The Modernist Sappho: Manifesting Hellas in the Poetics of H.D. and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

This thesis examines the written works of H.D. and Virginia Woolf in order to elucidate the many manifestations of Hellenic and Sapphic influences on their high modernist queer female poetics. Through scholarship review and direct analysis, I trace the ways in which Hellas and Sappho mediated both writers’ creative engagement with themes of fragmentation, matrilineage, marginalization, and homoeroticism. I explore the influence of Sappho’s lyrics and legacy on Woolf’s and H.D.’s respective poetics of sexuality (e.g., their homoerotics, perspectives on androgyny, and critical engagement with heterosexual inheritances in literature). Moreover, I use H.D. as a foil for Woolf, contrasting her idyllic Sapphic visions of female creativity with Woolf’s Hellenic ambivalence – in which Greek and Sappho are inherently associated with loss, obscuration of truth, censorship of love, female disenfranchisement, and the lack of female artistic community in the patriarchal modern world.