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Moments when the original poet in each of us created the outside world for us, by finding the familiar in the unfamiliar, are perhaps forgotten by most people; or else they are guarded in some secret place of memory because they were too much like visitations of the gods to be mixed with everyday thinking.
Thinking about creativity and its enigmatic sources inevitably invokes the figure of the artist's muse. As Adele Tutter, editor of The Muse, reminds us, the nine muses (each responsible for a different art form) were conceived as the offspring of gods: Zeus/Jupiter and Mnemosyne. While Zeus commanded all of the gods, Mnemosyne embodied the specific functions of memory. Such a distinguished lineage must have expressed the ancients' reverence for creativity, since they regarded its provenance as divine.
While we can imagine Zeus as a figure of supreme power and might, Mnemosyne seems more human, as she represents a capacity that we all rely on in the course of our everyday lives. In this sense, Mnemosyne seems closer to Marion Milner's notion of the “original poet in each of us” than to the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon.
Tutter's rich collection of essays helps us enter the lives and worlds of extraordinary people whose inner lives, due to the clarity and insightfulness of the authors' analyses, seem not so different from our own. The interpretations they offer are enriched by their deep knowledge of their subjects, rendered accessible to lay readers through their integration of art history, biography, literary criticism, and psychoanalytic theory into clear narrative prose.