Reimagining the Muse

FOR WOMEN POETS, the concept of the muse as a source of poetic inspiration has long been one fraught with anxiety. The muse/poet relationship in Western literary tradition is constructed as a heterosexual dyad in which the female muse provides inspiration for the male poet. This dyad leaves no real space for women poets to construct a poetic identity in which they actively create rather than passively inspire art. While poets and critics have attempted or proposed various approaches to this problem, including acceptance of the “Tenth Muse” role or suggesting that women poets adopt male muses, these solutions are largely unsatisfactory, in part because they remain predicated on a model of the muse/poet relationship that is both exploitative and profoundly heteronormative.

In The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, Sarah Parker shows how six women poets of the fin-de-siècle and modernist periods in Britain and the United States construct poetic identities by reimagining the concept of the muse in their lives and work. For Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Olive Custance, Amy Lowell, H.D., and Bryher, the relationship between poet and muse is not a male/female or active/passive dyad, but a “flexible triangle in which roles are shared and exchanged” and in which “it is entirely possible to have two poets, or two muses, and various other combinations.” This “flexible triangle” depends upon a living, contemporary muse figure (often but not necessarily male) whose presence “leads to the disruption of gender categories and a greater fluidity between the roles of poet and muse.” This fluidity of gender categories is particularly important for these six poets because each can be broadly categorized as a queer writer (they can be described as bisexual or lesbian writers), and their position outside of heteronormative gender dynamics further complicates their relationships with traditional constructions of the muse.

The first chapter, “Historical Muse Figures, Imagined Ancestries and Contemporary Muses,” provides background on the female muses traditionally adopted by women poets—particularly Sappho and the Virgin Mary—and gives an overview of these historical muse figures in the focal poets’ work. Parker argues that even when the poets shift their interest to a living muse figure, they often adopt familiar Sapphic or Marian imagery to depict that muse “in order to render these images intelligible within cultural and literary tradition.”

Michael Field’s career, as Parker notes in chapter two, is bracketed by this Sapphic and Marian imagery, but the main focus of this chapter is the way Bradley and Cooper share the roles of muse and poet in their collaborative identity. Parker claims that “Bradley and Cooper’s contemporary muse was primarily each other. They undertook the radical experiment of sharing and swapping the roles of muse and poet from within the unified identity of their pseudonym,” but also suggests that this fluidity of roles was enabled in part by Bradley and Cooper’s adoption of a shared male muse figure. This muse, according to Parker, was Bernhard Berenson, the young Russian critic who earlier critics have argued, nearly came between Bradley and Cooper. Parker argues that Berenson should be read not as a disruptive masculine presence whose erotic nature drew Cooper’s desire and Bradley’s jealousy, but rather as a shared muse, a “third term” whose presence is essential to Bradley and Cooper’s construction of the Michael Field identity. By reexamining the Fields’ collaborative diary Works and Days and then rereading several of the poems known to have been written about Berenson, Parker lays out convincing evidence that Berenson acts as a muse figure for both Bradley and Cooper. She further goes on to show that the eventual split between the Fields and the Berensons is precipitated in part by Cooper’s growing recognition that Berenson’s real presence—as opposed to the presence of an idealized Bernhard whom she and Bradley can more easily construct and control—is ultimately destructive to her creative capabilities.

The influence of a real versus an ideal male muse...