Rare Book & Manuscript Library

“Some say there are nine Muses, but they should stop to think. Look at Sappho of Lesbos; she makes a tenth.”

Plato, as recounted in Plutarch’s Morals

In seventeenth century America, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the most eminent of the poets writing in the colonies. Her first collection took on the title directly: The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America. Modern literary historians often identify her poetry as the starting point for American literature. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695) was a contemporary of Bradstreet’s in Mexico, whose career reflected a shared experience as a colonial woman writer, but whose life was otherwise quite different. Of elite mestiza heritage, Sor Juana was highly educated and literate in Spanish, Nahuatl (the indigenous language of Central Mexico), and Latin. A collection of her poetry, Poemas de la unica poetisa americana, musa dezima, soror Juana Ines de la Cruz (1690), identified her as a “Tenth Muse”, and in her other works she was also called “del fenix de México” and “The Phoenix of Mexico.” Numerous poems addressed to her close friend the Vicereine, Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga (1649-1721) take on a distinctly romantic character as well as erotic overtones.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) has never been addressed as a “Tenth Muse” herself, a curious omission given her importance in American letters. Only a few of her poems were published during her lifetime, although many appear in her correspondence to family and friends. After her death, her younger sister discovered the trove of over 1,800 poems in notebooks and loose sheets. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson was only issued in 1924, following years of acrimonious family battles over their content. Her early works are often on the sentimental side, but those of her middle and later periods are fiercely original, by turns riddling, erotic, dark, and evocative. The poems and surviving letters between herself and Susan Huntington Dickinson née Gilbert (1830-1913), as well as those with Otis Phillips Lord (1812-1884), directly indicate deep emotional entanglements. With Susan these may have been romantic and sexual; with Lord they were almost certainly so.

Wild nights - Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be

Our luxury! (209, l.1-4)

Works Included