SOURCE: "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632–1664," in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1, Autumn, 1989, pp. 34–60.

In the following essay, Andreadis argues that the poems that constitute "Philips's real contribution to English letters" reveal expressions of homoerotic love "and have a place beside the long classical tradition of the literature of male love. " Extensive footnotes have been deleted in this reprinting, and can be found in the original essay cited above.

Katherine Philips, known as "The Matchless Orinda," was the first English female poet to achieve a considerable reputation in her own time. She was extravagantly praised, indeed lionized, by her male contemporaries: Abraham Cowley, the earl of Roscommon (Wentworth Dillon), Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden, and much later, even John Keats referred to her as the female standard of excellence toward which all other women ought to aspire. Andrew Marvell may have been influenced...