SAPPHIC • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Sapphic

"Sapphic" Quotes from Famous Books

... Alexandrine, is one thing. It is another that in Spenser's case alone can the invention of a complicated but essentially integral form be assigned to a given poet. It is impossible to say that Sappho invented the Sapphic, or Alcaeus the Alcaic: each poet may have been a Vespucci to some precedent Columbus. But we are in a position to say that Spenser did most unquestionably invent the English Spenserian stanza—a form only inferior in individual beauty to the sonnet, which is itself practically ...

— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... a not uncommon form; but the presence in all the others of one line-mostly the second in the verse" (stanza?)—"which flows continuously, with only an aspirate pause in the middle, like that before the short line in the Sapphic Adonic, while the fifth has at the middle pause no similarity of sound with any part besides, gives the versification an entirely different effect. We could wish the capacities of our noble language in prosody ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... obedience to her word the lovely girl bent her fair form over the lute, and, after a wild prelude full of strange thrilling melodies, poured out a voice as liquid and as clear, aye! and as soft, withal, as the nightingale's, in a soft Sapphic love-strain full of the glorious poetry of ...

— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

Words linked to "Sapphic" : Sappho, rhythmic, homosexual, rhythmical, lesbian