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 Daudet’s Sapho. It figures in suggestive moving pictures.1 The 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,

a prophecy still true even in this materialistic day. Sappho, herself, had intimations of immortality, for she writes with perfect beauty and modesty:

This brief, pellucid verse Swinburne in his Anactoria has distorted into the gorgeous emotional rhetoric of fourteen verses. But its own quiet prophecy stands good to-day. A fragment first published in 19222 also seems to make her say:

In general, antiquity thought of her as “the poetess” ?at’??????, ? p???t??a,3 just as Professor Harmon has recently shown4 that “the poet” in ancient literature means Homer. Down to the present day Sappho has kept the definite article which antiquity gave her and has been called the poetess, though we must be careful to test a writer’s use of the term. Therefore, we must not understand by the absence of any added epithet, as Wharton does, that Tennyson rates her higher than all other poets, merely because in Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After he speaks of Sappho as “The Poet,” having called her in his youth “The Ancient Poetess,”5—for he also speaks of Dante as “The Poet,” when in Locksley Hall he says, “this is truth the poet sings,” and then cites verse 121 of the Inferno. It is rare, however, even in modern times to find Sappho classed with any other poet as a peer, as in the beautiful tribute To Christina Rossetti of William Watson, one of the best modern writers of epigrams, where Mrs. Browning and Sappho are the two other women referred to:

In ancient days Pinytus (1st cent. A.D.) composed this epigram:6

Tullius Laureas, who wrote both in Greek and Latin about 60 B.C., puts into her mouth the following: “When you pass my Aeolian grave, stranger, call not the songstress of Mytilene dead. For ’tis true this tomb was built by the hands of men, and such works of humankind sink swiftly into oblivion; yet if you ask after me for the sake of the holy Muses from each of whom I have taken a flower for my posy of nine, you shall know that I have escaped the darkness of Death, and no sun shall ever rise that keepeth not the name of the lyrist Sappho.” (Edmonds, with variations.)

Posidippus7 (250 B.C.) says:

Horace8 says:

That inadequate and misleading metaphor of fire, as Mackail says, recurs in all her eulogists. ?e????a p??? f????eta?, “her words are mingled with fire,” writes Plutarch,9 but the “fire” of the burning Sappho is not raging hot, it is an unscorching calm, brilliant lustre that makes other poetry seem cold by comparison. No wonder that Hermesianax10 (about 290 B.C.) called her “that nightingale of hymns” and Lucian11 “the honeyed boast of the Lesbians.” Strabo (1 A.D.) said: “Sappho is a marvellous creature (?a?ast?? t? ???a), in all history you will find no woman who can challenge comparison with her even in the slightest degree.” Antipater of Thessalonica (10 B.C.) named Sappho as one of the nine poetesses who were god-tongued and called her one of the nine muses: “The female Homer: Sappho pride and choice of Lesbian dames, whose locks have earned a name.”12 In another epigram in the Anthology,13 probably from the base of a lost statue of Sappho in the famous library at Pergamum,14 and which Jucundus and Cyriac were able to cite many hundreds of years later, Antipater says,

are the words of Plato in Lord Neaves’ translation of an epigram of which Wilamowitz15 now timidly defends the genuineness. Antipater of Sidon (150 B.C.)16 in his encomium on Sappho tells how

He also speaks17 of Sappho as “one that is sung for a mortal Muse among Muses immortal ... a delight unto Greece.” Dioscorides18 (180 B.C.) says: “Sappho, thou Muse of Aeolian Eresus, sweetest of all love-pillows unto the burning young, sure am I that Pieria or ivied Helicon must honour thee, along with the Muses, seeing that thy spirit is their spirit.” Again, in an anonymous epigram19 it is said: “her song will seem Calliope’s own voice.” Another writer,20 also anonymous, discussing the nine lyric poets, says:

Catullus21 speaks of the Sapphica Musa, and Ausonius in Epigram XXXII calls her Lesbia Pieriis Sappho soror addita Musis.22

If we turn now from the praise of the ancients to modern literary critics of classic lore we shall not find any depredation but rather an enhancing of that ancient praise. The classic estimate of Sappho holds its own and more than holds it to-day. J. A. K. Thomson in his Greeks and Barbarians23 says: “Landor is not Greek any more than Leconte de Lisle is Greek ... they have not the banked and inward-burning fire which makes Sappho so different.” Mackail speaks of “the feeling expressed in splendid but hardly exaggerated language by Swinburne, in that early poem where, alone among the moderns, he has mastered and all but reproduced one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza which she invented and to which she gave her name”—

Swinburne himself was thoroughly steeped in Sappho whom he considered “the supreme success, the final achievement of the poetic art.” He laid abounding tribute at her feet both in verse and prose. In an appreciation first published posthumously in 1914 in The Living Age,24 he says: “Judging even from the mutilated fragments fallen within our reach from the broken altar of her sacrifice of song, I for one have always agreed with all Grecian tradition in thinking Sappho to be beyond all question and comparison the very greatest poet that ever lived. Aeschylus is the greatest poet who ever was also a prophet; Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist who ever was also a poet, but Sappho is simply nothing less—as she is certainly nothing more—than the greatest poet who ever was at all. Such at least is the simple and sincere profession of my lifelong faith.” Alfred Noyes recognizes in Swinburne’s praise of Sappho a spirit which would make them congenial companions in another world, when in the poem In Memory of Swinburne he writes:

J. W. Mackail echoes Swinburne’s high praise: “Many women have written poetry and some have written poetry of high merit and extreme beauty. But no other woman can claim an assured place in the first rank of poets” ... “The sole woman of any age or country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets, she is also one of the few poets of whom it may be said with confidence that they hold of none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique way, an immediate inspiration.”

Many another modern critic ranks Sappho as supreme. Typical are such eulogies as “Sappho, the most famous of all women” (Aldington), or “Sappho, incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen” (Watts-Dunton in ninth ed. EncyclopÆdia Britannica).