reviews,” in Swinburne: Poems and Ballads, ed. Morse Peckham (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 328, in which Swinburne refers to “the two odes and the remaining fragments of Sappho.”

11. The numbering of the fragments was not consistent, although fragment 1 was usually “Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα.” I follow here the numbering in John Addison's Works of Anacreon, Translated into English Verse (London: John Watts, 1735), which included, in addition to the two odes, six fragments of Sappho: (1) “Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα,” (2) “κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσεαι πότα,” (3) “Γλύκεια μα̑τερ,” (4) “Εροσ δαυ̑τέ μ' ὀ λυσιμεληs δόνει” combined with “ἄτθι, σοὶ δ' ἔμεθέν μεν ἀπήχθετο / φροντίσδην,” (5) “Εἰ τοι̑σ ἄνθεσιν ἤθελεν ὁ Zοὺσ οπιθει̑ναι Βασιλέα” (from Achilles Tatius, now not attributed to Sappho), and (6) “έλθε, Κύπρι, χρυσίαισιν ἐν κυλίκεσσιν ἄβρωs.”

12. Frederick Tennyson, The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcaeus (London: Macmillan, 1890), v. In the preface, Frederick Tennyson notes that his poems were inspired by his reading of an 1825 French edition of Sappho's fragments. Although he gives no sense of when he first read the volume, it may have been as early as the 1830 tour of France and the Pyrenees, on which Frederick accompanied his brother and Hallam. A new English edition of Sappho's poetry, Scriptores Graeci Minores, quorum reliquias, fere omnium melioris notae, ex editionibus variis excerpsit, ed. J[ohn] A[llen] Giles (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1831), was published while Tennyson and Hallam were at Cambridge.

13. Kolb (note 1), 401.

14. I have used a modern summary of this view from R. L. Fowler's The Nature of Early Greek Lyric: Three Preliminary Studies (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1987), 54-57. The view Fowler summarizes was articulated, if with less sophistication, in the nineteenth as well as twentieth century; quoting Longinus, an anonymous writer [D. K. Sandford] on “Greek Authoresses” for The Edinburgh Review 55 (1832): 198, notes that Sappho gives “strictly a physical picture” of love in the second ode—“no play of the fancy—no fairy frostwork.”

15. All quotations come from Wharton's Sappho (note 2), where they are fragments 54, 19, 5, 42, and 4, respectively.

16. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 1-14.

17. Fowler (note 14), 4.

18. Trans. by DuQuesne (note 9), 30.

19. The poem was first published in the 20th century, too late to fulfill Tennyson's dream of another discovery of Sappho's verse. It is fragment 16 in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ed. Edgar Lobel and Denys Page (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 14.

20. The words are Hallam's (see Tennyson: The Critical Heritage, ed. John D. Jump [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967], 40), but the concept of “belatedness” derives in modern criticism from Harold Bloom, beginning with his Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

21. Tennyson did, of course, finally write epic, and his mastery of both the lyric and epic traditions suggests his desire to subsume and exceed his poetic predecessors—much as Browning's desire to be both “subjective” and “objective” poet suggests another version of poetic mastery.

22. Jump (note 20), 41.

23. Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, In a Series of Legitimate Sonnets, with Thoughts on Poetical Subjects, and Anecdotes of the Grecian Poetess, new ed. (London: Minerva Press, 1813); [John Nott], Sappho, After a Greek Romance (London: Cuthell and Martin, 1803); “Sappho,” in The Poetical Works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Smith, 1859), 367-70.

24. Although Sappho's sexual ambivalences were discussed by some scholars, it is simply not the case, as Swinburne suggests in his “Notes on Poems and Reviews” (note 10), that every schoolboy “compelled under penalties to learn, to construe, and to repeat” Sappho's “imperishable and incomparable verses” would have recognized her desire as anything but heterosexual. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was standard to alter certain feminine endings (especially in the ode, “Peer of the gods”) and thus “regularize” Sappho's desire. See deJean (note 8).

25. See Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 16-41.

26. Robinson (note 23), 28; Nott (note 23), esp. 2:viii-ix and 3:iv, “The Table-Dispute,” “The Afternoon Hours,” and “Poetry,” 187-217, 250-60. Robinson is citing the biographical sketch of Sappho by the Abbé Barthelemy.

27. Indeed, in Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart, Martin devotes a separate entry in his index to “criticism, sensitivity to” ([note 1], 636).

28. The phrases come from Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), 6, and refer to Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence (note 20).

29. Leslie Brisman, “Maud: The Feminine as the Crux of Influence,” Studies in Romanticism 31 (1992): 23, 26. Brisman is here modifying terms from Michael Cooke's Acts of Inclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elementary Theory of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979).

30. David M. Robinson (note 3), 5-6, for a discussion of the epithets for Sappho and Homer.

31. Collins (note 3), 27.

32. Anthony Kearney has recently resuscitated Collins's criticism in “Making Tennyson a Classic: Churton Collins' Illustrations of Tennyson in Context,” Victorian Poetry 30 (1992): 75-82.

33. James R. Kincaid, Tennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), 23; Harold Bloom, “Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats,” in Poetry and Repression (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), 149-52; Ricks (note 2), 187; Alastair W. Thomson, The Poetry of Tennyson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 31-32; John Hollander, “Tennyson's Melody,” Georgia Review 29 (1975): 683; and Herbert F. Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), 76-77. In Tennyson and Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), Robert Pattison discusses several classical influences, including the Sapphic lyric, which Tennyson used not simply “because he liked it, but because it provided an appropriate lyric context upon which he could dilate” (11).

34. The Bloomian reading of Tennyson's early poems, one that has dominated the past two decades of criticism, is that they fall “in the shadow of Keats.” Bloom's discussion of “Mariana” acknowledges the presence of Virgil behind Keats, but it does not recognize Sappho, whose presence is far more fundamental and powerful than that of any other classical or English poet. See “Tennyson: In the Shadow of Keats” (note 33), 149-52, as well as “Tennyson, Hallam, and Romantic Tradition,” in The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). Following this line of criticism, but with greater interest in the cultural work of Tennyson's poetry, is Tucker's chapter “Emergencies,” in Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (note 33), 93-174.

35. As in “Anacaona,” where a feminine speaker exposes the violence of masculine (epic) colonialism.

36. Some readers interpret Sappho and Phaon as a sonnet sequence à clef about her affair with the Prince of Wales, others about the end of her long relationship with Colonel Tarleton. See Lawrence Lipking (note 8), 82-83, and Stuart Curran, “Mary Robinson's Lyrical Tales in Context,” in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776-1837 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming), 6 in ms.

37. Robinson (note 23), 16-18. Robinson called herself “the English Sappho.”

38. Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), chap. 2, 45-77.

39. Letter from Disraeli to his sisters, quoted in D. E. Enfield, L.E.L.: A Mystery of the Thirties (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 74; L.E.L., The Improvisatrice; and Other Poems (Boston: Munroe and Francis, 1825), 71-72.

40. L.E.L. (note 39), 367-70. The crowning of Sappho derives from book 2 of Corinne, where the Italian poetess is publically celebrated and crowned with laurel. The name Corinne comes from Corinna, the female poet-teacher of Pindar.

41. Felicia Hemans, “Records of Woman” and “Last Song of Sappho,” in The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1845), 200-26, 391-92; Lipking (note 8), 83-84.

42. Leighton (note 38), 24.

43. [Father Prout], Fraser's Magazine 8 (October 1833): 433. Accompanying this article is the famous engraving of Landon wearing her hair à la Sappho and holding a rose, the flower thought dear to Sappho.

44. [D. K. Sandford] (note 14), 183, 199, 200.