Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so convincing and
illuminating that it seems to demand quotation here: "Never before these
songs were sung, and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery
passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in
directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only
nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the
place of second."
The poems of Sappho so mysteriously lost to us seem to have consisted of at
least nine books of odes, together with _epithalamia_, epigrams,
elegies, and monodies. Of the several theories which have been advanced to
account for their disappearance, the most plausible seems to be that which
represents them as having been burned at Byzantium in the year 380 Anno
Domini, by command of Gregory Nazianzen, in order that his own poems might
be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved. Of
the efficacy of this act no means of judging has come down to us.
In recent years there has arisen a great body of literature upon the
subject of Sappho, most of it the abstruse work of scholars writing for
scholars. But the gist of it all, together with the minutest surviving
fragment of her verse, has been made available to the general reader in
English by Mr.
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