![]() It seems like all the Beats were obsessed with Neal Cassady-himself a lesser artist than his friends, but a perfect example of the kind of life they all aspired to, their own personal “holy fool.” Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road after being inspired by a letter Cassady sent him, which Kerouac thought the height of literary prowess: “all first person, fast, mad, confessional, completely serious, all detailed… forty thousand words long, mind you, a whole short novel. ![]() Needless to say, perhaps, she was, as Jim Dwyer put it, the “object of Yeats’s infatuation across five decades, the muse-well, really, the furnace-for his poetry of yearning.” Nothing like unrequited love to fuel some seriously tragic poems. He would try three more times, and she would never accept him-though they remained close, and Yeats kept writing poems about her, and eventually, at least once, they did consummate their relationship. Yeats met Gonne in 1889, and proposed marriage two years later. Yeats picked a ringer for his muse: the feminist, spiritualist, English-born Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, who reportedly once had sex in her child’s tomb in an attempt to coax his soul into a new body. This is all not so scandalous now, but in 1906? What a woman. This is a case of mutual musedom, which is objectively the best kind, though of course Woolf’s writing is much more well-read now than Sackville-West’s-and in at least one novel, much more directly bonded to the muse in question.Įven better: it was apparently Nora who was the muse in the bedroom as well as in the novel- taking the initiative in their first sexual encounter (June 16th, now celebrated around the world as Bloomsday-sure, because that’s when Ulysses is set, but Ulysses is set on that day because that’s the day of their first sexual encounter) as well as in their famously dirty letters (perhaps this is the “warm womanly pattern” Burgess is referencing above). Their romantic affair lasted seven years, but the two remained very close until Woolf’s death in 1941. Woolf and Sackville-West met in 1922 and quickly fell in love. Some of my favorite literary muses are below, from most delightful to most questionable (this mostly through no fault of their own, of course). Still, I love stories about love and stories about writers, so I can’t help but take pleasure in the tales of famous literary muses and the art they inspired-even if those stories sometimes fail to exactly satisfy. Plus, as a culture, we are bizarrely obsessed with the “truth” behind our favorite fictions, ever desperate to unpick inspirations, infiltrations, author’s disguises, and yes, muses-though whether this is a particularly useful way to evaluate art or not is up for debate. Muses, in general, are a tricky proposal-there’s something inherently sexist about the trope of women being objectified and artified by men (see Ruby Sparks, etc.), but there’s no denying that a forceful enough emotion (or a forceful enough person) can change the course of an artist’s work. Today marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Vita Sackville-West-poet, novelist, and noted muse and sometime lover of Virginia Woolf.
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