Publisher's Synopsis
Sappho is perhaps the most widely read poet of Greek and Roman antiquity. As poet, as legendary literary figure, Sappho has fascinated readers ever since she composed her poems on the island of Lesbos at the close of the seventh century B.C.E. Sappho's intense, burning verses of feminine desire have presided over the Western lyric much the way Homer's epics have occupied their authoritative position in Western literature. Indeed, Sappho's poetry and her persona have captivated the Western imagination for centuries. While she remains an iconic and influential figure throughout much of the lyric tradition in the West, her poetry has clearly provoked a good deal of curiosity and criticism as well.
The origins of the modern meaning of "lesbian" most likely can be traced to Sappho, the woman poet from Lesbos. Many of Sappho's poems evoke a community of women whose relationship to one another is arguably homoerotic. In some of her poems, Sappho herself expresses passionate, erotic feelings toward another woman. Even in poems that do not deal explicitly with love, Sappho often depicts herself as part of a world in which the emotional and/or erotic bonds between women take center stage. Since ancient Greek society was largely male-dominated, Sappho's ostensible focus on a "woman-centered" world in her poetry has, at least in part, made her a fascinating yet vexing subject of speculation and fantasy.
Although only forty fragments of her work are long enough to be intelligible, her influence on the Western poetic tradition is undeniable. For many male writers, from Catullus and Ovid in ancient Rome to Swinburne, Tennyson, and Baudelaire in the modern era, Sappho represents the paradigmatic poetic voice of feminine desire and sexuality. For many women poets through the ages, Sappho has represented the literary foremother who gave them a poetic tradition of their own. There are few poets of the ancient world -- apart from Homer and Virgil -- whose legacy has cast such a wide net.
Sappho's work covers a broad range of themes and concerns: romantic love, fellowship and community, myth and ritual, politics, and philosophical reflections on nobility and goodness. This book will present a broad overview of these themes and situate Sappho's poetry within the performative and cultural context of ancient Lesbos, discuss the major literary conventions, themes, and poetic devices employed by Sappho, and examine Sappho's presentations of eros and feminine sexuality. It will discuss Sappho's reception in Roman antiquity and in modern eras from the Renaissance through the twentieth century.
This book will help illuminate Sappho's importance in Western poetic tradition and, more significantly, make Sappho's poetic world come alive for the contemporary non-specialist reader.