A Study Guide for Sappho's "Fragment 34"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Sappho's "Fragment 34," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535818988

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13

Fragment 34

Sappho

C. 580 BC

Introduction

Sappho is unquestionably one of the greatest female poets ever to write. She is also the first female writer in any Indo-European language of whom history has any knowledge. Coming at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition in ancient Greece, Sappho had an influence that is impossible to overestimate. She is the kind of poet whom other poets considered great, from her contemporary Alcaeus of Mytilene to the modernist Ezra Pound, claim as their favorite poet. For the philosopher Plato, she was the tenth Muse. Her works achieve a unique beauty through an unrivaled simplicity and clarity of language. Nevertheless, Sappho's poems are lost. Today they are known only through quotations in the works of other ancient authors or in scraps of books thrown out for rubbish in Egypt, where the dry climate preserved them. For this reason there exist only two complete poems of Sappho's. Fragment 34, for example, consists of only three extant lines quoted by Eustathius of Thessalonica, a Byzantine commentator on Homer. The main theme of almost all Sappho's poetry is the universal human experience of love. In Fragment 34, the eyes of love see the beauty of a young girl as outshining the beauty of the cosmos, whether the eyes are those of her bridegroom or perhaps of Sappho herself.

Sappho's works were translated in 1958 by Ezra Pound's disciple Mary Barnard in her volume Sappho. Since then Barnard's work has become the most popular version of Sappho and is the source of much information about Sappho on the Internet. She titled her translation of Fragment 34 Awed by Her Splendor, although Sappho's poems