Composers From Greece

"Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. They give us a taste of her way of writing, which is perfectly conformable with that extraordinary character we find of her in the remarks of those great critics who were conversant with her works when they were entire. One may see, by what is left of them, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modem lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry: she felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms. She is called by ancient authors the tenth muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but flame. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading."

"Sappho thou coverest, Æolian land! The Muse who died, Who with the deathless Muses, hand in hand, Sang, side by side! Sappho, at once of Cypris and of Love The child and care; Sappho, that those immortal garlands wove For the Muses’ hair! Sappho, the joy of Hellas, and thy crown,— Ye Sisters dread, Who spin for mortals from the distaff down The threefold thread, Why span ye not for her unending days, Unsetting sun, For her who wrought the imperishable lays Of Helicon?"

"When everybody says "lesbian," a word connected with Sappho and the island of Lesbos, that automatically means that your forefathers and foremothers are European, that George Washington is the father of our country and Columbus discovered America-all false assumptions."

"When Judy Grahn wrote of the Greek poet Sappho she suggested that she was not the first woman poet in Western civilization, not a solitary female voice rising out of an otherwise barren plain. On the contrary, Grahn said, hers was the surviving voice, the last voice in a long line of women poets and artists-Sappho's works so badly fragmented because they were systematically destroyed. Grahn wrote: “And what was the nature of Sappho's wealth? She praised it often enough: love, beauty, grace, flowers, appropriate behavior to the gods, lovely clothing, intelligence, tenderness. Her poems are filled with the color purple, the color gold, the sun, flowers, especially the violet and the rose, and altars, deer, groves of trees, and the stories of the gods. Love, she said, is a tale-weaver. Wealthy? We own no kind of money that would buy us Sappho's wealth. In her world, women were central to themselves; they had to have been to write as she did. She lived on an island of women, in a company of women, from which she addressed all creation. And oh, how they listened.”"

"I wanted to hear Sappho’s laughter and the speech of her stringed shell.What I heard was whiskered mumble- ment of grammarians:Greek pterodactyls and Victorian dodos."

"One of the earliest -- and perhaps the first -- rivals of the hymnology of war, hatred, and revenge made immortal by Homer was the poetry of an Aeolian woman called Sappha by her people but uniformly known to later times as Sappho...Much of Sappho's poetry was of a plaintive tenderness but she had a fervid feeling for love as a saving grace. Several of her feminine disciples also sang of the beauty and healing force of love. Solon the law-giver and Plato the philosopher were deeply affected by her hymns to the great idea of a social power unrecognized by "the Bible of the Greeks": Homer. Though Attic poets and playwrights tried to destroy her by attacking her as a courtesan or "Lesbian" pervert, the German classical scholar, Welcker, in his Kleine Schriften, declares that such attacks were sheer calumny. Nor did they succeed in their aim. More than twenty centuries have honored the "sweet singer" of Aeolia."

"(What author living or dead would you most like to meet, and what would you like to know?) Sappho, what else did you write?"

"We knew...that Sappho had written love poems to women in 600 B.C."

"Mascula Sappho."

"Ἐπιδειξαμένου γὰρ αὐτῷ τοῦ Μυρρινουσίου Φαίδρου λόγον ὑπὸ Λυσίου τοῦ Κεφάλου συγγεγραμμένον ἐρωτικόν, οὐκ ἔφη θαυμάζειν, πλῆρες τὸ στῆθος ἔχων ὥσπερ ἀγγεῖον ἀλλοτρίων ναμάτων, ἤ που Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς (οὕτω γὰρ αὐτὴν ὀνομάζων χαίρει διὰ τὴν ὥραν τῶν μελῶν, καίτοι μικρὰν οὖσαν καὶ μέλαιναν), ἢ Ἀνακρέοντος, φησίν, τοῦ σοφοῦ."

"And of the flowers of Sappho few, but roses."

"Of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses."

"Non veniunt in idem pudor atque amor."

"Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierach requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism."

"Poetry changes with every generation, but it does not improve or progress. It just changes its styles, trappings and some of its obsessions, but we can still enjoy Sappho and Homer; they are today's news as much as when they were written or recited."

"Sappho speaks words mingled truly with fire; through her song she communicates the heat of her heart."

"Living unloved, to die unknown, Unwept, untended and alone."

"The small dark body's Lesbian loveliness That held the fire eternal."

"Philip Sidney, printed with The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (F1, 1593)"

"Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd: or, A Tale of Robin Hood (1641) act 2, sc. 5"

"William Bowles, in Poems by Several Hands, and on Several Occasions, collected by N. Tate (London: J. Hindmarsh, 1685) p. 85"

"John Addison, The Works of Anacreon, [with] the Odes, Fragments and Epigrams of Sappho (London: J. Watts, 1735)"

"Ambrose Philips, Pastorals, Epistles, Odes, &c. with Translations from Pindar, Anacreon, and Sappho (1748)"

"Thomas Moore, Evenings in Greece (1826) p. 18"

"Edwin Arnold, The Poets of Greece (London: Cassell, Fetter, and Galpin, 1869)"

"D. G. Rossetti, Poems (1870; 2nd ed., 1881)"

"J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets (1st series, 1873; 2nd series, 1876; revised 1883)"

"H. T. Wharton, Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings and a Literal Translation, 2nd ed. (London: David Stott, 1887)"

"Frederick Tennyson, The Isles of Greece: Sappho and Alcaeus (1890) p. 91"

"Thomas Hardy, Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)"

"W. G. Headlam, A Book of Greek Verse (Cambridge UP, 1907) pp. 4–17"

"Rennell Rodd, Love, Worship and Death: Some Renderings from the Greek Anthology (London: Edward Arnold, 1919)"

"A. S. Way, Sappho, and the Vigil of Venus (London: Macmillan and Co, 1920)"

"A. E. Housman, Last Poems (1922) no. 24 · More Poems (1936) nos. 10 and 11"

"J. M. Edmonds, Lyra Graeca, vol. 1 (1922)"

"E. M. Cox, The Poems of Sappho (London: Williams and Norgate, 1924)"

"T. F. Higham, C. M. Bowra and W. S. Marris, The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation (1938) nos. 140–157"

"Douglas Young, A Braird o Thristles (1947) — into Scots"

"Richmond Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949; revised 1960)"

"C. M. Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) p. 197"

"Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation (University of California Press, 1958)"

"Willis Barnstone, Sappho: Lyrics in the Original Greek with Translations (New York: Anchor, 1965; 2nd ed., New York UP)"

"Suzy Q. Groden, The Poems of Sappho (Bobbs-Merrill Co, 1966)"

"David A. Campbell, Greek Lyric, vol. 1: Sappho and Alcaeus, LCL 142 (1982)"

"Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)"

"Art, and, above all, music, has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks, to draw [one] towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal."

"Music is not a language. Any musical piece is akin to a boulder with complex forms, with striations and engraved designs atop and within, which men can decipher in a thousand different ways without ever finding the right answer or the best one..."

"The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry."