and even in Acheron’s halls
[thou shalt be honored.]
In general, antiquity thought of her as “the poetess” κατ’ἐξοχήν, ἡ ποιήτρια,[3] just as Professor Harmon has recently shown[4] that “the poet” in ancient literature means Homer. Down to the present day Sappho has kept the definite article which antiquity gave her and has been called the poetess, though we must be careful to test a writer’s use of the term. Therefore, we must not understand by the absence of any added epithet, as Wharton does, that Tennyson rates her higher than all other poets, merely because in Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After he speaks of Sappho as “The Poet,” having called her in his youth “The Ancient Poetess,”[5]—for he also speaks of Dante as “The Poet,” when in Locksley Hall he says, “this is truth the poet sings,” and then cites verse 121 of the Inferno. It is rare, however, even in modern times to find Sappho classed with any other poet as a peer, as in the beautiful tribute To Christina Rossetti of William Watson, one of the best modern writers of epigrams, where Mrs. Browning and Sappho are the two other women referred to:
Songstress, in all times ended and begun,
Thy billowy-bosom’d fellows are not three.
Of those sweet peers, the grass is green o’er one;
And blue above the other is the sea.
In ancient days Pinytus (1st cent. A.D.) composed this epigram:[6]
This tomb reveals where Sappho’s ashes lie,
But her sweet words of wisdom ne’er will die.