Sapphic Poets Throughout History

... Enheduanna, in ancient Akkadia, now known as Iraq. Enheduanna was an ancient Akkadian princess, a priestess as well as a poet, writer and, is considered as the world's first author known by name. Enheduanna was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad (Sargon the Great, r. 2334 - 2279 BCE). The Akkadian Empire was the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia which was a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system and is now home to modern-day Iraq, Kuwait, Turkey and Syria. Enheduanna's name translates as 'En-Priestess, wife of the god Nanna' or 'High Priestess of An' (the sky god). She became the high priestess of the most important temple in Sumer (in the city of Ur, (in modern-day Southern Iraq)) to try to merge the Sumerian (Sumer is the earliest known civilisation in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia) gods with the Akkadian gods to create stability for her Father's empire.

Enheduanna is credited with creating paradigms of poetry, psalms, and prayers used throughout the ancient world. This is even more stellar considering scribal traditions in the ancient world are often considered as boystown. Enheduanna’s works form an important contribution to ancient Mesopotamia's rich literary history.

Though she wrote 42 poems that have survived more than 4,000 year reflecting personal frustrations and hopes, religious devotion, her response to war, and feelings about the world she lived in, Enheduanna is best known for her works hymns. Three powerful hymns: Inninsagurra (The Great-Hearted Mistress'), Ninmesarra (The Exaltation of Inanna), and Inninmehusa (Goddess of the Fearsome Powers) were to the goddess Inanna (later identified with goddesses such as the Akkadian/Assyrian Ishtar, the Hittite Sauska, the Greek Aphrodite, and the Phoenician Astarte, among others). The goddess Inana (Sumerian)/Ištar (Akkadian) was among the most important deities and the most important goddess in the Mesopotamian era. Was it admiration or something deeper... Enheduanna odes to the goddess Inanna are now being interpreted as Enheduanna's love for Inanna.

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... now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; two notable exceptions are the "Ode to Aphrodite" and the Tithonus poem.

Beyond her poetry, she is well known as a symbol of love and desire between women and Women loving women (WLW) with the English words sapphic and lesbian being derived from her own name and the name of her home island of Lesbos. How gay was Sappho? Among modern scholars, Sappho's sexuality is still debated.

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...to be Italy's earliest lesbian writer. Although only six of her sonnets have survived, five are specifically dedicated to Margaret of Austria. There is debate as to when the two met but it is certain that they met before Margaret's marriage to Alessandro de' Medici, Duke of Florence in 1536. They quickly formed an intense bond. Again there is debate as to whether they consummated their bond. Interestingly Forteguerri's' object of desire, Margaret had no children from her marriage to Alessandro and after his death she married the Duke of Parma and she famously refused to consummate the union for five years. After giving birth to twins she chose to live separately from her husband. Forteguerri married Giulio di Alessandro Colombini (a member of a powerful Noveschi family) and had three children. After he died she married Petruccio Petrucci (a member of the powerful ruling family of Siena) and her children were sent to live with the her first husbands family.

Forteguerri became a legend n Sienese history when she led a group of women in helping with the construction of a defensive bastion to protect her city against an anticipated attack from Imperial Spanish forces, in January 1553. The attack and siege that followed in 1554–55 ultimately lead to the fall of the independent Republic.

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...xxx

Poem 49, a Sapphic love poem written in Scots, which appears in the Maitland Quarto manuscript (containing 95 poems) is one the earliest known instances of sapphic poetry in Europe, since Sappho herself. Although anonymous, research suggest the Poem 49 was most likely written by Marie Maitland, a daughter of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (East Lothian, Scotland).

Though the author of Poem 49 is anonymous the poem is unambiguously written in the voice of a woman and is addressed to another woman: praising the bond between two women in a way that is homoerotic rather than platonic. Check out an in-depth interpretation (and partial translation) of Poem 49. Good luck reading it in Scots!

3e weild me holie at 3our will [Ye govern me wholly at your will] and raviss [ravish] my affectioun...

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She also translated plays by Pierre Corneille and five shorter Italian and French pieces. Though she married, at aged sixteen, Welsh Parliamentarian James Philipps and had two children there has been speculation over Katherine's sexuality. Many of her poems were written for or about fellow "Society of Friendship" members Anne Owen and Mary Aubrey, who, in her poetry, went by the names of Lucasia and Rosania, respectively.

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Aphra Behn is buried at Westminster Abbey, though not in Poets' Corner. Aphra Behn was one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing as a playwright (of 19 plays), poet, prose writer and translator. She broke cultural barriers and became a literary role model for women authors.

Initially, Aphra wrote under the pseudonym Astrea - taken from the play L'Astrée which features several erotic scenes between female characters (or characters passing as female).

Some of Aphra's lyrics originally appeared in her plays but the majority of her poetry was published in two collections: Poems upon Several Occasions: with A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684 - 45 poems) and Lycidus: Or The Lover in Fashion (1688 - 10 poems). Her poetry and correspondence with a number of women showed little hesitation in expressing sentiments that could be interpreted as romantic. Aphra addressed several poems to a woman named Emily Price, possibly an actress and wrote a dedication in 1689 to Hortense Mancini, Duchesse Mazarine, who enjoyed a number of unambiguous "friendships" with women.

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Sor Juana loved learning and when she was 16, she asked for her parents’ permission to disguise herself as a male student in order to attend university, which did not accept women. They refused. Interested not in marriage but in the furthering of her studies, Juana entered the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites of St. Joseph and shortly afterwards moved to the Convent of the Order of St. Jérôme, where she remained until her death. In the Convent, Sor Juana had her own study and library (housing an estimated 4,000 books, the largest collection in Mexico) which became Mexico City’s intellectual hub where she debated with scholars from the Court and the University. In addition to writing poems and plays, she studied music, philosophy and natural science.

One of her visitors was María Luisa, Condesa de Paredes the wife of the Viceroy Marqués de la Laguna. Maria Luisa became the subject of a series of Sor Juana's Sapphic love poems: "That you're a woman far away, is no hindrance to my love: for the soul, as you well know, distance and sex don't count."

Surprisingly it was not because of her Sapphic poetry, but because of her now famous letter "Respuesta a Sor Filotea" which has been hailed as the first feminist manifesto, defending, among other things, a woman's right to education that the Church authorities cracked down on her. Threatened by the Inquisition, Sor Juana was silenced for the final three years of her life. In 1995, Sor Juana's name was inscribed in gold on the wall of honour in the Mexican Congress. The town where Sor Juana grew up, San Miguel Nepantla in the municipality of Tepetlixpa, State of Mexico, was renamed in her honour as Nepantla de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

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... daughter of a merchant and through an arranged marriage, married a merchant herself. Not only was she a talented poet she was a playwright and composer who wrote an opera (zaju) Yinjiu du Sao (Reading the "Li Sao" While Drinking) - also known as Qiaoying (The Fake Image) about a woman who cross-dresses and paints her own self-portrait, while lamenting her inability to use her talents because she is a woman and the gender roles of the era are stupidly limiting. Highly praised and popular during her life time and considered one of the best lyricists of the Qing dynasty, Wu Zao's poems/songs were sung throughout China.

Later in life she converted to Buddhism, becoming a Taoist priestess and lived in monastic seclusion. Such a shame, despite seven of her poems being translated into English very little of her trailblazing work has been translated into English and is known to Western audiences, mostly likely due to her sapphic overtones.

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... of her work was published posthumously in 1890. Upon her death, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered forty handbound volumes of nearly 1,800 handwritten poems. Dickinson assembled these booklets by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems. The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, who removed her annotations. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981) is the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Some scholars question the poet's sexuality, theorizing that the numerous letters and poems that were dedicated to Susan Dickinson indicate a lesbian romance. Emily met Gilbert in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season "when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens." Both Emily and her brother, Austin, became attracted to Susan. Susan married Austin Dickinson and lived next door to Emily, who was now her sister-in-law. Throughout Emily’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her "Only Woman in the World." At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to Susan though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd. Also Sent sent Susan over three hundred letters, more than to any other correspondent, over the course of their relationship. Note Emily Dickinson never married.

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... and biographies on abolitionists: fireside poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1893) and author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897).

During the American Civil War, Fields was a supporter of Abraham Lincoln and wanted a complete end to slavery. She was also supporter of women's rights and encouraged women writers such as Emma Lazarus, Harriet Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Mary Freeman, and Sarah Orne Jewett. Following her marriage in 1854, to well respected publisher James Thomas Fields they established a literary and artistic salon in their Boston home, at 148 Charles Street. Among their friends were Alfred Tennyson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens (they visited London)...

Upon James' death, Sarah Orne Jewett moved in with Annie. When the women were apart they wrote passionate letters to each other. In March 1882, Sarah wrote: "Are you sure you know how much I love you... I think of you and think of you and I am always reminded of you." In another letter she told Annie: "I long to see you and say all sorts of foolish things... and to kiss you ever so many times." Annie Fields's especially close relationship with Jewett may have been one of the inspirations for Henry James's The Bostonians.

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... seaport towns. She also wrote successful books for children, including Play Days (1878), The Story of the Normans (1887), and Betty Leicester (1890). Posthumously, her poems were collected and published under the title Verses (1916).

Jewett never married. She established a close friendship with writer Annie Adams Fields and her husband, publisher James Thomas Fields. After the sudden death of James Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett's life in a "Boston marriage". The two also travelled together to Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Italy, Norway, and Switzerland meeting authors like Charles Reade, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the family of Charles Dickens. After Jewett's death, Fields published Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911). Apparently their mutual friend, author and editor Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe urged Fields to remove deeply personal passages before publication.

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that most of her poetry remained unpublished until the 21st century. I've Googled until my fingers have turned pink but sadly there is zilch about her and her poems. Apparently, Isa wrote what was interpreted as "emotionally and erotically" charged poems for her best friend Lydia Lagus..

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... Polyxena was known for founding, co-editing, writing and illustrating the children's magazine and publishing house Тропинка (FootPath 1905 - 1912) with children's author Natalia Manaseina (1869-1930). In the magazine, she published her translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of the earliest translations into Russian. Polyxena Solovyova was a Russian poet and illustrator and, the sister of the famous poet, philosopher and theologian Vladimir Solovyov. As well as being a poet, Polyxena was known for founding, co-editing, writing and illustrating the children’s magazine and publishing house Тропинка (FootPath 1905 - 1912) with children’s author Natalia Manaseina (1869-1930). In the magazine, she published her translation of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” one of the earliest translations into Russian.

Polyxena was a Symbolist poet, from the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. Her first verses appeared in the magazine Niva, in 1885. Her collections of poetry include: Poems (1899), Frost (1905) which was dedicated to her partner Natalia Manaseina, Plakun-grass (1909) and the The Night (1914).

Though, she received the Medal of Pushkin, in 1908, in recognition for her literary merit for many years, her contributions to Russian literature were lost and there was no mention of her in the Soviet period. In 1999, she was reintroduced as a figure of Russia's Silver Age when Tatyana Nikitichna Zhukovskaya and Elena Albertovna Kallo compiled a book, Sub Rosa.

Polyxena and Natalia began an affair and bizarrely Polyxena, 1909, moved in to Natalia's marital home in Saint Petersburg. To avoid the violence of the Russian Revolution, in 1917, Polyxena, Natalia and Natalia's husband lived in voluntary exile in Crimea. The Russian intellectual community living in the Crimea included such notables as Russian translator and literary figure Eugenia Gertsyk, the actress Lyudmila Erarskaya, poet Sophia Parnok, composer and musician Alexander Spendiarov and the poet Maximilian Voloshin. At the end of 1923, they were able to return to Moscow, where Polyxena and Natalia shared their life together, until Polyxena's death.

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... 650 poems. One of her highly acclaimed works and her last was Legends (1921) in which she uses 11 legends from around the globe as a basis for 11 poems.

In 1912 Lowell met actress Ada Dwyer Russell while Russell was on an acting tour in Boston for a play. Two years later Russell moved in with Lowell and their long-term relationship lasted over a decade until Lowell's death. Russell not only became Lowell's secretary but the subject of many of Lowell's romantic poems such as "The Taxi", "Absence", "In a Garden", "Madonna of the Evening Flowers", "Opal", and "Aubade". Lowell admitted to John Livingston Lowes (an American scholar and English literature critic) that Russell was the subject of her series of romantic poems titled Two Speak Together. Lowell wished to dedicate her books to Russell, but even though they were in a "Boston marriage" Russell refused but relented once for Lowell’s biography of John Keats, in which Lowell wrote, "To A.D.R., This, and all my books. A.L."

Lowell is also known for bringing the "Imagism" of Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle to the attention of Americans. Imagism was a reactionary movement against romanticism and Victorian poetry in early-20th-century Anglo-American poetry. Imagism emphasised simplicity, clarity of expression, and precision through the use of exacting visual images. Lowell also wrote a biography on Keats, penned two books of literary criticism, Six French Poets: Studies in Contemporary Literature (1915) and Tendencies in Modern American Poetry (1917) and A Critical Fable (1922) which was a light-hearted satire on the literary currents of her day. Posthumously Lowell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for "What’s O'Clock" from in East Wind, and Ballads for Sale (1926).

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... The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which is written by Stein from Toklas's point of view. Stein also wrote librettos to several operas by Virgil Thompson including Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All.

Stein's life partner, was American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde Alice Babette Toklas, which lasted for nearly four decades, ending in with Stein's death. Together they hosted a salon in their home at 27 rue de Fleurus which became a hangout for the leading figures of modernism in art and literature including avant-garde painters such as Braque, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso. Between WW I and WW II, her salon also attracted expatriate American and English writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder, and Sherwood Anderson.

Although Gertrude Stein willed much of her estate to Toklas, including their shared art collection (some of it by Picasso) housed in their home, as they were gay, the couple's relationship was not legally recognised. While Toklas was away on vacation, Stein's relatives removed the valuable art collection from Toklas' home. Consequently, Toklas had to rely on contributions from friends as well as her writing to make a living.

Being a Jew, I wonder how Gertrude Stein survived the occupation of Paris by the Nazis?

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... Le Coeur innombrable ("The Numberless Heart", 1901), Les Éblouissements ("Resplendence", 1907), and L'Honneur de souffrir ("The Honour of Suffering", 1927).

Anna de Noailles was the first woman to become a Commander of the Legion of Honor, and be received in the Royal Belgian Academy of French Language and Literature. In 1921, she was honoured with the "Grand Prix" of the Académie Française.

Opps, I can't remember why I included her in - so will have to further research this :(

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By hosting a highly successful literary salon Barney certainly did not need a dating app. She had numerous long, short-term, on-and-off romances which sometimes overlapped as she was not into monogamy. Relationships included: poets Renée Vivien and Olive Custance (Lady Alfred Douglas), dancer Armen Ohanian, painter Romaine Brooks, Oscar Wilde's niece Dolly Wilde, writers Élisabeth de Gramont (the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre), Colette and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, artist and furniture designer Eyre de Lanux.

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... Les Kitharèdes ("The Women of Kithara", 1904); translations from Sappho; and Sillages ("Sea Wakes", 1908). A public square is named in Vivien's honor in Le Marais, Paris: Place Renée Vivien.

At 21, when she inherited her father's fortune, Vivien moved from London to Gay Paree. She lived an open life and her dress style (dressed in 18th century men's clothing) and lifestyle were as notorious among the bohemian set as was her verse. She had affairs with American heiress and writer Natalie Clifford Barney, immensely wealthy Baroness Hélène de Zuylen, one of the Paris Rothschilds and Kérimé Turkhan Pasha, the wife of a Turkish diplomat.

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... a best-seller throughout the German Empire. Gertrud Günther was born to Jewish parents, in 1881, in Eydtkuhnen, East Prussia. In the same year she published Auf Kypros, aged nineteen, she married Baron Heinrich Georg Ludwig von Puttkamer, a member of the Pomeranian nobility who was 35 years her senior. They moved to Grunewald, Berlin and lived a life of high society and wealth. Fourteen years later, her husband died and it is believed she then turned to morphine.

By 1910, her writings were not only centered on erotic sapphic love but also on the use of morphine. By using her pen name Marie Madeleine, she had kept secret her identity for more than three decades, but during the Third Reich, the Nazis ferreted her out. Despite her nobility, the Nazis wanted to erase this Jewish lesbian poet addicted to morphine from history. In 1932, her writings were condemned as depraved and ordered to be burned explaining why her writings are so rare to find. Under the pretense of treating her for morphine addiction, in 1943, the Nazis committed her to a sanatorium in Katzenelnbogen, Rheinland-Pfalz. A year later, she died on 27 or 30 September 1944 while "under the care" of Nazi doctors... was she victim to the Nazi's Aktion T4 euthanasia campaign?

By the end of her life, von Puttkamer had written over 46 works, including poetry, short stories, plays and novels. In 2016, Baroness von Puttkamer's rediscovered works were translated into English and compiled into the book Priestess of Morphine: The Lost Writings of Marie-Madeleine in the Time of Nazis by Ronald K. Siegel. Moreover, her life and works inspired a chamber opera by Rosśa Crean and Aiden Feltkamp The Priestess Of Morphine, subtitled A Forensic Investigation Of Marie-Madeleine.

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... several poems to them and that her poems were influenced by Sappho, Parnok is referred to by many as the "Russian Sappho".

Parnok created five books of poems: Стихотворения (Poems, 1916), Розы Пиерии (Roses of Pieria, 1922), Лоза (The Vine, 1923) , Музыка (Music, 1926) and Вполголоса (Half-Whispered or In a low voice, 1928). Her poetry career was cut short in 1928 when Soviet censorship made Parnok unable to publish any more of her work. During 1928 and 1933 she wrote nearly a 100 poems which were never published until long after her death. Her personal work was kept in a "secret drawer". She also wrote three libretto for Yuliya Veysberg's operas: Русалочка (The Little Mermaid (libretto), 1923), Алмаст (Almast, (libretto), 1930) and Гюльнара (Gyul'nara (libretto), 1935) - As Parnok died before production, Veysberg made final edits to the lyrics before its debut in 1935. Though she continued to write during the Soviet censorship years, the only works that were released were her translations of poems by Charles Baudelaire, novels by Romain Rolland, Marcel Proust, Henri Barbusse and others. She also wrote more than thirty critical essays.

In order to escape her father’s disapproval at her being gay, and to move to more cosmopolitan St. Petersburg, Parnok had a short-lived marriage to her friend Vladimir Volkenstein, a poet and playwriter, who empathised with her circumstances. In St. Petersburg she did find others like her. She had relationships with poet Marina Tsvetaeva, actress Lyudmila Erarskaya, Moscow University mathematician Olga Tsuberbiller, opera singer Maria Maksakova and physicist Nina Vedeneyeva.

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... inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Gabriela Mistral, literary pseudonym of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was a Chilean poet and diplomat. In 1945 she became the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world".

Gabriela's poems are characterized by strong emotion and were influenced by the modernist movement. The central themes of her poetry are love for children, love, deceit, sorrow, nature and travel. Sonetos de la muerte (Love Poems In Memory Of The Dead) (1914), made her known throughout Latin America. Thereafter, followed her first great collection of poems, Desolación (Despair) (1922), Ternura (Tenderness) lullabies and rhymes for children (1924), Tala (Felling) (1938). A complete collection of her poetry was published in 1958. As well as being South America's first ever Nobel Laureate in Literature, Gabriela Mistral was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature 1951.

There is debate regarding whether or not she was a closet Lesbian / Bisexual - oops, slap my wrist, i've included her.

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... only the third woman to ever win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 1943, Millay was the sixth person and the second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. Although poetry was her main aim, Edna began seeing much success as a playwright; she had lucrative careers with both the Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild.

At Vassar College Millay she had an affair with English actress Edith Wynne Matthison and after graduation and moving to NYC she lived an openly bisexual lifestyle. She also had an affair with sculptor and famous lesbian expat Thelma Wood, who she met after moving to Paris in 1921. Many of her plays and poems are now legendary for their lesbian subtext, such as The Lamp and the Bell, Aria da Capo, and Renascence.

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... autobiography published where the author does not employ a pseudonym. Over the course of her career Gidlow wrote thirteen books including Sapphic Songs: Seventeen to Seventy (1976).

With Roswell George Mills (a quite openly gay journalist) in Montreal, Quebec, they published the first magazine in North America which discussed gay and lesbian issues and lifestyle via Les Mouches Fantastiques (The Fantastic Flies). Through contacts in the theatre district of NYC, Gidlow met Isabel Quallo, Gidlow who became her partner for more than ten years. They moved to a ranch, in rural Marin County, and turned it into a Bohemian retreat, named "Druid Heights" which attracted many artists in residence.

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... born Mary Kathleen in London in 1906 and was taught by her father to: drive, shoot and... box (he had missed not having a son!). At the age of nineteen, in 1925, she impulsively married English novelist and playwright Richard Turpin - they both probably had not yet realised their sexual preferences. Within two years, the marriage was annulled. Thereafter Valentine started sporting a boyish Eton crop and wore men's clothes. Valentine began writing poems in the Dorset village of Chaldon where she had escaped to an artists' colony begun by TF Powys. There, in 1930, she fell in love with novelist and poet Sylvia Townsend Warner who was 12 years her senior. The two writers lived together in Dorset, and in 1934 they jointly published a sensational Sapphic poetry collection Whether a Dove or a Seagull which comprises 109 sapphic love poems: 55 by Valentine Ackland and 54 by her partner Sylvia Townsend Warner, voicing their physical love and emotional commitment.

During the 1920s to the 1940s, Valentine's poetry appeared in British and American literary journals. In 1934, both Valentine and Sylvia joined the Communist party and Valentine, started to be widely published in the left wing press. During the Spanish Civil War, they volunteered for the Red Cross in Barcelona. When they returned to Dorset for a time they were under surveillance by M15 and the local Dorset Police and most likely blacklisted, During WW2 her repeated applications to use her driving skills for the allied campaign were mysteriously turned down. Her M15 "file" remained open until 1957, when the investigation was halted! At the outbreak of the Second World War Valentine and Sylvia moved to a riverside house in Frome Vauchurch, Dorset, where they lived for the rest of their lives until Ackland's death from breast cancer in 1969.

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... poet and short-story writer. During her lifetime she published 101 poems. From 1949 to 1950 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and for her work she received a: Order of Rio Branco (awarded by the Brazilian government), Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Poems: North & South/A Cold Spring Neustadt International Prize for Literature for Geography III, National Book Award for The Complete Poems, Guggenheim Fellowship and Academy of American Poets Fellowship. In 2010 she was elected to inaugural class of the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

In 1944, Elizabeth Bishop left Key West, and for 14 years she lived in Brazil with her lover, the architect Lota de Macedo Soares in Pétropolis (who took her own life in 1967). In 1971 Bishop began a relationship with Alice Methfessel (the visiting scholars' Kirkland House's secretary) who she met while teaching at Harvard University.

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... Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and was awarded the Academy of American Poet's Wallace Stevens Award for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. In 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts, stating that "[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage."

In 1976, Rich began her partnership with Jamaican-American novelist Michelle Cliff (known for the novels Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (2004)), which lasted until her death.

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... Kääpiöpuu (The dwarf tree, 1949), Kuningas Kultatakki (King Goldcoat, 1950), Pohjajäätä (Permafrost, 1952), Päivästä päivään (From day to day, 1954) and Kalliopohja (Bedrock, 1955). Posthumous collections of her poetry were published in 1959 Sanantuoja (The messenger) , and in 1974, Pikku karhun talviunet (The little bear's winter dreams).

Though her poetry is sometimes seen in Finland as a poetry of suffering, sometimes likened to that of Emily Dickinson and, of intense, even forbidding, religiosity, fairy-tales were her playground. Her work was progressing during a transition period, when modernism broke into Finnish poetry.

Although a lesbian, her sexual identity had to remain hidden since until 1971 homosexual acts, whether between men or women, were illegal in Finland. Thus her poems seldom hint to her lesbianism. For about ten years she lived with a female companion, Sirkka Meriluoto who she dictated her last poems to while she was dying in the hospital.

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Mirkka published her first collection of poems, Vedessä palaa (Burning in the water) in 1954, thereafter followed Tunnit (The hours,1957), Syksy muuttaa linnut (Autumn changes the birds, 1961), Ilo ja epäsymmetria (Joy and asymmetry, 1965), Anna päivän olla kaikki (Let the day be all, 1968), Minä rakastan sinua, mina sanon sen kaikille (I love you, I shall tell everyone, 1972), Tuulen viime vuosi (The last year of the wind, 1974)... Any Sapphic Fins out there, fly your flag proud and please do help me out here.

Mirkka Rekola is known for her complex and innovative style and for this she received 14 (?) Finish literary awards, including Finland's highest literary prize, the Suomi prize, in 1995 and in 2000, she was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Though Mirkka's life partner was award-wining Finnish writer Mirjam Polkunen, I'm not sussing any hidden sapphic code in her poetry. This may merely reflect how little of Mirkka's work has been translated into English and is not out there to be googled on the www? It has been suggested that translators may be challenged to find alternative ways of rendering her prose in to other languages? Or perhaps this was due to the fact that, until 1971 homosexual acts, whether between men or women, were illegal in Finland? I still wish to include her in this page as she seems a v innovative poet who was lesbian.

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... Audrey was born on February 18, 1934 to immigrants from Grenada and grew up in Manhattan, US. While studying for a year at the National University of Mexico in Cuernavaca she identified herself as being both a lesbian and a poet. Thereafter, she earned a Bachelor's degree from Hunter College, NYC and a Master's degree in library science from Columbia University.

Audre married attorney Edwin Rollins who was a white gay man, in 1962, and they had two children but, eight years later they divorced. During the 1960s, while working as a librarian in New York City public schools, Audre's poetry began being published in magazines and anthologies. Her first volume of poems, The First Cities, was published in 1968. That same year, she earned a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College, a historically Black college in Mississippi. There, she discovered her love of teaching and met Frances Clayton, a professor of psychology and her partner until 1989.

As a poet, Audre Lorde is well known for her technical mastery and expression of anger and outrage at civil and social injustices, covering civil rights, feminism, black female identity, African American identity, lesbianism, illness and disability. She was also accoladed as a powerful, melodic, and intense spoken word artist.

Not only a gifted poet and author, Audre was a prominent member of numerous movements, including: civil rights, women's & LGBTQ rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. In 1984, Audre started a visiting professorship in West Berlin at the Free University of Berlin. During her visits to West Berlin, Audre became an influential part of the Afro-German movement and mentored Afro-German women including poets and authors like Ika Hügel-Marshall, and May Ayim. Rather than fighting injustice through violence, Audre advocated that language was a very powerful weapon of resistance and therefore encouraged Afro-German women of Germany to speak up instead of fight back.

Sadly, diagnosed with breast cancer in 1977, Audre found that the ordeals of cancer treatment and mastectomy were shrouded in silence for women, and found them even further isolating as a Black lesbian woman. She disclosed her ordeals in The Cancer Journals (1980) which a year later won the American Library Association's Gay Caucus Book of the Year Award. Guttingly, Audre's cancer returned and, at the age of 58, she passed away in 1992 in St. Croix (an island in the Caribbean Sea), where she had been living with her partner Gloria Joseph (Crucian-American academic, writer and activist).

Throughout her career Audre Lorde received many honours including the Bill Whitehead Memorial Award (1990), the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit (1991), was elected Poet Laureate of the State of New York for 1991-1992 and was posthumously elected to the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City in 2020. The Publishing Triangle association instituted, in 2001, the Audre Lorde Award for distinguished works of lesbian poetry.

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... Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement and received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. Escaping a difficult home life, she would retreat to the nearby woods, where play and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and forging a friendship with Norma Millay (Edna's sister) she helped Norma organise her sister's papers. When she was 28, Mary's first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963.

Often it is stated that her work was inspired by nature - but it was also inspired by her partner of 40 years. In the late 1950s, Mary met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They made their home largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived until Molly's death in 2005.

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... Lebanese-American descent, she always identified most closely with the Laguna, among whom she spent her childhood and upbringing.

In her early years Paula identified as a lesbian, but by the end of her life she was identifying herself as a "serial bisexual" having married twice and divorced twice. Her scholarship on Native American understandings of "two-spirits" is recognised as some of the most significant work on the subject. Native American cultures once celebrated people who were "two-spirited," Two-spirit persons" - individuals, who would now be labelled as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. For example in The Kaska culture, in a family of only girls, one girl would be designated as a boy and the new "son" for the rest of his life would dress in male clothing and function in the Kaska male role. Based on dreams, The Yuma culture had a tradition of gender designation: a female who dreamed of weapons would become a male for all practical purposes. A Cocopah girl who chose to play with boys or with boys’ objects such as a bow and arrow would become a male functionary.

Paula received a BA and MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon and earned a PhD at the University of New Mexico, where she began research on tribal religions. Throughout her lifetime she worked in the English department of over 7 different premier universities, becoming the head of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center in the 1990s.

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... in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada and was a Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Women's Studies at Exeter University. At present she lives in the southwest of England with English writer Gillian Hanscombe. Suniti's poetry, fables, articles and reviews have been featured in various anthologies and journals in India, Australia, Canada, Britain and the US.

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... Jonestown & Other Madness (1985), Movement in Black (1978), Woman Slaughter (1978), Pit Stop (1975), and Child of Myself (1972). Friends and admirers established The Pat Parker Poetry Award which is awarded annually for a free verse narrative poem or dramatic monologue by a black lesbian poet.

Parker became actively involved in civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements. In '60s she worked with the Black Panther Party, directed the Feminist Women’s Health Centre in Oakland, was a member of the Lesbian Tide Collective, founded the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council and the Women’s Press Collective. In 1985 Parker travelled to Kenya and Ghana in 1985 with two separate United Nations delegations and testified before the United Nations on the status of women.

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... American Poets. Ryan has won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2011), been selected four times for The Best American Poetry and was selected for The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–1997 for Outsider Art (1995).

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Premio Campiello for Con passi giapponesi. Bravo! Patrizia was an out lesbian - her life partner for forty years was Art historian Diane Kelder, whom she married in Rome in 2017.

"My first poems were written for Kim Novak, in the fifth grade, after I saw the film Picnic. At one point, Novak is coming down the stairs, blond and beautiful, clapping her hands in time to the music that's playing... I fell in love, went home, fasted for a week in protest because I'd never be able to know Kim Novak — and after the fast I wrote two poems." Patrizia Cavalli, quoted from The Paris Review

Thereafter Patrizia wrote lots of poems! Her poetry collections, include L'io singolare proprio mio (1992), Sempre aperto teatro (1999), Pigre divinità e pigra sorte (2006), Flighty Matters (2012), Datura (2013), My Poems Won't Change the World: Selected Poems (2013), Con passi giapponesi (2019). Her love poetry which is implicitly and at times explicitly lesbian in orientation, reveals the complexities of translating some languages.

"In English, only context can sexualize the second person singular, whereas Italian grammar reveals gender in, for example, the suffix of an adjective or a past participle that qualifies a subject. In an untitled poem that begins "Love not mine not yours, / but the fenced-in field that we entered / from which you soon moved out," the protagonist who has "soon moved out" is necessarily a woman because of the "a" in the "riuscita" of "poco dopo sei riuscita." Quoted from John Taylor in The Arts Fuse

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... the monarch of the United Kingdom but now is appointed on the advice of the Prime Minister. Duffy's award-wining collections include a: Scottish Arts Council Award for Standing Female Nude (1985), Somerset Maugham Award for Manhattan (1987), Whitbread Poetry Award for Mean Time (1993) and T. S. Eliot Prize Rapture (2005).

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