Women Poets of the Late 20th Century

Women poets of the last half century have developed a poetic voice which is, in the most positive way, distinctively female. Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich are three of these poets. Though they write on a variety of subjects, death for example, or on subjects that are uniquely female, such as motherhood, one of the areas in which women poets pose the strongest challenge to the patriarchal tradition is the subject of love. After centuries in which the conventions and approaches and vocabulary of love poetry were primarily the creations of men, poets such as Smith, Sexton and Rich were among those who offered a new, specifically female view of love. Though the three poets are very different writers in terms of style, form and the specifics of subject matter, taken together they provide strong examples of how the uniquely female view is transforming the poetry of love.

Women were, for so long, the objects rather than the subjects of love poetry that the simple mention of the subject may still conjure up the notion of poetry that is used to woo a woman. In poetry intent on flattering the woman of the poet's choice, the poet competed for her using speech that persuaded her that his adoration exceeded that of any other suitor or, more importantly, that he possessed an intrinsic worth that exceeded that of others. Woman was the object of a pursuit and the poet carried on the pursuit by praising her or, in those cases where the man's heart had been broken, by vi

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ker's envy of the old dog on whose neck the man is resting his head. The distance between them and her desire to know why his eyes "have gone into their own room", i.e., to understand what is separate in him, speaks to her perception of the tenuousness of their connection. Where the woman can be other in the sense of being the desired object, the man in Sexton's poem is other in the sense that the speaker is trying to understand the limitations between their separate and their shared selves. Despite her love she "can see only / your little sleep, an empty place." The speaker is forced to admit that no matter how much she has "learned" his eyes and knows her own reactions to them she will still be at a loss what to say or do when his eyes open -- the difficulty of communicating with him overwhelms her. She concludes that "she need not speak of it at all" and can instead join him in letting her face "rest in assembled tenderness / on the old dog's neck." What the speaker envies is the uncomplicated, unreflective nature of the man's response to the dog and the comfort the dog can take in his attention. How much easier things would be if she could assume such a relationship with him, if she could enter into this moment "st

Category: Literature - W