“The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination” interrogates how modernist interpretations of Sappho’s poetics have become integral to our contemporary understanding of the elusive poet. Sappho has been many things for many people throughout her disorderly reception: 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.” Creative reuses of Sappho date back to antiquity, but the early twentieth century witnessed a particularly fervent revival. Modernist aesthetic concerns—the materiality of the text, the discontinuity of thought, and the existential human condition of lack—enshrined the Sapphic fragment as the chosen medium of a generation.

“It was Sappho who first called eros ‘bittersweet,’ ” the classicist and poet Anne Carson writes. “No one who has been in love disputes her.” Indeed, far from disputation, Sappho’s economical and memorable formulation of desire has become paradigmatic. Who hasn’t heard that love is at once devastating and liberating? How did the spare poetic corpus of a sixth century BCE lyric poet from the island of Lesbos become so integral to our contemporary vocabulary of desire? Engaging authors from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Audre Lorde, James Joyce to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, “The Scarcity of Desire: Sappho’s Encounter with the Modernist Imagination” will seek to shed light on this very question.

Curated by Daniel Zhang ‘26