LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sappho: Poems
built 269 days ago
Sappho was a poetess of Ancient Greece. She is thought to have written nine books of poems, although the first written record of her is not dated until approximately the third century BC, nearly a hundred years after she lived. It may be said that in her was born the greatest lyric poetess of all time. By the Middle Ages, all copies were lost.
Source:
Sappho chose to occupy her time with writing, an honored profession among men. Cheryl Glenn says that Sappho wrote an amazing nine books of lyric poems in her lifetime. Two hundred of these poems are left fragmented and only one is left in its entirety (21). Women generally did not write in Greek society, and if they did they certainly did not receive credit or esteem for their writing. As a matter of fact, women were just higher than slaves in the hierarchy of society. Surprisingly, Glenn states that a male contemporary of Sappho, Alcaeus, commented on her beautiful style of writing: "O weaver of violets, holy, sweet-smiling Sappho" (22).
Source:
Sappho wrote nine books of odes and a number of epithalamia (wedding songs), elegies, and hymns, but only a few fragments remain. They include the Ode to Aphrodite, quoted by the scholar Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the 1st century BC. Sappho’s poems are marked by beauty of diction, simplicity of form, and intensity of emotion. She invented the verse form known as Sapphics, a four-line stanza in which the first three lines are each 11 syllables long and the fourth is 5 syllables long. Many later Greek poets were influenced by Sappho, particularly Theocritus.
Source:
The poems of Sappho are translated by classicist Anne Carson in this beautiful book. It features both the original Greek and the author's English translation. The book ... includes notes on the poems as well as a "who's who" of literary references.
Source:
The fragmentary remains of Sappho’s poems indicate that she taught her art to a group of young women, to whom she was devotedly attached and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to be married. Greek poet Anacreon, writing a generation later, implied that the name of the island Lesbos connoted female homosexuality. That association is the source of the modern terms lesbianism and sapphism.
Source:
"Chase after the beautiful gifts of the Muses," Sappho 58, the poem recently pieced together by M.L. West in the Times Literary Supplement (July 6 2005). There is a version without comments.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Poems