Sappho plate from artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, 1979. But the tiny subset of splendor that does survive - nowhere more splendidly than in poet Anne Carson’s enchanting translation, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho ( public library) - has radiated an aura of genius so immense that it has moved more than one hundred generations and influenced such disparate titans of thought and artistic vision as Mary Wollstonecraft, Oscar Wilde, Allen Ginsburg, and Judy Chicago.
(Available as a print.)Īnd yet she comes to us only as a faint echo across the whispering gallery of time, erasure, and collective memory - the nine-volume set of her complete works burned with the Library of Alexandria it is rumored that the early Christian dogmatists of the Byzantine empire burned most of her remaining works as too scandalous for so openly celebrating same-sex love.
Death of Sappho by Miguel Carbonell Selva, 1881. 570 BC) endures as the first great beacon of women’s right to creative expression and of the basic human right to love whomever one loves - the original champion of what we, two and a half millennia later, have the hard-earned luxury of calling LGBT rights, for unlike Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson twenty-some centuries after her, Sappho did not alter the gender pronouns of her poems to conceal the same-sex nature of her loves - so much so that her native island of Lesbos has woven itself into the etymology of same-sex love in the modern world’s dominant languages. A sole voice rises from antiquity, cuts through the long silencing and erasure of women, cuts through the Ancient Greek tradition of heroic poetry about war and worldly valor, to sing to us in her soulful authoritative voice a new kind of poetry - the personal, consummately intimate poetry of the inner world, the poetry of passionate love and heartbreak, of longing and loss, of the rapture of the natural world - a sensibility that would come to color everything from the cosmogony of the Romantics to pop music.Ĭelebrated as the Tenth Muse, Sappho (c.
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