Our debt to Greece and Rome

Sappho and her influence

The following lovers of Greek literature, and of Sappho in particular, have kindly consented to act as patrons and have made possible, by generous contributions, the larger size of this volume in the Series Our Debt to Greece and Rome: The name of Sappho will never die. But it lives in most of the minds that know it at all to-day as hardly more than the hazy nucleus of a ragged fringe suggestive of erotic thoughts or of sexual perversion. Very seldom does it evoke the vision of a great and pure poetess with marvellous expressions of beauty, grace, and power at her command, who not only haunts the dawn of Grecian Lyric poetry but lives in scattered and broken lights that glint from vases and papyri and from the pages of cold grammarians and warm admirers, whose eulogies we would gladly trade for the unrecorded poems which they quote so meagerly. Sappho has furnished the title of such a novel as Daudets Sapho. It figures in suggestive moving pictures.1 The[4] name will answer prettily as that of a bird or even a boat such as the yacht with which Mr. Douglas defended the American cup in 1871. The modern idea of Sappho truly seems to be based mainly on Daudet, who with Pierre Louys in recent times has done most to degrade her good character and who goes so far as to say that the word Sappho itself by the force of rolling descent through ages is encrusted with unclean legends and has degenerated from the name of a goddess to that of a malady. But to the lover of lyrics, who is also a student of Greek Literature in Greek, this poetess of passion becomes a living and illustrious personality, who of all the poets of the world, as Symonds says, is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace. Sappho, says Tennyson in The Princess, in arts of grace vied with any man. She is one whose fervid fragments, as the great Irish translator of the Odes of Anacreon and the Anacreontics, Thomas Moore, says in his Evenings in Greece, ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 61505
Author: Robinson, David M. (David Moore)
Release Date: Feb 24, 2020
Format: eBook
Language: English