Only a few complete poems and hundreds of tantalizing fragments survive, yet they constitute some of the most searingly intimate writing in human history. Sappho invented the lyric as personal utterance: desire, jealousy, longing, and the body's knowledge treated as subjects worthy of serious literature. Anne Carson's *If Not, Winter* is the definitive modern translation.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.