The White Goddess is such a _peculiar_ book, but in some ways it's a
kind of mine. Graves had a healthy respect for the fact that women
did write poetry - he was a big fan of Sappho, for instance - and was
so extraordinarily supportive of Laura Riding, to the point where he
was constantly pointing out sexism among his contemporaries, that he
wasn't going to say that women couldn't be poets (though he did say
women poets were exceptional). But he did run into a few tangles
when he tried to theorise a female Muse in the WG. Later on in his
life the Muse became an obsessive religion and I don't think it's a
coinicidence that his poetry became less interesting.
Best
A
At 7:58 AM -0700 1/10/03, Douglas Barbour wrote:
>I'm not saying we must get rid of The White Goddess, not if she serves you
>in any way, but that we don't need to buy into Graves's vision whole. After
>all, didn't he more or less say, bia that, that women can't be poets? Well,
>given the manh women poets I not only read & love, but from whom I've
>learned to write, I simply can't accept THAT.
--
Alison Croggon
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http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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