American. In America in early days little attention was paid to the content of Sappho, but the Phaon story is sometimes used, as for example by Philip Freneau of New Jersey, the “poet of the American Revolution,” the “creature of the opposition” (1752-1832). In The Monument of Phaon, a poem published in 1795, in the form of a dialogue between Sappho and the traveller, Ismenius informs her that he saw the tomb of her deserter, Phaon, in Sicily, erected by another lady:
Not distant far a monument arose
Among the trees, and form’d of Parian stone,
...
A sculptured Venus on the summit wept,
A pensive Cupid dropt the parting tear.
The last lines are:
I’ll go! and from the high Leucadian steep
Take my last farewell in the lover’s leap,