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Sappho



Plato called her the Tenth Muse, and she was widely regarded as the greatest poet of her age, initiating a wholly original poetic style of personal reflection which we now take for granted, but that in an age of recited epic verse was unique for her time. Clearly Sappho produced a considerable body of work, but time has not been kind to her. Her poems, by turns vividly descriptive, deeply human and fiercely passionate, have suffered both at the hands of prudish minds eager to expunge them from the record and an uncaring indifference which even has seen her recorded verses used as the padding for mummy wrappings - an irony of their very preservation. What has been left to us are scraps rescued from ancient refuse dumps and the lines of hers which have been quoted in the preserved writings of others who recognized her true worth. But even if all that we had of the writings of Shakespeare were a few scattered passages from Hamlet or The Tempest we still would recognize his greatness, and so it is with Sappho.

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