Routledge Revival: Sappho - Poems and Fragments (1926) (Routledge Revivals)

Product Description 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. About the Author Sappho (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an archaic Greek poet from the island of Lesbos. Sappho wrote lyric poetry and is best known for her poems about love and women. Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost and survives only in fragmentary form. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry, and three epigrams attributed to Sappho survive. However, these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.