Plato hailed her as "the Tenth Muse," and 2,500 years later her voice remains dazzling as well as direct and honest. The lyric poetry of Sappho sings to both sexes of desire, rapture, and sorrow. This concise collection of her surviving works features an Introduction by translator J. M. Edmonds, who supervised the Sappho volume published by Harvard University's Loeb Classical Library. AUTHOR: Details about the life of Sappho, a lyric poet from the Greek island of Lesbos, are largely unknown. She is thought to have lived sometime between 612?570 BCE, and her poetry was read and admired throughout the ancient world. Today Sappho's poems survive in fragmentary form and she is best known as a symbol of female homosexuality, having inspired the terms "sapphic" and "lesbian."
