>I don't know how well Shakespeare knew The Iliad, but I think Polonius
>is strikingly like Nestor:  a tedious old fool whose advice is always
>bad when it's not sheer bromide and whose only use to anyone is that
>he sometimes manages to bore people out of being upset.

Ah, yes, and perhaps not unexpectedly, Polonius is probably the most often 
quoted Shakespearean character, if the put-you-into-a-coma of 
commencements, graduations, mayoral and school principal speeches are any 
indication.

 >This strikes me as well said and a clear description of the psychology
>(but doesn't the second sentence sort of contradict the first?)  My
>impulse though is to take issue with the word "fantasy," not because
>it's necessarily disparaging but because it's necessarily subjective. 
>I would have said "vision," since it's experienced as something that
>comes to you, not as something you generate, which is what "fantasy"
>usually connotes.

Thanks, John, though I didn't think my second sentence contradicted the first's 
idea that the traditional western muse thrives on absence. But it is more 
hypothetical, since it includes what can only be my guess that Beatrice's real and 
ordinary presence would have disrupted his imagining of her. 

But to the impulse of your reply, I think you're right to make a distinction 
between "'vision" and "fantasy," a distinction I think which connects with your 
earlier posts on Homer evoking the muse, that sense of real belief, but also a 
different posture in that the poet asks, prays, evokes, being filled as a vessel, 
the vision arrives as it were from outside. You're right though to note  that 
Dante's vision in a dark wood or glimpse on a bridge was different, posits a 
different relationship in any number of directions

On the other hand, I think this is just as subjective since it relies for its 
distinctions upon the view of a subjectivity which posits the muse as either 
arriving from outside, as in a vision, or as conjured from within, as a fantasy. 
There are different degrees of authority claimed by each, but still the degree of 
authority is defined and granted by the defining subjectivity. 

Perhaps if the 'vision' in which the muse appears thrives on absence, 'the 
fantasy' which writes the muse depends on loss:

Or to quote Judith Butler writing of LaPlanche and Pontalis 

"fantasy emerges on the condition that an original object is lost, and that this 
emergence of fantasy coincides with the emergence of auto-eroticism. Fantasy 
originates, then, as an effort both _to cover_ and _to contain_ the separation 
from an original object. As a consequence, fantasy is the dissimulation of that 
loss, the imaginary recovery and articulation of that lost object. Significantly, 
fantasy emerges as a _scene_ in which the recovery installs and distributes the 
'subject' in the position of both desire and its object...This activity of 
'appropriating' and 'inhabiting' what we might call the dissimulation of the 
subject in fantasy, effects a reconfiguration of the subject itself. . .Precisely 
because that separation is a nonthematizable trauma, it initiates a subject in its 
separateness only through a fantasy which scatters that subject, simultaneously 
extending the domain of its auto-eroticism. .. fantasy orchestrates the subject's 
love affair _with itself_. . ."    (Bodies That Matter)

It may be a stretch to read Dante through the lens of this passage. But since you 
confessed to not liking Mozart, I'll confess that I've never been able to read 
Paradiso without feeling some of the elements the above paragraph describes. 
How the subject is scattered, into hell, purgatory, and paradise, how Beatrice in 
a sense becomes the 'scene', how much of what she says lavishes divine and 
eternal love upon the poet, and how the process is one of individuation and 
reconfiguration of the poet.  

Though this muse of loss, fantasy rather than vision, does  better pertain to the 
muse as configured in various works of literature, particularly from the 
Surrealists on, but while there are distinctions between the earlier sense of 
vision that thrived on absence this later variation of fantasy that thrives on loss, 
they seem connected. Perhaps a line of descent, changing as the sense of poetic 
'genius' or 'vocation' (more evoked in the days of the 'vision) has altered to 
poetic 'sensibility' or 'profession.' But I'm just speculating,  

best,

Rebecca