"The Tenth Muse" sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. This concise collection of the ancient Greek poet's surviving works was assembled and translated by a distinguished classicist.

A detailed up-to-date survey of the most important woman writer from Greco-Roman antiquity. Examines the nature and context of her poetic achievement, the transmission, loss and rediscovery of her poetry, and the reception of that poetry in cultures far removed from ancient Greece, including Latin America, India, China, and Japan.

Born around 630BC on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho is now regarded as the greatest lyrical poet of ancient Greece, ironic and passionate, capturing the troubled depths of love. Her work survives only in fragments, yet her influence extends throughout Western literature, fuelled by the speculations and romances which have gathered around her name, her story and her sexuality.This remarkable anthology brilliantly displays the way different periods have taken up Sappho's haunting story bringing together many different kinds of work. We see her image change, re-created in Ovid's poetry and Boccaccio's tales, in translations by Pope, Rossetti and Swinburne, Baudelaire, in the modern versions of Eavan Boland, Ruth Padel and Jeanette Winterson.

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Fear of Flying brings the seductive Greek poet to life in this “enormously entertaining” tale (Booklist). As she stands poised at the edge of a precipice in the shadow of the sanctuary of Apollo, the greatest love poet who ever was or ever will be recalls the eventful fifty years that have led her to this moment. It was love that seduced her, at age sixteen, into an ill-fated plot with the poet Alcaeus to depose the despot of the island of Lesbos. It was love that made her trade the unwanted marriage bed of an old, despised, and drunken husband for a seemingly endless series of lovers, both male and female. For Sappho, life has always been a banquet to be savored to the fullest, a strange and sensual odyssey that has carried her to the far corners of the ancient world. Devoted to the goddess Aphrodite and granted the gift of immortal song, she has followed her magnificent destiny from Delphi to Egypt, to the land of the Amazons, the realm of the centaurs, and into the stygian depths of Hades itself, often in the company of her companion and friend, the fabulist slave Aesop. Through every grand affair and every wild adventure, she has remained forever true to her heart, her passion, and herself, right up to this, the end of everything. Combining evocative and realistic detail with unabashedly outrageous invention, Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap is a flawless gem of historical fiction boldly imagined by one of America’s most enthralling storytellers. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erica Jong including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

By combining the ancient mysteries of Sappho with the contemporary wizardry of one of our most fearless and original poets, If Not, Winter provides a tantalizing window onto the genius of a woman whose lyric power spans millennia. Of the nine books of lyrics the ancient Greek poet Sappho is said to have composed, only one poem has survived complete. The rest are fragments. In this miraculous new translation, acclaimed poet and classicist Anne Carson presents all of Sappho’s fragments, in Greek and in English, as if on the ragged scraps of papyrus that preserve them, inviting a thrill of discovery and conjecture that can be described only as electric—or, to use Sappho’s words, as “thin fire . . . racing under skin.” "Sappho's verse has been elevated to new heights in [this] gorgeous translation." --The New York Times "Carson is in many ways [Sappho's] ideal translator....Her command of language is hones to a perfect edge and her approach to the text, respectful yet imaginative, results in verse that lets Sappho shine forth." --Los Angeles Times

After considering the audience and the function of different modes of performance - community, bardic, and participation in closed groups - Stehle explores this poetry as gendered speech, which interacts with performers' bodily presence to create social identities for the speakers. Texts for female choral performers reveal how women in public spoke in order to disavow the power of their speech and their sexual power.

Presents a Sappho by a poet and translator that treats the fragments as aesthetic wholes, complete in their fragmentariness, and which is also, as the translator puts it: 'ever mindful of performative qualities, quality of voice, changes of voice...'

A history of ancient literary culture told through the quantitative facts of canon, geography, and scale.