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Germaine Greer
Sappho
Hay Festival 2019,
From the Greek island of Lesbos, Sappho presented one of the earliest forms of passionate literary subjectivity in the history of Western love poetry. As one of the first female love poets with verse embracing both men and women, her legacy in popular culture lives on and her persona has become etymologically attached to female homosexuality. What do we really know about Sappho? As a professional performer she wrote poems in various personae, yet scholars have persisted in regarding every fragment that survives as autobiographical.
