In spite
of all that is in these days being written about Sappho, it is perhaps not
out of place now to inquire, in a few words, into the substance of this
supremacy which towers so unassailably secure from what appear to be such
shadowy foundations.
First, we have the witness of her contemporaries. Sappho was at the height
of her career about six centuries before Christ, at a period when lyric
poetry was peculiarly esteemed and cultivated at the centres of Greek life.
Among the _Molic_ peoples of the Isles, in particular, it had been carried
to a high pitch of perfection, and its forms had become the subject of
assiduous study. Its technique was exact, complex, extremely elaborate,
minutely regulated; yet the essential fires of sincerity, spontaneity,
imagination and passion were flaming with undiminished heat behind the
fixed forms and restricted measures. The very metropolis of this lyric
realm was Mitylene of Lesbos, where, amid the myrtle groves and temples,
the sunlit silver of the fountains, the hyacinth gardens by a soft blue
sea, Beauty and Love in their young warmth could fuse the most rigid forms
to fluency. Here Sappho was the acknowledged queen of song--revered,
studied, imitated, served, adored by a little court of attendants and
disciples, loved and hymned by Alcaeus, and acclaimed by her fellow
craftsmen throughout Greece as the wonder of her age.
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