"Only in sappho's letter does Ovid make use of the speaker's own writings, because only here do the roles of fictional and actual author coalesce. Ovid knew Sappho's poetry and his epistle is full of its echoes, but whereas "echo" suggests a disembodied voice capable only of repetition, Ovid's radical reipscription of Sappho bears the arts of sexual mastery and theft. His ventriloquistic appropriation of her voice subordinates Sapphic meter to the demands of his own elegiac lines, and the portrait that he present provided and indelible legacy that displaced the authority of her own words, blurring the boundaries between "authentic" and constructed discourse."

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"... The candor and passion of her poetry became an object of ridicule for these playwrights, who made her into a caricature of love-longing and sowed the seeds for the reputation of immorality and licentiousness that was still attached to her name in the renaissance."

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".... "Sappho to Philanenis" follows a similar trajectory, moving from its opening, which reproduces the Ovidian complaint in its mourning for PHilaenis's absence, to Sappho's conversion of that absence into presence, with the celebration of poetic language that this reanimation entails, and finally to a dramatization of the radical solipsism and narcissism of this recovery, in which the other turns out to be theself.  What is enacted within the poem (between Sappho and Philaenis) points to an analogus relationship between author and speaker where what appears to be Donne's generous bestowing of language and independence on Sappho, in direct contrast to Ovid's violations of her .... "

(Ventriloquized Voice, E. D. Harvey)