Rekhti is a genre of Urdu erotic poetry, spinning off from the formal, classical ghazal poetic genre. Rekhti differs both in the point of view of the poetic persona, in the subject matter, and in the use of language. Within Urdu culture (a southern Indian Muslim culture whose language has a strong admixture of Persian in an Indic base), traditional ghazal poetry had two modes: “Persian” in which the poetic persona is male and the beloved can be male or female, and “Indic” in which the poetic persona is female and the beloved is male.
love poetry
I have tagged as “love poetry” any poetic expression written by a woman (or in a woman’s voice) to a woman that would be considered love poetry if written between an opposite sex couple.
LHMP entry
I downloaded this because I had a link to it, but in the end after reading halfway through I decided not to blog it in detail. It’s interesting and competent as an undergraduate paper, examining comparative imagery in the work of Katherine Philips and near-contemporaries especially John Donne. But the paper didn’t seem to have anything genuinely new in terms of the historic record.
Nossis was a female poet of the Greek Hellenistic period (approximately 2 centuries after Sappho), 11 of whose poems have survived. This article discusses how her work reflects a self-conscious identity specifically as a female poet and as one who sees herself as following in the tradition of Sappho.
Lardinois (who several years earlier wrote an excellent article digging into the actual known facts about Sappho’s life, and their likely interpretation – Lardinois 1989) examines the evidence for the context in which Sappho’s poetry was performed and the likely composition of her audience.
I probably should have been clued in to the angle of Devereux’s article by the word “inversion” in the title. This article is a modern psychoanalysis of Sappho fragment 31 (“He is like a god to me”), interpreting the emotional and physical reactions described in the poem as indicating, not romantic desire or even jealousy, but an anxiety attack triggered by Sappho’s recognition of her “abnormal” and “deviant” homosexual desires and her consequent shame at experiencing them.
The poem by Sappho identified as “fragment 1,” which isn’t a fragment but the only surviving complete poem, is also the one where Sappho as a woman-desiring-woman is most overt. This is not only because she names herself within the poem, but also because it is specifically about asking divine help to attract the love of another woman.
Chapter 19: Sylvia Drake | W 1851
Sylvia Drake was 66 when Charity died and had not left her side for over 40 years. Family and neighbors commented on what a shock it would be for her to be on her own, with loneliness a common theme in their condolence letters. Some came close to recognizing that Sylvia was the equivalent of a widow, using that word, but she was denied the social recognition and status that widowhood normally conferred.
Chapter 17: Diligent in Business 1835
The chapter opens with a detailed dramatized episode from a typical workday for C&S, cited to a diary entry, but not indicated as direct quotes and clearly elaborated from the author’s imagination. This is the sort of concern I’ve noted previously about the fictionalizing of details.
Chapter 15: Dear Aunts 1823
Chapter 13: Wild Affections 1811
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