Post- world War II, Victorian Female, and Romantic Period Female Literature Comparison of Language

Sappho (c. 630 BCE–c. 570 BCE)

We know more legend than actual facts about the life of Sappho, a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Much adored during her time, she was named “The Tenth Muse” by Plato and the Greeks honored her as “the Poetess” to match Homer’s “the Poet.” She composed in a dialect called Aeolic Greek, and her poems were meant to be sung with a lyre as an accompaniment. 
Her style was direct and vivid, employing emotion and description in equal parts. She often wrote about women in the context of her women’s community, called a thiasos, depicting her—or society’s—adoration of women. This resonates especially in works like “Fragment 31”, her best-known poem. Her adulation for women, muses, and goddesses is clear, even in the fragmented pieces of her gorgeous poetry that have survived.

Joy Harjo (1951–)

Incumbent US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo is a dynamic poet, performer, playwright, and musician. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Harjo preserves the oral tradition of her nation in live storytelling and performance. Her first volume of poetry, The Last Song, was published in 1975 as a chapbook, followed by What Moon Drove Me to This?, her first full-length volume of poetry published in 1980. 
Harjo weaves nature, spirituality, and Native traditions and myths into her work. Her 1990 book In Mad Love and War won a Before Columbus American Book Award for her voicing of “a stolen people in a stolen land.” 
Also an accomplished performing artist, Harjo has released four music albums and played the alto saxophone with the band Poetic Justice. She composed a one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, and a musical play, We Were There When Jazz Was Invented. Harjo was honored with the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

Gertrude Stein’s witty quotation has been invoked by many an American in Paris: “America is my country and Paris is my hometown and it is as it has come to be.” But this writer central to the modernist movement—who wrote novels, plays, stories, and poems—was far more important as a progenitor of experimental and playful stream-of-consciousness writing than as a devoted Francophile. 
Her writing has been held up as a literary answer to cubism; in fact, Stein’s star-studded Paris salon often hosted luminaries like Pablo Picasso and she hung his paintings on her walls. Her most famous book is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, considered a quasi-memoir penned from the perspective of Toklas, her romantic partner. She also realized numerous works centering her lesbian identity, including books Q.E.D. and Tender Buttons.