List of famous authors-muses?

November 15, 2010 4:46 PM

Can you help me compile a list of authors/muses? I am stuck after Dante-Beatrice, Petrarch-Laura, Henry-June, Kerouac-Cassady. Thank you!
posted by bukvich to Media & Arts (26 answers total)

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Caroll)—Alice Liddell
posted by JiBB at 4:56 PM on November 15, 2010

Shakespeare-The Dark Lady/The handsome youth/Henry Wriothesley (or whatever you believe to be true)
posted by pised at 5:08 PM on November 15, 2010

Dante Gabriel Rosetti / Elizabeth Siddal?
posted by synecdoche at 5:13 PM on November 15, 2010

Also, maybe, Herman Melville / Nathaniel Hawthorne
posted by synecdoche at 5:16 PM on November 15, 2010

Vladimir and Vera Nabokov.
posted by kprincehouse at 5:17 PM on November 15, 2010

Nora Barnacle/James Joyce.
posted by Tylwyth Teg at 5:18 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Ezra Pound/Olga Rudge.
posted by nasreddin at 5:22 PM on November 15, 2010

Trying also to think of a reverse gender pair here. So:
Leonard Woolf to Virginia.
posted by Tylwyth Teg at 5:22 PM on November 15, 2010

Emily Dickinson/"Master"
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:29 PM on November 15, 2010 [1 favorite]

Gaius Valerius Catullus/"Lesbia"
Sextus Propertius/Cynthia
posted by xueexueg at 5:33 PM on November 15, 2010

How about Rimbaud/Verlaine?
posted by John of Michigan at 5:40 PM on November 15, 2010

Yeats and Maud Gonne; "I have spread my dreams..."
posted by Abiezer at 6:15 PM on November 15, 2010

The Brownings served as muses to each other, really.

Arguably, Constantin Heger to Charlotte Bronte.
posted by thomas j wise at 6:20 PM on November 15, 2010

Catullus - Lesbia
posted by aheckler at 6:23 PM on November 15, 2010

Oh, and Dafydd ap Gwilym and Morfudd 'like the sun'.
posted by Abiezer at 6:26 PM on November 15, 2010

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. And then perhaps, vice versa.
posted by jbenben at 6:36 PM on November 15, 2010

And to continue spamming the thread with Celtic poets, Sorley MacLean and Eimhir, though apparently she was a 'composite of two women'.
posted by Abiezer at 7:00 PM on November 15, 2010

J.D. Salinger/Joyce Maynard

Salman Rushdie/Padma Lakshmi
posted by invisible ink at 7:34 PM on November 15, 2010

Sartre Beauvoir and vice versa
posted by OrangeCat at 12:26 AM on November 16, 2010

Charlotte Bronte and Constantin Heger
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 1:36 AM on November 16, 2010

William Moulton Marston and Olive Byrne.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 1:57 AM on November 16, 2010

Tibullus wrote about Delia, who was supposedly a real woman named Plania.

Catullus wrote not only to Lesbia (real name Clodia) but also to Juventius.

Bob Dylan and his first wife Sara.

Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote Sonnets from the Portuguese to Robert Browning (I can't remember any poems from Browning to his wife, but surely there were some).

Verlaine and Rimbaud wrote poems about and to each other and Verlaine wrote poems about and to his wife.
posted by Kattullus at 7:25 AM on November 16, 2010

Not authors (primarily), but Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Plus, it goes both ways.

If songwriters are authors, another kind of twofer. Pattie Boyd for both George Harrison and Eric Clapton.
posted by cmoj at 11:18 AM on November 16, 2010

Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lenny
posted by wayland at 12:17 PM on November 16, 2010

For that matter, Doyle Bramhall and SRV.
posted by cmoj at 12:38 PM on November 16, 2010

Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. Seemed to work both ways there, too.
posted by fiercecupcake at 4:57 AM on November 17, 2010