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The White Goddess is a fabulously nuts book. I love in particular his channelling of the translation of the Battle of the Trees. Graves really did believe - at that stage, anyway - that there were such things as great women poets (eg his support of Laura Riding or admiration of Sappho). Squaring the Muse with the female poet was a bit of a trial to him, as it has been, in different ways, for many feminists. The Muse being - in this incarnation anyway - intransigently female, she cancels out poetry in women: all they can do, if they wish to be poets, is to stamp out their sexuality (code for "domesticity" is "having children", the famous "pram in the hallway" that kills poetry or is suicide - I hit that one bigtime when I had babies). Even if Woman (she's always capitalised in these contexts) doesn't have babies, her role is to inspire, rather than to be inspired, to be the object, not the subject, to be thought of, not to think. Step outside this and, hey presto! she's not Woman any more, but some kind of monstrously masculine aberration. She is permitted to be Sapphic, but if she is heterosexual it's only permissible if she has some lingering disease, like Barrett Browning. All very tricky. Best A Alison Croggon Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com