[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.