ABSTRACT
‘Sapho to Phaon’ was first published in March (before 18 March, according to an advertisement in The Spectator), 1712. As with many of Pope’s early poems there is evidence of a considerable gap between first composition and publication. A note in Pope’s hand on the cover page of the autograph fair-copy manuscript of ‘Sapho to Phaon’ in the Pierpont Morgan Library indicates that the poem was ‘Written first 1707’. This would place the first composition of the poem in the same period in which Pope began his translation of Statius. There are no references to the poem in Pope’s correspondence until 14 June 1709 when Wycherley wrote to Pope: ‘I find by your Letter to Mr Cromwell, you have dispos’d of the Sappho, (you promis’d me,) to him, so that you have a mind to give me Jealously, but it is rather of your Friendship, than of the Love of your Sappho, since he refus’d, to let me see your last Letter to him’ (Corr., I.65). However, there is a particular concentration of familiar mentions of Ovid in Pope’s letters to Cromwell of 1710 (e.g. 10 April, 17 May, 21 August, 12 October, 25 November; Corr., I.81–105; and see Pope to Caryll, 25 January 1711, Corr., I.113). Traffic was two-way: Pope commented on Cromwell’s version of one of Ovid’s elegies in a letter of 20 July 1710 (Corr., I.92).
