Sappho

The poet Sappho is very interesting person to study. Firstly, the word Lesbian derived from the island that she was born and the word, Sapphic came from herself. Not many people back then were freely talking about the sexuality. Moreover, Sappho was a woman herself. Her poetry talks about love and passion toward both genders to genders. I believe it is very shocking idea while the poem is written. I don’t personally enjoy reading poetry since it is usually harder to understand the hidden symbols or meaning. However, her poem was catchy and impressive to go and find out the meaning of each passages.

Sappho

I think there is evidence that the poems of Sappho are written from her perspective because she puts her own name into the poem. This would suggest that she is the one feeling all of these emotions that she puts in her poems. However, it is possible that because men were dominating the arts world at the time that she wanted to make her poems fit in more and was writing from the perspective of a man. She might have been trying to find out how a man feels about a woman and that was the inspiration to her poetry. She is a really interesting poet because she is not afraid to say what she thinks even if it might make other people uncomfortable.

Sappho

The more interesting qualities of Sappho's writing is her own personal involvement in the narrative. Until this point, the audience has been a passive observer, one which is meant to take objective lessons from the work itself. In Sappho's poetry, however, she speaks in the first person which allows for a much more involved audience -- in this instance allowing for the author's emotions to be transferred to the viewer.

Another interesting aspect is the lesbianism present in the play. To this day, Sappho has had a major impact on woman to woman relationships, with Sapphic and her native island, Lesbos, as the two strongest and most familiar terms relating to lesbianism. This adds an interesting element to the stories, especially considering how she was supposedly married and had a child by the time she was writing her works. It is a shame that so many of her poems are lost to time.

Felicia Ooi; Poems of Sappho

Sappho's poetry is very emotional, and very heart-felt. When I read the stanzas, I could feel the passion emanating from the words. The phrases used are also very graphic and descriptive, and if you just exercise your imagination a little, you can almost envision the scenes that you are reading about. Aphrodite is mentioned several times, and Sappho appears to be praying/talking to the goddess. One thing though, it was a bit difficult to grasp the overall meaning of the poem as the poem was rather disjointed, and there were missing parts.