A reminder for those interested that the locus classicus for much of what's
being discussed under this heading remains Robert Graves' The White Goddess,
especially chapters 22ff. In hopes of encouraging the company to read or
reread these chapters, I give below an excerpt which I am sure each of you
who reads it will cherish as a source of either insight or aggravation:
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The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to publish
poetry after their early twenties is...that something dies in the poet.
Perhaps he has compromised his poetic integrity by valuing some range of
experience or other - literary, religious, philosophical, dramatic,
political, or social - above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his
sense of the White Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was
a Muse, turns into a domestic woman and would have him turn similarly into a
domesticated man. Loyalty prevents him from parting company with her,
especially if she is the mother of his children ... and as the Muse fades
out, so does the poet. The English poets of the early nineteenth century
... were uncomfortably aware of this problem and many of them, such as
Southey and Patmore, tried to lyricize domesticity, though none of them with
poetic success. The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual
'other woman', and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility
to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide
in simple domesticity lurks in every mænad's and muse's heart.
===
Also relevant is the comment Graves makes somewhere about Tennyson's In
Memoriam, which Graves considered was doomed to failure as a poem because "a
Muse does not wear whiskers."
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