Biography about sappho

However, there is no hard evidence of her sexuality. Her poems express great passion for a variety of people — both men and women; they may have been autobiographical or not. Also, in Greek culture, there was a greater acceptance of homoeroticism, with love of the same gender considered a normal practice. Combined with her intense poetry, it has made Sappho appear to be an early figure of lesbian literature.

For example. My flesh runs with soft fire, My eyes lose sight, My ears hear nothing but the roar of the wind. All is black. Sweat streams off me, Trembling seizes me, The colour drains from le like grass in autumn. I almost die. A philosopher Maximus of Tyre wrote that the friendships of Sappho were similar to those of Socrates — suggesting Sappho had a circle of like-minded friends brought together by a love of art, poetry and culture.

Biography about sappho

It has been suggested, with little authority, that Sappho may have been the head of some formal academy like a school. However, it is more likely to be a less formal circle of friends. The poetry of Sappho often revolves around themes of love and passion, and has a clarity and simplicity of language; within her poems, there is great vividness and directness.

Doolittle, Hilda H. Anne Janowitz. San Francisco : City Lights Books, Duban, Jeffrey M. Ancient and Modern Images of Sappho. Lanham, Mich. Grahn, Judy. San Francisco : Spinsters Ink, Anne Marie Hacht. Detroit: Gale, Snyder, Jane McIntosh. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Sappho ca. Her vivid, emotional manner of writing influenced poets through the ages, and her special quality of intimacy has great appeal to modern poetic tastes.

The poetry of Sappho epitomizes a style of writing evolved during the 7th and 6th centuries B. At that time the main thrust of Greek poetry turned away from the epic form, which was concerned mainly with telling the stories of heroes and gods, utilizing the traditional and highly formulaic dactylic hexameter. The poets of the 7th and 6th centuries wrote choral songs, which were sung and danced by a choir, and solo songs, in which the poet was accompanied by a lyre or flutelike instrument.

Doubtless these types of composition had existed side by side with the epic tradition, but after B. Among the most prominent features of this kind of poetry were the infusion of the poet's personality and a concentration on his own inner feelings and motivations. No poet of this period displays the personal element more than Sappho. Despite the highly personal tone of her poetry, Sappho gives very few details of her life.

She was born either in the town of Eresus or in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in the northern Aegean Sea and lived her life in Mytilene. She is said to have married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and she herself mentions a daughter, Cleis. Apparently Sappho came from one of the leading noble families in Mytilene, and, although she herself never mentions politics, tradition has it that her family was briefly exiled to Sicily shortly after B.

Sappho had three brothers: Larichus, who served as a wine bearer in the town hall of Mytilene an honor reserved for youths of good family ; Charaxus, a merchant, whom Sappho scolds in her poetry for loving a prostitute in Egypt; and Eurygyus. There is some evidence that she lived to a fairly old age. Tradition relates that she was not beautiful but "small and dark.

We can only estimate how much Sappho actually wrote, but her output must have been large because her works were collected in nine books arranged according to meter in the 3d century B. Although she enjoyed great popularity in antiquity, changes in literary fashion, the general decline of knowledge in the early Middle Ages , and Christian distaste for a poet who was considered vile resulted in the loss of most of her poetry.

Book 1 alone contained 1, lines; yet a total of fewer than 1, lines survive, many of them preserved by ancient grammarians citing peculiarities of the Aeolian dialect. Since the late 19th century many new fragments have been recovered from papyrus finds in Egypt. Except for a few wedding songs and some narrative poems, most of what remains of Sappho's poetry may be termed "occasional pieces," addressed to some person or to herself, very personal in content and manner.

The subject is nearly always love and the attendant emotions—affection, passion, hatred, and jealousy—which Sappho felt toward the young girls who made up her "circle" or her rivals in love. Much scholarly controversy rages over the relationship between Sappho and the women about whom she wrote. On the one hand, it has been maintained that she was a corrupter of girls and instructed them in homosexual practices; on the other hand, it is said that she headed a kind of polite "finishing school" which prepared young ladies for marriage or that she was the leader of a thiasos religious association , sacred to Aphrodite, in which girls were taught singing and other fine arts, with no hint of sexual irregularity.

The precise nature of this circle of young women remains unclear. From the poems themselves it is clear that Sappho associated with girls, some of whom came from long distances, to whom and about whom she wrote poems detailing her frankly erotic feelings toward them. Sappho's poetry is characterized by its depth of feeling and delicacy and grace of style.

She wrote in her native Aeolian dialect, using ordinary vocabulary; her thoughts are expressed simply and unrhetorically but with exquisite care. Her grace and charm together with her technical skill in handling language and meter are most fully realized in the several longer fragments which have survived. I am pale as the sun-scorched Grass.

In my fury I seem like a dead woman, But I would dare Edward Storer [ 83 ]. Sappho worked within a well-developed tradition of poetry from Lesbos, which had evolved its own poetic diction, metres, and conventions. Sappho was one of the first Greek poets to adopt the "lyric 'I'" — to write poetry adopting the viewpoint of a specific person, in contrast to the earlier poets Homer and Hesiod , who present themselves more as "conduits of divine inspiration".

With the exception of a few songs, where the performance context can be deduced from the surviving fragments with some degree of confidence, scholars disagree on how and where Sappho's works were performed. Sappho's poetry is known for its clear language and simple thoughts, sharply-drawn images, and use of direct quotation that brings a sense of immediacy.

These elite poets tended to identify themselves with the worlds of Greek myths, gods, and heroes, as well as the wealthy East, especially Lydia. Sappho's poetry was written to be sung, but its musical content is largely uncertain. Sappho wrote both songs for solo and choral performance. In Sappho's time, sung poetry was usually accompanied by musical instruments , which usually doubled the voice in unison or played homophonically an octave higher or lower.

One of the major focuses of scholars studying Sappho has been to attempt to determine the cultural context in which Sappho's poems were composed and performed. One longstanding suggestion of a social role for Sappho is that of "Sappho as schoolmistress". In , Denys Page, for example, stated that Sappho's extant fragments portray "the loves and jealousies, the pleasures and pains, of Sappho and her companions"; and he adds, "We have found, and shall find, no trace of any formal or official or professional relationship between them Edward Storer [ ].

In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars began to interpret Sappho as involved in the ritual education of girls, [ ] for instance as a trainer of choruses of girls. However, though Sappho wrote hymns, including some dedicated to Aphrodite, there is no evidence that she held a priesthood. Though her songs were certainly later performed at symposia, there is no external evidence for archaic Greek women's symposia, and even if some of her works were composed for a sympotic context, it is doubtful that the cultic hymns or poems about family would have been.

Despite scholars' best attempts to find one, Yatromanolakis argues that there is no single performance context to which all of Sappho's poems can be attributed. The word lesbian is an allusion to Sappho, originating from the name of the island of Lesbos , where she was born. In classical Athenian comedy from the Old Comedy of the fifth century to Menander in the late fourth and early third centuries BC , Sappho was caricatured as a promiscuous heterosexual woman, [ ] and the earliest surviving sources to explicitly discuss Sappho's homoeroticism come from the Hellenistic period.

The earliest of these is a fragmentary biography written on papyrus in the late third or early second century BC, [ ] which states that Sappho was "accused by some of being irregular in her ways and a woman-lover". Today, it is generally accepted that Sappho's poetry portrays homoerotic feelings: [ ] [ ] as Sandra Boehringer puts it, her works "clearly celebrate eros between women".

In antiquity, Sappho's poetry was highly admired, and several ancient sources refer to her as the "tenth Muse ". Sappho's poetry also influenced other ancient authors. Plato cites Sappho in his Phaedrus , and Socrates ' second speech on love in that dialogue appears to echo Sappho's descriptions of the physical effects of desire in fragment Skinner as an imitator of Sappho, and Kathryn Gutzwiller argues that Nossis explicitly positioned herself as an inheritor of Sappho's position as a female poet.

In the first century BC, the Roman poet Catullus established the themes and metres of Sappho's poetry as a part of Latin literature, adopting the Sapphic stanza, believed in antiquity to have been invented by Sappho, [ ] giving his lover in his poetry the name " Lesbia " in reference to Sappho, [ ] and adapting and translating Sappho's 31st fragment in his poem Other ancient poets wrote about Sappho's life.

She was a popular character in ancient Athenian comedy , [ ] and at least six separate comedies called Sappho are known. In Diphilos' play, she was the lover of the poets Anacreon and Hipponax. She was the most commonly depicted poet on sixth and fifth-century Attic red-figure vase paintings [ ] — though unlike male poets such as Anacreon and Alcaeus, in the four surviving vases in which she is identified by an inscription she is never shown singing.

From the fourth century BC, ancient works portray Sappho as a tragic heroine, driven to suicide by her unrequited love for Phaon. While Sappho's poetry was admired in the ancient world, her character was not always so well considered. In the Roman period, critics found her lustful and perhaps even homosexual. By the medieval period, Sappho's works had been lost, though she was still quoted in later authors.

Her work became more accessible in the 16th century through printed editions of those authors who had quoted her. In Aldus Manutius printed an edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus , which contained Sappho 1, the Ode to Aphrodite, and the first printed edition of Longinus' On the Sublime , complete with his quotation of Sappho 31, appeared in In , the French printer Robert Estienne produced an edition of the Greek lyric poets that contained around 40 fragments attributed to Sappho.

In , the first English translation of a poem by Sappho was published, in John Hall 's translation of On the Sublime. Like the ancients, modern critics have tended to consider Sappho's poetry "extraordinary". Thy soul Grown delicate with satieties, Atthis. O Atthis, I long for thy lips. I long for thy narrow breasts, Thou restless, ungathered. From the Romantic era , Sappho's work — especially her Ode to Aphrodite — has been a key influence of conceptions of what lyric poetry should be.

Housman in the 20th century, have been influenced by her poetry. Tennyson based poems including "Eleanore" and "Fatima" on Sappho's fragment 31, [ ] while three of Housman's works are adaptations of the Midnight Poem , long thought to be by Sappho though the authorship is now disputed. Western classical composers have also been inspired by Sappho.

The story of Sappho and Phaon began to appear in opera in the late 18th century, for example in Simon Mayr 's Saffo ; in the 19th century Charles Gounod 's Sapho and Giovanni Pacini 's Saffo portrayed a Sappho involved in political revolts. It was not long after the rediscovery of Sappho that her sexuality once again became the focus of critical attention.

In the early 17th century, John Donne wrote "Sapho to Philaenis", returning to the idea of Sappho as a hypersexual lover of women. The critic Douglas Bush characterised Swinburne's sadomasochistic Sappho as "one of the daughters of de Sade ", the French author known for his violent pornographic books. Sappho , and in Ideal Likenesses took Sappho as one of their progenitors.

Sappho also began to be regarded as a role model for campaigners for women's rights, beginning with works such as Caroline Norton 's The Picture of Sappho. The discoveries of new poems by Sappho in and excited both scholarly and media attention. West described the discoveries as "the greatest for 92 years". Contents move to sidebar hide.

Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. Ancient Greek lyric poet c. For other uses, see Sappho disambiguation. Ancient sources [ edit ]. Life [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Ancient editions [ edit ]. Surviving poetry [ edit ].

Most of Sappho's poetry is preserved in manuscripts of other ancient writers or on papyrus fragments, but part of one poem survives on a potsherd. Style [ edit ]. Music [ edit ]. Social context [ edit ]. So you hate me now, Atthis, and Turn towards Andromeda. Sexuality [ edit ]. Sappho's sexuality has long been the subject of debate. Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 's Sappho and Alcaeus above portrays her staring rapturously at Alcaeus; images of a lesbian Sappho, such as Simeon Solomon 's painting of Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene below , were much less common in the 19th century.

Legacy [ edit ]. Artwork by Spanish painter Enrique Simonet. Sappho c. The Archaic period circa — BCE was marked by significant developments in art, politics, and literature. It was a time when the polis city-state was solidifying its structure, and the foundations of classical Greek culture were being established. Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, a center of trade and culture in the Aegean Sea.

Her exact birthdate remains uncertain, but scholarly consensus places it around BCE. She hailed from a wealthy family; her father, Kleis, was a prominent figure, possibly involved in the administration or religious life of the city. The island was home to a vibrant community of poets, musicians, and scholars, fostering an environment where artistic expression could flourish.

Sappho received an extensive education, which was not typical for women of her time. She likely learned to read and write, skills that were rare among her female contemporaries. Additionally, Sappho was trained in music and dance, essential components of lyric poetry. The combination of literary and musical education equipped her to compose and perform her own works, often accompanied by the lyre, a stringed instrument integral to Greek musical tradition.

Sappho is believed to have led a communal lifestyle, possibly overseeing a group of young women in an educational or religious context. While details about her personal life are sparse, some of her poems suggest close relationships with other women, hinting at a community centered around artistic and intellectual pursuits. Historical records indicate that Sappho may have experienced personal tragedies, including the loss of family members and political upheaval on Lesbos.

These experiences could have profoundly influenced the emotional depth and thematic concerns of her poetry. It is believed that she remained on Lesbos, continuing her poetic endeavors until her death around BCE. Posthumously, her reputation as a master lyric poet endured, with her works being admired and emulated by subsequent generations. The preservation of ancient texts was precarious, subject to the vicissitudes of time, war, and changing cultural values.

Despite this, the fragments that remain offer valuable insights into her poetic genius. Her works were characterized by their brevity, emotional intensity, and vivid imagery, focusing on personal experiences and interpersonal relationships. Out of an estimated 10, lines of poetry attributed to Sappho, only about lines survive, with approximately 30 complete poems.

Her works often delve into the complexities of human relationships, capturing both the ecstasy and agony of affection. Her ability to convey complex emotions within the constraints of lyrical form is a testament to her poetic mastery. Sappho is often credited with pioneering the genre of personal lyric poetry, shifting the focus from public and epic themes to intimate, individual experiences.