In our time of gender awareness and de-alienation of fringe groups, Sappho's example looms large. Women deploy her as a weapon in the long-standing fight for gender equality. At the same time, homosexuals point to her poetry as proof of the positivity in same-sex relationships. These days, it seems,

Classical & biblical poetry, Ecstatic, Feminist, Lyrical, Pathos, Rebel

The middle years of John Milton's career were devoted to prose. Caught up in the Puritan movement and the English Civil War, he penned political pamphlets and idealistic treatises on religious freedom and the glory of the new Commonwealth. True, a peculiarly personal sensibility revealed itself in th

17th century poetry, Epic, Lyrical, Mythic, Overflowing, Religious, Sublime

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilecti

Anxiety, Dark, Death, Gothic fiction, Grotesque, Intense, Lyrical, Sublime, Symbolist poetry, Violent

We don't know whether or not Homer wrote his poems down. Nor do we know if he alone composed them. The author of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" may have been more than one person, or he may have been only one -- it may even be the case that the distinction, when applied to the ancient Greeks, is meani

Classical & biblical literature, Dramatic, Epic, Lyrical, Monumental, Mythic, Overflowing