You're right, of course, Alison:
>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.
And it's been a long time since I was utterly enamoured of that book. I
mean I love the concept! But I also have to wonder. Actually, Atwood's
article on MacEwen is interesting because she addresses graves head-on, yet
insists that a male muse is possible for a woman poet ( so may be giving in
to what Rich would call 'compulsory heterosexism'), while of course now we
might equally say the gender of the muse may more easily relate to the
gender orientation of the poet. So I would say that the mythic/historical
stuff is fascinating, but the theorising may be something we need to be
wary of?
Doug
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
the way of what fell
the lies
like the petals
falling drop
delicately
Phyllis Webb
