Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Women’S Erotic Desires And Perspectives On Marriage In Sappho’S Epithalamia And H.D.’S Hymen, Amanda Kubic
Women’S Erotic Desires And Perspectives On Marriage In Sappho’S Epithalamia And H.D.’S Hymen, Amanda Kubic
Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations
In her collection Hymen (1921), the modernist poet H.D. engages in a collaborative, composite reception of the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. H.D. draws on Sappho as a source of lyric power and lesbian erotic authority, and brings together the various women’s voices and perspectives represented in Sappho’s poems—especially those that have to do with marriage—into her own present poetic moment. As the title Hymen suggests, of particular significance to H.D.’s Sapphic reception work is the genre of the epithalamium, or “wedding song.” Sappho, in her epithalamia, constructs a woman-centered and woman-identified thiasos that is centered on the bride, her …