Aeon on Sappho and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi's Eroticism

In "Eros at Play," published at Aeon, Jamie Mackay reads poetry by Sappho and Wallada bint al-Mustakfi to examine just how both writers' works are as erotic as ever, and in fact, "more stimulating than pornography." MacKay asserts that "[f]or all the distractions of our contemporary lives, reading Sappho today remains just as exhilarating as it was 2,000 years ago when, as one of the foremost poets of the ancient world, her poems were widely anthologised." More: 

...Her delicate style, her withholding of details and delaying of pleasure, has drawn admiration from such canonical figures as Charles Baudelaire and A C Swinburne, even Oscar Wilde, who trilled ‘never had Love such a singer’.

Sappho’s restraint remains strangely gratifying today, when sexuality is so intensely visual, imposed top-down through the peculiar marriage of pornography and pop culture. Her verses are themselves pornographic, of course, but we’d be shortsighted in aligning them with the music videos, high-street adverts and internet clips that dominate our sexual imaginations today. Modern porn is, on the whole, relentlessly present-tense, populated by anonymous bodies performing athletic feats for the instant gratification of a voyeuristic audience. That Sappho’s work – intimate, reflective, euphemistic – maintains its allure against such a backdrop is surely significant, then. What does her work provide that modern porn cannot? And what does this tell us about our sexual imaginations more generally?

Read on at Aeon.