BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. The Sappho history / Margaret Reynolds.
Published 2003
Summary: In The Sappho History, Margaret Reynolds traces the story of the reception
of Sappho's poetry and her afterlife in literature and art from the mid eighteenth-century to
the twentieth-century. For women writers in the Romantic period, she symbolized
possibility; for the young Tennyson, she was a private ancestor helping him make his own
name as a poet. The book includes texts from Swinburne, Baudelaire, Christina Rossetti, H.D.
and others Sappho has influenced. Richly illustrated throughout, The Sappho History
provides a new view of Western culture from the Romantic period to the Modern.
2. Sappho / Jane McIntosh Snyder and Camille-Yvette Welsch.
Published,2005
This book is published as part of a series of books on Gay and Lesbian Writers and
concentrates on the her lyrical poetry that emphasizes the love between women that has
made Lesbos the stem for the English word “Lesbian”
3. Sweet bitter love: poems of Sappho / translated by Willis Barnstone ; with epilogue
and metrical guide by William E. McCulloh.
Published 2006
Summary: Sappho is the greatest lyric poet of antiquity. Plato, a century after her
death, referred to her as "the Tenth Muse," and Longinos, in his first-century treatise "On
the Sublime," uses her verse to exemplify that transcendent quality in literature. In Sappho's
lyrics we hear for the first time in the West the words of an individual woman of her own
world: her apprehension of sun and orchards; the troubles and summits of love, desire, and
friendship. Her poems combine an impression of intimate self-involvement with an almost
modern sense of detachment. She was born at Mytilene on Lesbos and was a member--perhaps the head---of a group of women who honored the Muses and Aphrodite. Her family
was aristocratic; it is said that she was married and had a daughter. Her brilliant love lyrics,
marriage songs, and hymns to the gods are written in Aeolic dialect in many meters, one of
which is named for her---the Sapphic. Mostly fragments survive of the nine books she is
thought to have authored. Her verse is simple and direct, exquisitely passionate and vivid.
Catullus, Ovid, and Swinburne were among the many later poets she influenced. Though
time has reduced the nine volumes of her work to a handful of complete poems and a
collection of fragments, each word and phrase that survives is poignantly significant. The
clarity of her voice, its absolute candor, its amazing fresh authority--whether in addressing a
goddess, dancers before a night altar, the moon and stars, a sweet apple or mountain
hyacinth, a lamb or cricket, a lover or companion--are qualities that compel us today as in
antiquity. Willis Barnstone has given us a close and beautiful lyrical version. His translation,
with the original Greek on facing pages, includes a dozen hitherto unintelligible fragments
that have been brought vibrantly back to life by him, as well as Sappho's newly discovered
poem from the Cologne papyrus in its complete form. It also contains the translator's essay
placing the poet in her historic and artistic context.
4. Searching for Sappho : the lost songs and world of the first woman poet : including
new translations of all of Sappho's surviving poetry / Philip Freeman. Published 2016.
Summary: For more than twenty-five centuries, all that the world knew of the
poems of Sappho--the first woman writer in literary history--were a few brief
quotations preserved by ancient male authors. Yet those meager remains showed such
power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. But
within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on
crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt. As
recently as 2014, yet another discovery of a missing poem created a media stir around
the world.
The poems of Sappho reveal a remarkable woman who lived on the Greek island of
Lesbos during the vibrant age of the birth of western science, art, and philosophy.
Sappho was the daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother, a lover of
women, and one of the greatest writers of her own or any age. Nonetheless, although
most people have heard of Sappho, the story of her lost poems and the lives of the
ancient women they celebrate has never been told for a general audience. Searching
for Sappho is the exciting tale of the rediscovery of Sappho's poetry and of the woman
and world, they reveal.
All books referred in this bibliography are available
through the Hutt street Public Library