Ancient Greek poet, fountainhead of lyric verse
A sixth-century-BC Greek woman poet of the island of Lesbos, honored by the ancients as the "Tenth Muse." She founded the tradition of lyric verse that speaks personal feeling — above all love and desire — in the first person, and Plato called her one of the Muses. Most of her poems are lost, only fragments surviving, yet they still move later ages with their startling directness and delicacy. She is the first great woman poet in the history of Western literature to leave her name.
Sappho’s poems were held in the highest esteem in antiquity, yet through lost manuscripts and religious suppression only one complete poem and a mass of fragments survive today — some down to a few words. Even so, these scraps are still held by poet after poet as the supreme model of lyric verse. Her name and her home island of Lesbos have also given rise to particular cultural meanings in later ages, current to this day.
Sappho’s life is largely unknowable, her poems mostly lost — today only one complete poem and a mass of fragments survive, and many "biographical facts" are later legend; this site states this fragmentary state.
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.