from "The Grand Eccentrics"

The central preoccupation is plain: the dangerous and dominating Fatal Woman. More than half the oeuvre portrays triumphant and savage Circe, Salome, Helen, Delilah, Herodiade, etc. Even in work consecrated to the hero or the tragic poet, these central males stand confronted crushingly by womankind or her unconquerable surrogate imagery: Oedipus stands before the Sphinx, Orpheus is beleaguered and St. John decapitated, repeatedly. Indeed, perhaps only literature, and a process of careful personal anthologization, could have provided a so consistantly sinister collection of females.