The Shipwreck Sea

In the words of poet Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), Sappho was "simply nothing less--as she is certainly nothing more--than the greatest poet who ever was at all." Born more than 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.