The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho's Encounter with the Modernist Imagination

“The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination” interrogates how modernist interpretations of Sappho’s poetics have been integral to our contemporary understanding of the elusive poet. Sappho has been many things: the only woman among nine lyric poets canonized in antiquity, a spurned lover driven to suicide by the boatman Phaon, and a queer icon whose homeland boasts credit for the word “lesbian.” “It was Sappho who first called eros ‘bittersweet,’ ” the classicist and poet Anne Carson writes. “No one who has been in love disputes her.” Curated by Daniel Zhang ‘26