![]() ![]() Sappho’s women touch, taste, and see the world, and are touched in return, a radical assertion in an increasingly patriarchal Greek world, a world where wives were cloistered in the home like property.īeyond romance and sensuality, Sappho's work touches on religion, aristocratic lifestyle, aging, and the passage of time. Fragments 94 and 96 effortlessly bridge absolute loss and intense, immediate joy. “Fragment 31,” perhaps her most famous poem, describes an experience of romantic transcendence and bodily disintegration so abstract that it might feel modern were it not so distinctly hers. ![]() Nevertheless, it is impossible to read Sappho and remain unmoved by the stark passions of her work. Later scholars butchered her words in attempts to heterosexualize the writing and the life of one of history’s greatest poets. They accused her of promiscuity, named her death a suicide, and alleged that her poetry was an embellished emptiness, not worth reading. ![]() Classical scholars speculated about her lovers, her work, her faith. Along with her few surviving words, we know Sappho through a rich legacy of praise, conjecture, gossip, and legend. Of the nine volumes of her poetry that once sat in the library of Alexandria, only two full poems, and a few hundred fragments, remain. Sappho was a Grecian singer who performed more than 2,500 years ago. ![]()
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