On a terrace in Majorca, Beryl Graves, widow of the poet Robert, gives an interview about Graves's mistresses. "Judith, Margot, Julia were nice girls. We liked all the muses - except for Cindy." There were a lot of them to like. Even in his portly 80s, Graves had no difficulty in finding young women willing to embody what he called the "White Goddess" and inspire his verse.
Graves would never have got away with it without the potent myth of the muse: the idea that poetry is inspired by a lovely female spirit. Nor would the press be so interested in the new play Larkin With Women, which is, after all, about an uneventful, triangular relationship between consenting middle-aged people.
Dear Larkin, so egg-headed and lugubrious - so Eric Morecambe-ish in his heavy glasses and cardigan - it seems we can't accept that his emotional life, relationships or not, was as lonely as he always portrayed it. Nor can we admit that the most interesting things about him were his poems. Where there are women in the picture, we have to make them into muses.
Ted Hughes, unfortunately for him, supplies a more satisfactory story. Actresses are queuing up for the part of Sylvia Plath in Ted And Sylvia, a bio-pic about the emblematic, doomed, and - luckily for Hollywood - conspicuously thin poetic couple (Meg Ryan is the frontrunner, although where she'll put her trademark pout during her rendition of 'Lady Lazarus' is hard to imagine).
Over the past month, the literati may have been falling over themselves to write po-faced reviews of Emma Tennant's Burnt Diaries, but they've also been lapping up every detail of her affair with Hughes.
Do modern women want to be muses? It would seem so. One of the least edifying spectacles at literary festivals or on the seamy insides of literary tours is that of well-educated, apparently together young women throwing themselves at drunk middle-aged male poets in stained trousers. Some residential creative writing courses seem more productive of divorces than literature.
This does seem to be a gender-based phenomenon - handsome young men do not, sadly, fling themselves at me on these occasions - but not one for which I can bring myself particularly to blame the men. After all, they spend most of their time at their desks or burrowing in libraries, engaged in the lonely, underpaid production of literature. At a festival, fuelled on white wine and canapés, they are made over into shamans of the tribe, holders of the sacred flame, and are suddenly surrounded by supplicant nymphs. Who would not sample a few? No, the muse thing, I'm afraid, is something that we nymphs do to ourselves.
I know I did. I was a late starter as a poet - I didn't write a word until I was 28. The possibility of being a poet had honestly never occurred to me, which was odd for someone who spent most of her time reading verse. I lacked good female role models - I hadn't yet discovered our admirable contemporary women poets. But mostly, as a bookish, romantic sort, I'd hoped to be a muse - to be written about, rather than to write.
When I read love poems, I always imagined myself as the person written about, rather than the desiring poet. Didn't you? Shakespeare's 'Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day' may have been addressed to his "lovely boy", but when it is read in a classroom it has, I am sure, the effect of allowing the boys to imagine themselves as Shakespeare. The girls, meanwhile, already swamped by magazines and stories which endlessly invite them to match themselves up to descriptions of women, see themselves wandering through an Elizabethan Timotei ad, watched by a bearded, murmuring chap in breeches. Or worry about whether or not they are summer's day-like enough, of course, and if they should try harder to be temperate.
What these girls do not realise is that being a muse is hard. Your role models are Eurydice, twisting her way back to the underworld after Orpheus has tried to get a look at her, Petrarch's Laura, to whom he never spoke, and Dante's Beatrice, who was dead.
If you want to be a muse, you have to be unconsciously lovely, yet always mysterious. Being dead is a terrific advantage, but if you must live, you should try not to notice the poet at all - and if you do, to remain emotionally withdrawn so that he can maintain that gap of desire he will bridge with his words.
Muses absolutely never get to express desire or say: "Let's settle down and have a bunch of kids." Nor, whatever their hopes, do muses achieve immortality. Personalities, faces, even genders, as Shakespeare's sonnet aptly illustrates, are not immortalised in poems. The poet's partial vision of that person, and the thoughts he pins on them, might just be. It does not matter which of Larkin's women owned the hands he recorded in 'Broadcast' as "tiny in all that air, applauding", because the person has been effaced in the image.
Julia, Margot, Judith and even the bolshy Cindy do not live on in Graves's poems - Graves does. His widow Beryl has a voice, not because she is Graves's one true muse, but because she is something more lasting than that - his editor.
More lasting still, of course, is to write your own poems. Young men, being naturally self-absorbed and emotionally withdrawn, can make excellent muses, as Shakespeare found, and the simple act of describing and objectifying men has great shock value. That shock value comes, though, at a price. Women poets, even today, are considered exceptions, and are defined by their gender in a way that women novelists, for example, are not.
Partly, this is down to the history of the two genres: it is easy to line up a canon of great women novelists to match the male ones - an Eliot for a Dickens - but barely possible to find the women poets to compare with men. To an extent, the muse myth itself is to blame. If poetry is imagined as sexual desire, then it is hardly surprising that women have not written more of it - for desire, historically at least, brings disgrace.
Nor do modern canon makers help. This year's Whitbread Prize poetry shortlist is entirely male, and it seems most likely, as the judges' minds fill with millennial notions, that the book of the year will be either Ted Hughes's Alcestis or Seamus Heaney's Beowulf. Alcestis is a wife who sacrifices herself for her husband, while the only woman in Beowulf is Grendel's mother, who has neither name nor shape and lives at the bottom of a marsh.
Willing sacrificial victim or the mother-monster under the gloop - it seems that women are being represented in poetry at the end of this millennium in much the same way as they were at the beginning. Maybe the muse myth has life in it yet.
• Kate Clanchy's latest collection, Samarkand, is available from Picador (£6.99). She will be reading from it on Wednesday at the Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden, London (8pm).
The Tenth Muse
My muse is not one of the nine nubile
daughters of Mnemosyne
in diaphanous nightshifts
with names that linger in the air
like scent of jasmine or magnolia
on Mediterranean nights.
Nor was any supple son of Zeus appointed
to pollinate my ear with poppy dust
or whispers of sea-spray.
My muse lands with a thud
like a sack of potatoes.
He has no aura.
The things he grunts are things
I'd rather not hear.
His attitude is 'Take it or leave it, that's
the way it is', drumming his fingers
on an empty pan by way of music.
If I were a man I would enjoy
such grace and favour,
tuning my fork to Terpsichore's lyre,
instead of having to cope with this dense
late-invented eunuch
with no more pedigree than the Incredible Hulk,
who can't play a note
and keeps repeating 'women
haven't got the knack'
in my most delicately strung, and scented, ear.
• From Dirty Washing: New and Selected Poems by Sylvia Kantaris (Bloodaxe Books, £6.95)
