[Julie Steiner]

Elsewhere the topic of Robert Graves's The White Goddess recently came up, in connection with the traditional envisioning of "the Muse" as a female supernatural entity. So I thought I'd start a thread in case people would like to further discuss the idea here--either Graves's take on it, or the concept of a Muse in general.

Gotta say, I didn't much care for Graves's thesis.

The book was recommended to me by a feminist friend who loved it. She had been raised, as I had, in a rigidly patriarchal and often downright misogynistic and homophobic religion. So I understand her unhappiness in a culture and community that perennially casts everything feminine or effeminate as fallen, evil, and weak both physically and morally...or (as in the case of the Virgin Mary) as simply lesser and second-class in relation to Wonderful, Holy Maleness. Note that the Virgin Mary is honored as the ONE exception to the female sinfulness represented by Eve; furthermore, her devotees are strictly cautioned that she may be honored but never, never, NEVER actually worshipped, because worship is reserved for the Holy Trinity, generally depicted as male, male, male. Femaleness is constantly depicted as inferior and secondary to maleness, from the creation of Eve to the Wedding of the Lamb in the book of Revelations (in which Christ is the bridegroom and the Church his once-sinful but now redeemed and properly subservient bride).

Christianity was vigorous about stamping out goddess-worship wherever it encountered it in medieval Europe, and it remains hypervigilant about goddess-worship sneaking back into society via the Marian cult. As Graves himself points out in his book.

Anyway, my friend loved Graves's re-affirmation of the divine feminine. The idea that successful poets have always devoted themselves to Her service in the form of a feminine Muse was a refreshingly validating concept, from my friend's perspective.

I took a completely opposite view. I thought Graves was just being a stereotypically self-justifying womanizer. And, as sexists so often are, homophobic to boot.

According to Graves, only heterosexual men can be great poets, because only they can have a "fruitful" erotic love relationship with the feminine ideal. He says that that's why Socrates and Plato were so negative about poetry--they felt no sexual attraction to a female Muse, and instead preferred "the god" (i.e., the rational, logical Apollo). Graves believes that male homosexuality is fundamentally incompatible with poets' need to properly appreciate the female Muse, as he does himself.

And women poets--why, why, why must you persist in wanting to write? You're no good at it, because it goes against your nature! Why can't you be content to be inhabited by the holy Muse, which is a tremendous honor unavailable to men? Graves reluctantly concedes that lesbians might have a shot at producing an occasional poem that's not doggerel (and even then it's not a "fruitful" relationship with the Muse, as his own male-female relationship is), but the rest of us chicks are hopeless as poets, because true poets must have an erotic relationship with the female Muse.

In other words, because male heterosexuality and spirituality and creativity are inextricably linked for Graves himself, he assumes that his own experience is the One True Way to Be a Poet; therefore, the entire universe must conform to his own worldview.

But I really lose patience when Graves says that the poet's unwavering faithfulness to the goddess requires him to not get too attached to the mortals in which she temporarily resides. That's right, poets are to worship the immortal Muse by recognizing her divine presence in the young, beautiful body of a mortal woman...making sweet love to her for a period of time...and then spotting when the goddess no longer resides in that particular mortal, but has moved on to inhabit the body of another beautiful young woman. If you don't move on when the goddess does, you are no longer worshipping Her--you have shackled yourself to a mere mortal, and are no longer worthy of receiving divine poetic inspiration.

Bottom line--to be a really great poet, you've gotta love 'em and leave 'em, and not be overly concerned about the trail of broken hearts and lives in your wake. What does it matter if a series of once-young, once-naïve women are now struggling to keep food on the table while they raise your bastards alone in a hostile society...so long as you got a smattering of really good love poems out of each of them? That's what counts.

Sorry, but I'm inclined to empathize with the young women who got used and discarded by both the poet and the goddess (who looks more and more like merely a personification of the poet's own wandering eye, and his unchanging sexual appetite for young, firm bodies, in spite of the fact that bodies change with time, pregnancy, etc.).

Claiming that the poet is not to blame for his cruelty, because ultimately it is the cruelty of someone else (the goddess)...and further claiming that his secular unfaithfulness is actually religious faithfulness...is the most outrageous, self-serving bullshit I've ever heard in my life.

So no, I'm not too enthused about Graves's thesis. Seems awfully misogynistic and homophobic from where I'm standing.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I have always found the idea of the book intriguing and felt bad for never having got around to reading it. Given your summary I am glad not to have wasted the hours.

I have always looked at the incarnation of the Goddess in a reverse manner, I feel like the presence of the Goddess in an individual is the multi-vocal part of the feminine--the bit of all women in every woman which in turn makes some of the accusations of monogamy being inherently boring more a matter of lack of sight and perception. I am sure my language here is clumsy and a bit hetero but I don't think the idea behind it is.

As far as the muse goes, I think poets are human as are their muses so Muse with a large M in poems is almost meaningless to me. I do think the poetry that scribbler and muse express in the space between them is up from Under and not theirs as individuals alone. I think gender in either poet or muse is as free as the animal spectrum is.

FWIW.

[Quincy Lehr]

John Foy has some things to say HERE

As Foy notes in the Raintown version, this represented my views at the time (and for the most part now):

For Quincy R. Lehr, his more intimate poems, he has said, are inspired by and addressed to—though often indirectly—particular people. Other poems, mainly those that take an adversarial stance against an audience he imagines to be large, faceless, and hostile, are propelled by the Muse of terror and hatred. He attributes this venom to his underground subcultural background. His poems are closer to Thanatos than Eros. “Artistically,” he says, “I am… obsessed with and offended by death.” Is there anything libidinal in his work? “Sure, but I would say that it's a libido aware of its own decay and eventual demise. I'm not sure I'd slice and dice the physical, cerebral, and spiritual, as they all flow from the same source—a lived life in which there just isn't that much time.” Quincy’s last observation, about time, points to something W.H. Auden said, that Eros is sad (from his elegy, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”). But why? Eros is sad because he represents what we cannot have. He is in league with “weeping, anarchic Aphrodite.” What we desire is what we want to conquer and possess forever. But, thanks to time, the objects of our desire change, slip away, and die. So do we. Eros, then, is a cup of sadness.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

From that Raintown article:
To talk about the Muse is to talk about where poems come from, and how. They come to us from people, places, ideas, things, sensations, experiences, memories, the dead, and our own intense emotions. Then we ask how they come.

I think what the writer names as the where is really the how. The...stuff comes to us as people, places, memories, the dead. And we try to represent the...stuff with phrase or word or rhyme. Some of which comes predisposed from lots of past use for similar attempts. Words, rhymes, and such carry the remnants of a lineage of proximity to certain veins of the stuff. They have tendencies in sound and sense from their poetic history because the stuff is potent and leaves a mark on language. But where is it from, this stuff? From a Who, emergent from matter or more dualist-daring? From a Completely Outside? From a Crazy Deep Inside? From a Happy Accident of Primate Yodeling Place?

[Michael F]

Julie,

A book with the thesis that Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and WH Auden can’t be great poets is only suitable to line bird cages, IMHO.

As for the notion that great artists must be cads because they are only faithful to the Muse – I think Woody Allen skewered that deliciously in “Bullets Over Broadway”. Yes, Woody Allen.

My Muse is a he. He is stubborn, infuriating, unfaithful, transfixing and wholly irresistible. To me.

[W.F. Lantry]

Julie,

I think you're overstating the case against Graves a little bit, but he's certainly guilty. The Laura Riding stuff is troubling... but perhaps one was as unbalanced as the other. I'd hate to be a referee in that particular situation... I think I'd likely go nuts myself.

I did, though, find the book valuable. It was my first approach to the triple goddess, a kind of springboard to other things. It also helped me call into question some of the patriarchal religious assumptions I'd been taught in my previous schooling.

As for the views of some others, well, there's so much blasphemy about the Muse it's hard to even know where to start. No argument I could make could serve Her anyway, She seems to have little interest in such things. She just wants me to write, and I wrote a halfway decent poem this afternoon, and three others got published today, so She's happy, I think. In the morning, she'll be on my case again, but for tonight, my offerings seem to have pleased her.

Best,

Bill

[Andrew Frisardi]

I'm pretty much where Bill is on the Graves. The Laura Riding story is weird city, but I do like things about that book, and many of Graves's poems as well.

But Graves didn't grasp that muses come in many shades of light and dark. The "All saints revile her" part of his poem would have surprised Dante quite a bit. Apollo's getting such short shrift is a post-Nietzsche, post-Freud reflex. Apollo's provenance in the myths is much more than reason. He played a harp. And poets know that number and language have a hidden bond.

So Graves was myopic or narrow in his a-musement. He didn't see that Logos is not merely logical, and that inspiration is not only hell, but hell, heaven, and everything in between.

[Julie Steiner]

I found much of value in Graves's book, and I enjoyed the parts that didn't make me throw it across the room.

I do think it's important to recognize, though, that we all need to find our own set of keys to the universe. Graves's set of keys worked for him, and some of those keys work very well for me, too, and I'm grateful to him for sharing them with me; but he seemed unwilling to entertain the notion that other working sets of keys exist, or that some of his keys might not work in exactly the way he thought they did.

I've been thinking a lot about the Apollo-Dionysus (or Apollo-Marsyas) dichotomy over the past few months. (Graves casts it as Apollo-Earth Goddess, I think.) Personally, I find it very unhelpful to recast the intellect-emotion dichotomy in terms of gender, because it just superimposes one set of stereotypes over another and makes something muddled even more muddled.

[Michael F]

I'm afraid I was offensive with my first sentence above. I haven’t read the book. I amused myself a little too much with my prose, I think. I apologize.

(My edit was cross-posted w/ Julie's next post -- Julie whom I thank for her understanding.)

[Julie Steiner]

Well, that's understandable, Michael, since my synopsis wasn't exactly a balanced consideration of the book's strengths and weaknesses. We all get a little carried away sometimes.

Digressing a bit....

I know lots of atheists and agnostics who refer to "my muse" in terms of a metaphysical entity with a mind of his or her own. However, I'm confident that they don't actually believe that such an entity exists, except in the way that "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus"...i.e., both the muse and Santa Claus are personifications of abstractions (perhaps the impulse to create/innovate and the impulse to give others joy, respectively) in which they do very much believe.

But for many people, the idea of a muse does seem to be, literally or figuratively, a question of spirituality or religion. Christian writers often refer to the Holy Spirit as their muse, and I've heard lots of people refer to receiving ideas from "somewhere else" when they are in a properly receptive mood...sometimes when they are in a state of altered consciousness or relaxation after meditation/prayer, fasting, substances, or sex.

In order for the muse to represent creativity's origin "somewhere else," one must either believe that the metaphysical realm of "somewhere else" actually exists, or that an individual's own unconscious mind is a realm so foreign to the conscious mind that it might as well be "somewhere else."

I'm in the latter camp myself, but if another mental model works for others, more power to them. There's no empirical right answer. (However, trying to convert someone from a belief which demonstrably does them more good than harm is definitely wrong.)

A spirituality-based conception of creativity may be very helpful to some people, while not working at all for others...just as some recovering addicts find twelve-step programs a real lifesaver, while others find such programs' continual emphasis on a higher power so cult-like that they can't lower their resistance enough to derive much benefit. Fortunately, other valid approaches exist. And I find others' approaches more interesting and worthy of respect than the narrator of my recent poem did.