LHMP #454 Donoghue 1997 Poems Between Women

The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women.  In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.

Of the approximately 100 authors and 150 poems, perhaps two-thirds fall within the pre-1900 scope of the Project. (This is very approximate, as I didn’t track down the specific publication dates.) Although the poems all focus on love of some type between women, the poets do not all fall within even the most generous definition of sapphic, demonstrating how normalized and ordinary expressions of f/f love have been across the centuries.

The collection specifically excludes poems where the relationship is between close family members. Other omissions are very long poems (mostly all from the 17-18th century), simple praise poems, and some works and authors who are already very familiar to the audience.

The organization is chronological, showing the development and change of poetic themes and fashions. These include the motif of unselfconscious romantic friendship from the 17th through 19th centuries, the establishment of poetic circles who used classical nicknames (17th century), the pleasures and pains of trying to maintain a female partnership in the face of a society that tolerated but did not actively support such an ambition (18-19th century), celebration of the extremes of sensibility (19th century), the entanglement of f/f love with feminist solidarity (later 19th century), death or absense of the beloved (universal, but especially increasing in the 19th century), and the waxing and waning of erotic language in varous degrees of explicitness. And then, beginning in the later 19th century, an increasing self-consciousness that the extremes of f/f love must be kept secret or disguised, until they begin to emerge more explicitly, first among sapphic salons and literary circles of the early 20th century then after a hiatus, openly with the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s.