Sappho by Bliss Carman

Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics by Bliss Carman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I knew that of Sappho’s poetry there remained only a few fragments. As I read this book I thought, this is not as little as I thought... and I was pretty bored. Only after I finished did I realize that this was Bliss Carmen’s attempt to fill in what a full collection of Sappho’s poetry might have been like. So then I googled the original fragments and sure enough, there’s almost nothing. While some of the poems were lovely, I feel like I wasted a little bit of my life. A male poet in 1907 is probably quite a bit substantively different than the original woman poet in 600 BC, but I guess it was a serious attempt at applying his knowledge of the era and contemporary accounts of her poetry.

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