taken from: Sappho fragment 104original text:"hespere, panta pheron osa phainolis eskedas' auos
phereis oin, phereis aiga, phereis materi paida"["hesperos (Evening-star), you bring all that the bright dawn scattered, the lamb, the kid, the child to its mother"]about the quoted person:seen by many as the greatest female poet of antiquity. Her vivid, emotional manner of writing influenced poets through the ages, and her special quality of intimacy has great appeal to modern poetic tastes.

Sappho's poems have been applauded by readers in all eras. Before Sappho poets such as Archilochus had used the lyric to challenge or interrogate social norms with the individual voice, but in Sappho's works subjective emotion reaches new heights of intellectual dignity, comparable almost to Plato or, later, Bernard of Clairvaux. In emphatic directness, using few figures of speech, she celebrates love as the highest of human faculties while recognizing its complex nature, including elements of jealousy, rivalry, and aggression. In her work the power of Eros is self-justifying and literally, in its extremest dimensions, religious.

Sappho is known through her work: ten books of verse published by the third and second centuries B.

C. By the Middle Ages, all copies were lost. Today what we know of the poetry of Sappho is only through quotations in the writings of others. Only one poem from Sappho survives in complete form, and the longest fragment of Sappho poetry is only 16 lines long.sappho was born probably about 620 B.

C. to an aristocratic family on the island of Lesbos during a great cultural flowering in the area. Apparently her birthplace was either Eressos or Mytilene, the main city on the island, where she seems to have lived for some time. she lived in Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, where women often congregated and, among other social activities, shared poetry they had written. Sappho's poems usually focus on the relationships among women.

This focus has given rise to speculation that Sappho's interest in women was what today would be called homosexual or lesbian. (The word "lesbian" comes from the island of Lesbos and the communities of women there.) This may be an accurate description of Sappho's feelings towards women, but it may also be accurate that it was more acceptable in the past for women to express strong passions towards one another, whether the attractions were sexual or not.