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...
[more]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, it's just plain hip to talk about Sappho.
Of course, it's not hard to see why she's become a role model for women. Sappho lived in the equivalent of an artists' colony on the island of Lesbos in the early seventh century B.C. (The term 'lesbian' has its root in the island's name.) She taught in female salons where women gathered to read and compose poetry. The fact that she was an educated woman who educated other women is quite compelling to the feminist imagination. In addition, her poetry dwells on the love of her own sex. Historians aren't sure whether Sappho actually engaged in "homosexual" relations; in fact, many contend that it's incorrect to heap contemporary definitions of sexuality on a poet who worked in such a different time and culture. But ideological concerns aside, Sappho's poetry clearly celebrates a beauty and identity only shared amongst women.
Sappho's poetry inhabits an emotional realm that stands in contrast to the world of the male poets of her era. In a time when a misogynistic patriarchy loved to blame the beautiful Helen for causing the Trojan War, Sappho praised her for following her desire (Fragment 16). In fact, she gently scoffed at the pursuits of men, writing that she would far rather gaze on a lover's face than on ranks of soldiers or battleships. Sappho's songs rejected the public sphere for private spaces -- bedrooms, religious ceremonies, matrimony -- all with an eye to the beautiful and the heartfelt.
The musical element is intrinsic to Sappho's poems both intellectually and aesthetically. In fact, they were originally written to be accompanied by the lyre. Her poems are structured by an irregular metrical form expressive of exalted or enthusiastic emotion; they avoid the grander, more stately meter of epic. When read aloud, they suggests an echo of their original sing-song performance, of the sensuousness of Sappho's Aeolic dialect. Words like "bittersweet," which she coined, no longer sound trite when our ears meet the ancient syllables: gluku-pikron.
In her own time, Sappho was considered great enough to deserve honorary statues; 200 years later, Plato labeled her the "Tenth Muse." Unfortunately, the bulk of her work was lost when she fell out of favor due to the rise of the Church -- her poetry's homoerotic overtones weren't entirely welcome with religious authorities. Yet fragments of her lyrics emerged centuries later in the sands of Egypt (she had her devotees there, too). Even in splintered form, Sappho's poetry delivers lightning bolts of erotic heat and gentle zephyrs of loving contemplation. It serves to show that, no matter how drastically our world or our vocabulary changes, the emotions we feel remain relatively the same.
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