Sappho And Catullus Comparison Essay

Both poems have their similarities and differences; both speaking of romance and love. Sappho states how death separates a person from their loved ones which states how Sappho's poems seem to be more about love while Catullus' poems are very descriptive and seems to have include lust rather than love. Sappho uses more emotion and subtlety in her work, while Catullus' work is more physical and raw. Both poets express their emotions and their individuality through their writing style. From what I gathered from reading Catullus’ poems, it seems as if Catullus was the less sensitive of the two. Sappho focused on emotion, to the tension between people. Catullus’ work is more about physicality and lust because Catullus stated “O then with lips and bodies joined many deep thousands confuse their number, so that poor fools… shall never learn our wealth and curse us with their evil eyes.” His poems are indeed beautiful, but in a different kind of way. His poems seems to exist on a more purely physical plane. Even though they both wrote about love in their poetry, their themes are quite different.

Readers can see Sappho’s influence on Catullus by him using the same words that Sappho uses in her poem. For example: Sapho states in stanza four, “speak—my tongue is broken; a thin flame runs under my skin; seeing nothing…” and in Catallus’ second poem, stanza three, he states: “Limbs are pierced with fire and the heavy tongue fails…” The repeated word in this example is tongue, but it is used differently. As readers continue to read and compare their poems they can notice how words and ideas are repeated. After reading and analyzing both of their works of poetry, I gathered the idea of Catallus' work to be more masculine. To me, it was quite obvious that the poet was male because of the lack of "femininity" shown throughout his work. While readers can grasp the idea of femininity through Sappho's