![]() The sport of their customs, good and bad, Of hallowed Troy, was made to stray grievously Who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel ![]() Sustain for me this song of the various-minded man, I say this prayer myself every morning before I sit down to work, just like Paul did. I can’t tell when I put them back together if I’m even getting them in the right order. Sometimes wind will blow the parts off my desk. You can see where the page has disintegrated into four parts. The typing is so faded it’s barely legible. ![]() My Prayer to the Muse, still hanging in there I still have that page that Paul banged out for me on his manual Remington atop the little formica tabletop in the back of his camper. “It’s the Invocation of the Muse, from the very beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, the T.E. Paul had a prayer that he said every morning before he started to work. That was all I was doing, day after day, week after week-trying to access the goddess. ![]() I had never taken such stuff seriously, but during those years when I was alone all day doing nothing but trying to learn to write, the idea of a mysterious force beyond the material plane began to make a lot of sense. Paul would turn me on to writers I’d never heard of, lecture me on the evils of the marketplace, and tell me stories about Steinbeck and Henry Miller, both of whom he knew.īut the best thing Paul did for me was he introduced me to the idea of the Muses. Learning from Paul was one of the great experiences of my young life. When I lived in Northern California years ago, I used to have coffee every morning with Paul in his camper, “Moby Dick.” Before addressing these matters, however, it is crucial to define the genre of lyric poetry and the debates surrounding the role of the lyric addressee, frequently figured as the female muse.I wrote in The War of Art about my old friend and mentor, Paul Rink. Finally, in the concluding section, I analyse poems from the late-nineteenth century to show how the gendered roles of poet and muse are unsettled via lyric experimentation. The second part then interrogates the problematic aspects of this concept for women poets. In response to the issues outlined above, this chapter poses the following questions: how do women poets play with the gendered conventions of the lyric genre in order to reconceptualise the poet/muse relationship? Do they claim a muse of their own? Do they try to write as both muse and poet? Or do they reject the concept of the muse entirely? The first part of this chapter traces the development of the muse figure in historical poetic tradition. This, along with other social and cultural factors, made it particularly difficult for women poets to claim the role of poet for themselves. Due to the concept of the muse, women have been consistently associated with the passive, inspiring role rather than that of active creator – that role is preserved for men. But the gendered positioning of the muse/poet relationship, reiterated throughout literary history, means that the lyric muse has proved a particularly problematic concept for women poets. The muse, as the conventional addressee of the lyric, plays a crucial role in enabling the poem to come into being: she is the absent presence towards whom the poet’s words are directed. The love lyric directed at the beloved muse has a lengthy tradition, from Sappho and Catullus to Petrarch, through Shakespeare, Sidney and Donne, and into the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the genre of lyric poetry, focussing on one particular aspect of that genre, the convention of the muse.
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