SAPPHO

This volume on the Lesbian poet Sappho includes two major previously unpublished new studies. “The Garden of the Graces: The Survival of Bronze Age Religious Motifs into the Modern Lyric Poem” considers the Sapphic fragments less as the precious creations of an individual sensibility than as a kind of cross-section slice through a vast emerging wave of cultural history—a slice whose implications seemed to extend widely in both time and space. McEvilley’s study is characterized less by modern literary criticism than by an acknowledgement that these fragments point far back into prehistory and an attempt to deal with that fact. In “The Clear-Voiced Song-Loving Lyre: Recent Explorations in Sapphic Studies” McEvilley attempts to dive deeply into the currents of ancient symbolism and psychology—more deeply perhaps than the New Criticism could light the way.