Poems and Fragments

Sappho, Stanley Lombardo, Pamela Gordon | 4.44 | 5,192 ratings and reviews

Recommended by Charlotte Higgins, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #14 in Love Poem, Ranked #59 in Ancient — see more rankings.

Little remains today of the writings of the archaic Greek poet Sappho (fl. late 7th and early 6th centuries B.C.E.), whose work is said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry--among them, poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance--that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse.

Stanley Lombardo's translations give us a virtuoso embodiment of Sappho's... more

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Poems and Fragments from the world's leading experts.

Charlotte Higgins Well, she was admired in antiquity for the delicacy and elegance of her verse, and this is quite right – it’s just pitch-perfect. She talks about love as being bittersweet – such a cliché but she was almost certainly the first person to coin this expression that everyone can understand…..In classical antiquity and later she was massively valued as a poet. In the Great Library in Alexandria there were nine volumes of her poems. We now have 200 tiny fragments and only two complete poems. So it’s a minuscule proportion of what she produced. (Source)

Rankings by Category

Poems and Fragments is ranked in the following categories:

#60 in Ancient Greece
#73 in Greek

Similar Books

If you like Poems and Fragments, check out these similar top-rated books:

Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?

Learn More