Search results
Oct 26, 2012 · Simon Gough: 'The betrayal was my falling in love with Margot. She was his muse.’ Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Simon Gough's memoir of his affair with his great uncle Robert Graves's muse, the White Goddess, is a captivating blend of fact and fantasy. Sophia Martelli reviews this fascinating book that ...
- Catullus
- William Shakespeare and Mr WH
- John Keats and Fanny Brawne
- Thomas Hardy, Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale
- Yeats and Maud Gonne
- F Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald
- Bob Dylan and Sara Lowndes
- Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac
- Robert Graves and Margot Callas
"Lesbia", as Catullus dubbed his muse, was generally held to be the young Roman matron Clodia Pulcher, sister of the infamous (or famous, depending on your view of Cicero), Clodius Pulcher. She became "the dark muse" of Catullus, inspiring not merely ardent love, passion and adoration, but bitterness, hatred and regret. Apart from that, she also in...
There's no reason on earth why a muse should have to be female. Whatever the truth of the matter (and uncertainty still rages in the higher corridors of intellectual power), the identity of "the fair youth", to whom Shakespeare dedicated so many of his sonnets is almost immaterial. The one certainty is that he had a muse, who provoked
Despite their secret betrothal, Keats's unrequited love for the unruly, outspoken Fanny Brawne (whom he first described as a "minx!") drove him to write some of the finest sonnets in English literature , and inspired La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which may well have laid bare a facet of "the mixed exultation and horror that her presence excites". Havin...
Whatever one might think of Hardy as a novelist, he wrote some remarkable poems. These were inspired more, perhaps, by the muses of guilt and remorse than either by his wife, Emma Gifford, or by his secretary and clandestine lover, Florence Dugdale – both of whom suffered a strange cruelty at his hands. This enigma of Hardy's true inspiration is an...
Like "Lesbia", Maud Gonne assured herself of immortality by putting her 23-year-old lover through agony: "I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams", wrote Yeats, but Gonne was already strapping on her hobnail boots. The poet proposed to her at least four times, but she refused as often. After 20 years of...
Hemingway loathed Zelda Fitzgerald, claiming that she was an anti-muse to her husband, "constantly making him drink because she was jealous of his working well". But Zelda was one of Fitzgerald's most powerful inspirations. His tragic, flawed masterpiece Tender is The Night is not only about her, and for her, but even partly written by her, since F...
"Sara, Sara, so easy to look at, so hard to define, with her eyes like smoke and her prayers like rhymes" – and the whole of Blood on the Tracks telling us what it's like to have to lose her. Her inspiration is undoubtedly seminal to Dylan's seemingly immortal reputation as a poet and songwriter.
It was the over-excited, fulsome, improvised prose in a letter from Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac that inspired Kerouac's benzedrine-fuelled nights of automatic writing, and the manuscript which would eventually become On the Road. Cassady was also the star of that novel, the instigator of the road trips that gave it its name and (as many say), of K...
I leave my great-uncle until last, since of all poets he deserves the crown of myrtle for his endless quest into the history, meaning and powers of "The White Goddess", often at risk to his own life. As for his muses, I can only speak of Margot Callas, the most potent of all. Her effect on Robert and on his love poems was so devastating, so mesmeri...
Aug 16, 2012 · Once he’d warned me, though, he allowed his muse, Margot, (with whom I’d already fallen in love at first sight), to take me to a party where he knew there would inevitably be drop-outs and ...
People also ask
Did Simon Gough fall in love with Margot?
Why did Margot burn herself out?
Why did Simon Gough go to Majorca?
Who is Simon Gough?
Jul 15, 2016 · If Margot Callas is a tenth of the woman described in Simon Gough’s The White Goddess: An Encounter she must have been a force of nature. (Deià artist David Templeton tells a story of meeting her when she was of a certain age and ‘voluptuous, busty, in a tight short dress’, and being mightily enchanted if a little unnerved.)
Characters: Robert Graves, 54, poet; Simon Gough, 17, his great-nephew, and Margot Callas, Robert’s muse, with whom Simon is falling in love. Returning to Canellun from a late-night party in the village, Simon and Margot see that Robert’s study light is still on: ) "Robert said to go and see him if he was still awake - "Margot shrugged lightly.
Nov 20, 2012 · Gough is the grand-nephew of Robert Graves, and the story he tells centres around three visits he made, aged 10, 17 and 20, to the Graves house on Majorca, where Robert was living what seems an ...
