April touched me and whispered ‘Come.’
Out and away to the great deep winging,
Sister, I flashed to thee over the foam,
Out to the sea of Eternity, singing
‘Mother, thy child comes home.’
J. W. Mackail echoes Swinburne’s high praise: “Many women have written poetry and some have written poetry of high merit and extreme beauty. But no other woman can claim an assured place in the first rank of poets” ... “The sole woman of any age or country who gained and still holds an unchallenged place in the first rank of the world’s poets, she is also one of the few poets of whom it may be said with confidence that they hold of none and borrow of none, and that their poetry is, in some unique way, an immediate inspiration.”
Many another modern critic ranks Sappho as supreme. Typical are such eulogies as “Sappho, the most famous of all women” (Aldington), or “Sappho, incomparably the greatest poetess the world has ever seen” (Watts-Dunton in ninth ed. Encyclopædia Britannica).