Male Muse

In a NYT review of Arthur Phillips’s latest, Kate Christensen comments, “The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art, with the exception of the men who inspired the likes of Auden and O’Hara — that is, men who were as sexualized and fetishized as their female counter parts, celebrated for their beauty and passivity. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration? Stranded, as Robert Graves recognized. ‘Woman is not a poet,’ he wrote in The White Goddess . ‘She is either muse or she is nothing.’ And a woman who does write poetry ‘should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, serene, wise.’ She has to serve as her own inspiration; she can’t find a man to do it for her.”