Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. This week I would like to discuss the poet

Sappho. I don't know if you've heard of Safo. She was born on the island of Lesbos. We don't know exactly when but she's an ancient Greek I think is what we would call her and she was around about 620, 646, 60 BC. She was a massive

legend. I know you read about Greek legends but I mean legend that in the modern sense she was the sort of

ancient Greek Taylor Swift there were statues of Sappho there were vases with her poetry printed on them, there were coins with

Sappho's face on. She was enormous, enormously successful poet.

Her poems are short personal emotional lyric poems.

When I say personal the speaker uses the word I which apparently was a new

thing in ancient Greece I don't know enough about it to absolutely bear that out but I take the words of several

experts and so she sort of led the way it seems in from the heart poetry. Like I say it doesn't mean as I always say it is

saffo speaking but certainly she makes the speaker a intimate figure who is sharing quite often their emotions.

Now I say that Lyric Poetry, which was her speciality, was often very short.

With Sappho, it's even shorter because really the main stuff we've got from Sappho is fragments of her poetry.

This was often quoted by ancient writers who would use an example of Sappho's poetry to say, you know,

Sappho said this brilliantly when she wrote. So we've got all those little extracts but also we found when I say

we I mean humanity has found fragments of saho's poetry in what I believe is called cartonage, which is stuff that the

ancients used to, they used it as packing, they used it in things like

Sarkof a guy and when they were bolstering up their mummies. There is an extract of a saffo poem which was found as part of a crocodile

modification. So she's basically found now in packing.

I know it's incredible.

So it's mainly fragments

as that was almost exclusively fragments which means that you don't get the full context and you have to try and work out what's going on,

but there is something amazing about a voice from the ancient world.

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