Sappho

Sappho was born on Lesbos about 630 BC and is the most famous woman poet of ancient Greece; Plato called her the tenth Muse. She wrote lyric poems in her native Aeolic dialect, on love, desire, friendship, weddings and prayers to the gods, in language of piercing simplicity. Ancient scholars arranged her poems in nine books, but nearly all are lost: one complete poem and a few hundred fragments survive, some discovered only in the twentieth century on papyri from Egypt. Even so, she is recognized as one of the sources of Western lyric poetry.