Word: musee
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Many also achieved secondary but more lasting fame: Marie Duplessis was the prototype for the heroines of Dumas' La Dame aux camelias and La Traviata; Blanche d'Antigny was transformed by Zola into Nana and Apollonie Sabatier was the real-life la Muse et la Madone of Baudelaire's Les Flews du nuil. If these coquettes shared a single trait, it was by no means beauty but an indomitable will to succeed and the ability to overcome natural handicaps. A practical sort was Blanche d'Antigny. An inordinately heavy sleeper, she found early in her career...
Dappled Nouns. If art is Nabokov's muse, words are his mania: puns, anagrams (he has pointed out with glee that T. S. Eliot is almost "toilets" spelled backward), "word golf" (get from "live" to "dead" in five steps*), bilingual and trilingual double-entendres. More seriously, words of any language are vital possessions...
...Tenth Muse. Anne Bradstreet was 18 when she came to Boston in 1630, but already a scarred combatant in the battle for salvation. Two years earlier, God had chastised her "carnal heart" with smallpox but, later the same year, relented and presented her with a husband she loved passionately. For several years she was plagued by fear of barrenness, though eventually she bore eight children. Life evolved around them and the two men she adored, her husband Simon, a busy government envoy, and her father Thomas Dudley, who succeeded John Winthrop as Governor of Massachusetts...
...hortatory: "Come, come, I'll show unto thy sense,/ Industry hath its recompense." Some of it was inadvertently funny: "Was ever gem so rich found in thy trunk/ As Egypt's wanton Cleopatra drunk?" Yet when her work was published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up In America, it became one of the "most vendible books in England," and when its author died in 1672 her eulogist said: "Time will a poet raise/Born under better Stars, shall sing thy praise...
...each other," wrote Yevtushenko hopefully in 1960. "Everywhere they speak the same tongue." But unhappily, intelligible dialogue between American and Russian nightingales is severely inhibited, partly in the matter of language, chiefly by the nature of Yevtushenko's nonpoetical preoccupations. The handicap is not so much that his muse is a Marxist but that she is a public creature: poetic sensibility in the West is involved in more private, perhaps more eternal matters...