[Rick Mullin]

English is not one of the original languages, though, Maryann. It may be that the classicists and Latinists can only entertain us with anecdotes. I suggest that, in the contemporary trenches, you regain your original hard line. Moreover, I encourage everyone to stop writing Sapphics in English.

RM

[Chris Childers]

1. I find it hard to understand issues with "males appropriating the form," as Sappho's contemporary Alcaeus also used it, & there is nothing intrinsically feminine about it. My own guess is that it was a sort of hymn stanza, probably not invented by either but a traditional Lesbian song form, though we have so little evidence no one can say for sure.

2. Discounting Alcaeus, any English sapphicker is still following the precedent, as Maryann points out, of Catullus & Horace, which may be as much linguistic as gendered imperialism but which at least makes such scruples seem excessively retiring.

3. I think it is likely that Sappho & perhaps Alcaeus thought of the form as a three-line stanza, & thought of 3-4 as one long line. So there are often words broken over the lines from the third to the fourth line, though never from first to second or second to third. Catullus does indeed pick up this aspect of Sappho's practice by eliding hypermetrically over the line-break, both from the 2nd to 3rd & 3rd to 4th line. Horace, otoh, seems pretty clearly to conceive of the Sapphic as a four-line stanza--if he elides over a line break he only does it once or twice in many poems--& he also regularizes the meter / rhythm in other ways. Today we think of it as a four-line stanza and it would be arcane to justify weak line-breaks by reference to the little understood prosody of Sappho (& Catullus' imitations).

4. For whatever it's worth, Catullus's hypermetric elisions in the Sapphic stanza in poem 11 are highly expressive, especially velut prati / ultimi flos, where the final i of prati is 'cut off' by the line break in the same way that the flower is clipped by the plow. The other one, in the previous stanza ("identidem omnium / ilia rumpens"), maybe conveys the impression of being overstuffed, as Lesbia is overstuffed by her 300 lovers. There are no hypermetric elisions in his only other poem in the Sapphic stanza, poem 51.

5. Also for whatever it's worth, I say, if you're not rhyming you should be able to do a decent job of the enjambments.

C

[Maryann Corbett]

A comprehensive answer indeed. Thanks, Chris.

And Rick, with all due respect, I love sapphics and prefer to read them in English, so I'll leave the case against them to you

[Catherine Chandler]

I love sapphics. I've only written three. In the first (Shadow Fish) I intentionally ended S2L3 on an indefinite article in order to highlight the first word of L4 (a hare being charmed out of a woodlot). In the second (To a Minor Goddess) there are no enjambment "transgressions", as there are none in the one I am now working on (Bloodroot), an imagining of my Lenape great-great-great-grandmother.

In Timothy Steele's All the fun's in how you say a thing, he discusses the Sapphic stanza on pages 269-270, mainly pointing out how the syllables on which the accents are placed differ between the original Sapphic stanza and the Horatian modification. He doesn't get into enjambment per se.

He refers to Swinburne's "Sapphics" which, you will note, scans and enjambs beautifully (though his numerous inversions are of a bygone era ) and, as an example of the Horatian modification quotes Cowper's "Lines Written During a Period of Insanity" in its entirety. NOTE: The Poetry Foundation site uses a different title, fails to capitalize the word Master in S2L2, misspells Deity in S3L1, has formatting issues between S3 and S4, has spelled call'd as called in S4L3, and fails to italicize the words Him and I in S5. I would say there are enjambment "transgressions" in S1L3 and S5L3.

He also refers to Kipling's "The Craftsman", a poem about Shakespeare, where Steele notes Kipling "mixes Sapphic and Horatian hendecasyllabics and adds wrinkles of his devising," as I would say Steele does in his own poem, Sapphics Against Anger, where the enjambment issue you are questioning appears, for example, in S2L1 and S2L2, whereas in the Kipling poem the enjambments seem OK.

If you don’t have Steele’s book, Maryann, please let me know and I’ll quote more extensively on the pages cited above.

[Maryann Corbett]

Thanks, Cathy. I'll get my Steele off the shelf--a helpful book on many matters.

[Rick Mullin]

Hopefully it's understood that my admonition that no Sapphics be written in English is ludicrous and meant as an obvious joke.~,:^) I'm actually a fan of Sapphics, which I have only read in English.

RM