The Shipwreck Sea: Love Poems and Essays in a Classical Mode

Sappho, in the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), was "simply nothing less – as she is certainly nothing more – than the greatest poet who ever was at all." Born over 2,600 years ago on the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho, the namesake lesbian, wrote amorously of men and women alike, exhibiting both masculine and feminine tendencies in her poetry and life. What's left of her writing, and what we know of her, is fragmentary, and thus ever subject to speculation and study.

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