Given the kinship of the ancient lyre, or barbitos, to the autoharp, Sappho's cunningly woven assonances and consonances probably sounded like Mother Maybelle Carter.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, August 10, 2013
The Music of Sappho
Guy Davenport (1927-2005), Introduction to Burton Raffel, tr., Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (New York: The Modern Library, 2004), pp. xiii-xxii (at xiv):