Sappho
About Sappho
Sappho was an Archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, writing around 600 BC. She is one of the earliest known female poets in Western literary history. In antiquity she was called "the tenth Muse" and admired as highly as Homer.
Only one complete poem survives — "Ode to Aphrodite" — along with approximately 200 substantial fragments of her larger body of work, much of it lost when the Library of Alexandria burned. Her poetry focused primarily on love, desire, and longing, using the Sapphic meter (named after her) with extraordinary compression and feeling. Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) is the most celebrated modern translation, treating the textual gaps in the fragments as meaningfully as the surviving words.
“Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.”
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Wikipedia — SapphoSappho's Famous Quotes
5 quotes
“Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.”
— Fragment 47 — trans. Mary Barnard and others
“I simply want to be dead. Weeping she left me.”
— Fragment 94 — trans. Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002)
“Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
— Fragment 55 — trans. Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002)
“With his venom irresistible and bittersweet that loosener of limbs, Love reptile-like strikes me down.”
— Fragment 130 — trans. Mary Barnard / various scholars
“Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us.”
— Fragment 147 — trans. Mary Barnard / Anne Carson
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Frequently Asked Questions
Sappho was an Archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, writing around 600 BC. She is one of the earliest known female poets in Western literary history. In antiquity she was called "the tenth Muse" and admired as highly as Homer. Only one complete poem survives — "Ode to Aphrodite" — along with approximately 200 substantial fragments of her larger body of work, much of it lost when the Library of Alexandria burned. Her poetry focused primarily on love, desire, and longing, using the Sapphic meter (named after her) with extraordinary compression and feeling. Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) is the most celebrated modern translation, treating the textual gaps in the fragments as meaningfully as the surviving words.