Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman PoetFor more than twenty five centuries, all that the world knew of the poems of Sappho the first woman writer in literary history were a few brief quotations preserved by ancient male authors. Yet those meager remains showed such power and genius that they captured the imagination of readers through the ages. But within the last century, dozens of new pieces of her poetry have been found written on crumbling papyrus or carved on broken pottery buried in