Word: sappho
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...Sappho was thought unladylike not so much because of her personal habits as because of the poetry she wrote. But Sappho has many a sister in these westering years. Since poets generally discarded their priestlike function for that of self-mindreaders, women have flocked to join the profession and some of them have gone to the head, or near it, of their respective specialties. Last week two U. S. lady poets, whom repute places high above the ruck of feminine poetasters, smote their lyres in unison...
...sort of bastard Ocdipus of "Boys in Uniform" is a weak substitute for the Sappho of "Girls in Uniform." A soulful cadet is in love with his young step mother, who has married his ancient soldier father for reasons unexplained. There is a murder, the cadet is accused refuses to speak to save his mother sweetheart's honor, and in general displays all the noble qualities of man. After a courtroom scene of strange procedure the mystery is solved and the situation ends substantially where it began...
Some of Huxley's notes: The Nature of Love, Physical Passion, Old Age, Progress, Money, Comic Poetry, Obscurity in Poetry. God, Death. Authors quoted range from Sappho to Paul Valery, include many passages from U. S. Poet Walt Whitman but only one from a living English poet, William Henry Davies (nothing from Huxley's late great friend. David Herbert Lawrence). Significant of the pendulum-swing of modern taste are the admiring references to Tennyson and Browning, frequent quotations from them. As an example of unconscious literature Huxley gives the farewell note of a suicide: "No wish...
...steady decline in the study of Latin and Greek, the verbal sparring about the special value of the classics both for mental training and for unique cultural contributions has not perceptibly abated. The impatient crusaders for "practical" courses face the less vociferous but equally sincere defenders of Homer and Sappho or Virgil and Horace...
...coast, that when prose is printed in vertical snatches it becomes poetry. A current convert to this theory is Novelist Rupert Hughes, who has written an introduction for a book* by a Miss Virginia Church, California schoolteacher, in which he says she reminds him of Edgar Lee Masters and Sappho. He calls her pages "poems," a definition which may mislead other schoolteachers or puzzle them when they read what are really excerpts from an observant, slightly sentimental diary filled with familiar schoolhouse fauna. Samples...