LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sappho: Love
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This poem takes the form of an argument in which Sappho addresses the question, "What is the most beautiful thing in the world?" Her procedure is methodical: a brief priamel (see below) which serves to highlight her own general definition (1 4); a mythological paradigm or example to confirm the validity of that definition (5-14); the substitution of a particular person for the general category "whatever one loves" (15-18); and a final return to the thought of the opening lines (ring-form)... creating an effect of closure (19-20).
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An Oxyrhynchus papyrus from around 200 AD[4] and the Suda agree that Sappho had a mother called Cleïs and a daughter by the same name. Two preserved fragments of Sappho's poetry refer to a Cleïs. In fragment 98, Sappho addresses Cleïs, saying that she has no way of obtaining a decorated headband for her. Fragment 132 reads in full: "I have a beautiful child [pais] who looks like golden flowers, my darling Cleis, from whom I would not (take) all Lydia or lovely..."[5] These fragments have often been interpreted as referring to Sappho's daughter or as confirming that Sappho had a daughter with this name. But even if a biographic reading of the verses is accepted, this is not certain. Cleïs is referred to in fragment 132 with the Aeolic word pais, which can as easily indicate a slave or any young person as an offspring.
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At the same time though, the Romanticist movement of Byron, Shelley, and Dante and Christina Rossetti embraced Sappho, but it could be argued, for all the wrong reasons. Instead of celebrating her depth of love and devotion, they embraced the scandalous aspect of Sappho, along with her mythical self-destructiveness, as characterized by the Phaon myth. However, a sense of the respect Sappho eventually gained can be found in a description of her by one of the great Victorian poets, the pagan-inclined, and viciously anti-Christian, Algernon Charles Swinburne: Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the Very greatest poet that ever lived. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who was ... a prophet; Shakespeare is the best dramatist who was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less - as she certainly is nothing more - than the greatest poet who ever was at all. Such was Swinburne’s love for Sappho that in the sublimely titled Anactoria, he used her as the voice that rails against a certain Hebraic god:
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Algernon Swinburne wrote a poem concerning Sappho, Sapphics, and another, Anactoria, concerning her and her lover Anactoria, which makes Sappho into a rather hyperbolic sadomasochist. The Sapphic stanza is a poetic form occasionally imitated by modern writers, including Swinburne's Sapphics.
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