Throughout history the poetic muse has tended to be (a passive) female and the poet male. This dynamic caused problems for late Victorian and twentieth-century women poets; how could the muse be reclaimed and moved on from the passive role of old? Parker looks at fin-de-siècle and modernist lyric poets to investigate how they overcame these challenges and identifies three key strategies: the reconfiguring of the muse as a contemporary instead of a historical/mythological figure; the muse as a male figure; and an interchangeable poet/muse relationship, granting agency to both.

Sarah Parker is an Impact Research Fellow in English Studies at University of Stirling, UK.

Introduction 1. Historical Muse Figures, Imagined Ancestries and Contemporary Muses 2. Michael Field 3. Olive Custance 4. Amy Lowell 5. H.D. and Bryher Conclusion