SAPPHO; CARMAN, Bliss.

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Sappho, One Hundred Lyrics. First edition, number 120 of 500 copies, of this very scarce collection of poems. Sappho, One Hundred Lyrics was the first comprehensive and fully imagined rendering into English of the fragmentary poems of Sappho. In 1902 Mitchell Kennerley gave Carman a copy of H. T. Wharton's Sappho (1885) and suggested that he poeticise Wharton's more literal translations. Inspired by Wharton Carman set to work reassembling the surviving Sappho fragments, fleshing them out with his own additions. The work is often considered his "finest volume of poetry" (DCB). It is particularly notable for making Sappho accessible and exciting to a wider, non-academic, audience. It was read and admired in particular by modernist poets such as Wallace Stephens and Ezra Pound. Indeed, critic D. M. R. Bentley has suggested that "the brief, crisp lyrics of the Sappho volume almost certainly contributed to the aesthetic and practice of Imagism" (Bentley).

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