Sappho

Sappho was a poet of the island of Lesbos around 600 BCE, of whom the ancients had nine books and we have one complete poem and some two hundred fragments, many recovered from Egyptian rubbish heaps and mummy wrappings in the last century, the newest in 2014. The poems are addressed to a circle of young women, on love, desire, absence and the gods, in a metre named for her, and Plato called her the tenth Muse. If Not, Winter is Anne Carson’s translation, which prints every fragment with its gaps, and it is the version the lists assign. Her name gave two words to the language.