Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine

H. L. Meakin

Print publication date: 1998

Print ISBN-13: 9780198184553

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184553.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2020. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 30 November 2020

‘The Desire for the Proximate’: Lesbian ‘Likenesse’ in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’

‘The Desire for the Proximate’: Lesbian ‘Likenesse’ in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’

Chapter:
(p.85) 2 ‘The Desire for the Proximate’: Lesbian ‘Likenesse’ in ‘Sapho to Philaenis’
Source:
John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine
Author(s):

H. L. Meakin

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184553.003.0003

This chapter examines John Donne's lesbian love poem Sappho to Philaenis. It discusses the possible reasons for and implications of this poem's near invisibility and its relegation beyond the margins of Donne's canon. It suggests that Donne's representation of lesbian love arises out of a desire to synthesize the unitive perfections of the marriage relationship and the Renaissance ideal of friendship between equals.

Keywords:   John Donne, Sappho to Philaenis, lesbian love, marriage, friendship

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .