Ian Lancashire is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.

• Introduction Experiencing the Muse Sightings - Richard Eberhart’s “The Groundhog” - William Stafford’s “Ask Me” Uttering Modelling the Inaccessible Skill - Mind on Fire - Conceptualizer and Verbalizer - Self-Monitor and Working Memory - Reading Span and Cognitive Lead - Conclusion CybertextualityPoet-Authors Geoffrey Chaucer - William Shakespeare - Samuel Taylor Coleridge - W. B. Yeats - T. S. Eliot Novelist-Authors James Joyce - Agatha Christie - Margaret Atwood - Iris Murdoch Reading the Writers’ Own AnonymousAppendices

'The age of authors, whether afflicted by dementia or not, can have a profound effect on their works. Late style, characterized by spareness in writing and by clarity in bringing out essentials, also witnesses authors facing up to changes in themselves. [Agatha] Christie must have recognized in herself the condition of forgetfulness and confusion that she depicts in her alter ego, the detective-fiction writer Ariadne [Oliver] ... Was her embodied intention to brood on a suspected cause of the decay in her cognitive powers that she had suspected her novels to show for some time?' - From Forgetful Muses, with research featured in The New York Times Magazine's Ninth Annual Year in Ideas