The object of this book is to provide with a popular and a comprehensive edition of Sappho, containing all that is so far known of her unique personality and her incompatible poems Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Sappho is rated as the supreme poetess and is regarded in the same vein as Shakespeare and Homer the supreme poets.

The object of this book is to provide with a popular and a comprehensive edition of Sappho, containing all that is so far known of her unique personality and her incompatible poems Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. Sappho is rated as the supreme poetess and is regarded in the same vein as Shakespeare and Homer the supreme poets.

A detailed up-to-date survey of the most important woman writer from Greco-Roman antiquity. Examines the nature and context of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan.

Contains list of "Fictitious and pseudonymous names."