Classical Women Poets

Fragmented and forgotten, the women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long been overlooked by translators and scholars. Yet to Antipater of Thessalonica, writing in the first century AD, these were the 'earthly Muses' whose poetic skills rivalled those of their heavenly namesakes. Today only a fraction of their work survives - lyrical, witty, often innovative, and always moving - offering surprising insights into the closed world of women in antiquity, from childhood friendships through love affairs and marriage to motherhood and bereavement. Josephine Balmer's translations breathe new life into long-lost works by over a dozen poets from early Greece to the late Roman empire, including Sappho, Corinna, Erinna and Sulpicia, as well as inscriptions, folk-songs and even graffiti. Each poet is introduced by a brief bibliographical note, and where necessary her poems are annotated to guide readers through unfamiliar mythological or historical references. In an illuminating introduction, Josephine Balmer examines the nature of women's poetry in antiquity, as well as the problems (and pleasures) of translating such fragmentary works. Classical Women Poets is a complete collection for anyone interested in women's literature, the ancient world, and - above all - poetry. It is a companion volume to Josephine Balmer's edition Sappho: Poems and Fragments, also published by Bloodaxe.

The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.

Although Greek society was largely male-dominated, it gave rise to a strong tradition of female authorship. Women poets of ancient Greece and Rome have long fascinated readers, even though much of their poetry survives only in fragmentary form. This pathbreaking volume is the first collection of essays to examine virtually all surviving poetry by Greek and Roman women. It elevates the status of the poems by demonstrating their depth and artistry. Edited and with an introduction by Ellen Greene, the volume covers a broad time span, beginning with Sappho (ca. 630 b.c.e.) in archaic Greece and extending to Sulpicia (first century B.C.E.) in Augustan Rome. In their analyses, the contributors situate the female poets in an established male tradition, but they also reveal their distinctly “feminine” perspectives. Despite relying on literary convention, the female poets often defy cultural norms, speaking in their own voices and transcending their positions as objects of derision in male-authored texts. In their innovative reworkings of established forms, women poets of ancient Greece and Rome are not mere imitators but creators of a distinct and original body of work.

Arab women poets have been around since the earliest of times, yet their diwans (collected poems) were not given the same consideration as their male counterparts’. Spanning 5,000 years, from the pre-Islamic to the Andalusian periods, Classical Poems by Arab Women presents rarely seen work by over fifty women writers for the first time. From the sorrowful eulogies of Khansa to the gleeful scorn of Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, this collection exclusively features the work of Arab women who boldly refused to be silenced. The poems are excursions into their vibrant world whose humanity has been suppressed for centuries by religious and political bigotry. With poems in both English and Arabic, this remarkable anthology celebrates feminine wit and desire, and shows the significant contribution Arab women made to the literary tradition.

Beginning with Sappho in the seventh century B.C.E and ending with Egeria in the fifth century C.E., Snyder profiles ancient Greek and Roman women writers, including lyric and elegiac poets and philosophers and other prose writers. The writers are allowed to speak for themselves, with as much translation from their extant works provided in text as possible. In addition to giving readers biographical and cultural context for the writers and their works, Snyder refutes arguments representing prejudicial attitudes about women’s writing found in the scholarly literature. Covering writers from a wide historical span, this volume provides an engaging and informative introduction to the origins of the tradition of women’s writing in the West.

Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.

One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe’eh, who lived over a thousand years ago) and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the twentieth century they tended to come from society’s social extremes. Many were princesses, a good number were hired entertainers of one kind or another, and they were active in many different countries – Iran of course, but also India, Afghanistan, and areas of central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Not surprisingly, a lot of their poetry sounds like that of their male counterparts, but a lot doesn’t; there are distinctively bawdy and flirtatious poems by medieval women poets, poems from virtually every era in which the poet complains about her husband (sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with poignant seriousness), touching poems on the death of a child, and many epigrams centered on little details that bring a life from hundreds of years ago vividly before our eyes. This new bilingual edition of The Mirror of My Heart – the poems in Persian and English on facing pages – is a unique and captivating collection introduced and translated by Dick Davis, an acclaimed scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right. In his introduction he provides fascinating background detail on Persian poetry written by women through the ages, including common themes and motifs and a brief overview of Iranian history showing how women poets have been affected by the changing dynasties. From Rabe’eh in the tenth century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the twenty-first, each of the eighty-four poets in this volume is introduced in a short biographical note, while explanatory notes give further insight into the poems themselves.