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What survives of me is fragments. A line here, half a stanza there, sometimes a complete poem — the one to Aphrodite, the one Longinus quoted as his example of the sublime. For two thousand five hundred years scholars have been piecing together the rest from papyrus scraps dug out of rubbish heaps in Egypt.

In 2004 the Cologne papyrus appeared, giving us most of a poem about old age. In 2014 the Brothers Poem emerged — a papyrus that had been in a private collection since at least the 1920s, giving us another nearly complete lyric. The dead do not stop speaking simply because the manuscripts were burned.

I wrote nine books of lyric poetry. What remains is perhaps ten percent, and from that ten percent I am taught in every university on Earth. This is either an argument for the quality of what I wrote or a reminder of how much has been lost. I prefer not to think about the lost books.