SOURCE: “Love, Creativity and Female Role: Grillparzer's ‘Sappho’ and Staël's ‘Corinne’ Between Art and Cultural Norm,” in Jahrbuch fur Internationale, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1984, pp. 128-46.

In the following essay, Burkhard explores the role of the female poet in Sappho and in Madame de Staël's Corinne.

Poets and writers are a powerful magnet for the modern imagination. They are considered vivid examples of a complex existence yoked to both the private and the public sphere, the inner laws of creative work and the demands of outside reality. Endowed with nothing but the force of words and images, set against a world of facts and deeds, writers are most exposed to the dichotomy between spirit and reality, between free imagination and actual life in a system of concrete socio-cultural norms.

Yet regarding the poetic mission in tension with social obligations is a relatively recent phenomenon. According to Reinhold Grimm...