SOURCE: Meakin, H. L. “Sapho to Philaenis: Donne Writes Back: His Dialogue With Ovid and Sappho.” In John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine, pp. 109-38. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Meakin discusses Donne's poem about the lesbian poet Sappho as example of how Donne was able to transcend seventeenth-century conceptions of sex and gender.

Donne Writes Back: His Dialogue with Ovid and Sappho

That imitations and translations of Ovid in the sixteenth century constituted a large part of literary endeavour hardly needs stating. Ovid's Epistulae heroidum or his Heroides were translated into English by George Turberville in 1567, the same year that Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses appeared. Turberville, John Lyly, whose drama Sapho and Phao was first performed in 1584 before the Queen, and Michael Drayton, who in 1597 wrote England's Heroicall Epistles, had their own agendas in responding to Ovid and were not interested in the...