Elizabeth Davis and the Library's Exhibit "Matriarchy: The Golden Age"
Date
1974-11-14
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Abstract
"The latest galley, with its support of Elizabeth Davis' The First Sex by a quotation
from Robert Graves, has simply piled one absurdity upon another. Robert Graves i s
one of the most notorious misreaders of poetry of the twentieth century. His widely
reproduced collection of Greek myths, for example, is infamous among classicists for
its unscrupulous mingling of fictive invention with accurate scholarly detail, so
that it actually is completelv useless as a reference work. His The White Goddess
has many wonderful passages, but is filled with unreadable linguistic meanderings in
Welsch a language about which Graves blithely admits he knows absolutely nothing!
This is a work not of scholarship but of a consciously self-referential personal
poet ic mythology" No Bennington feminist could continue to cite Graves as an
authority once she has assimilated his outrageous assertion in The White Goddess
t hat no woman can be a true poet: "Woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she
is nothing" (p . 446)"