Women Poets and Contested Spaces in The Yellow Book

To illuminate poetry's role in The Yellow Book as well as its gender politics, this essay investigates poems by women in relation to poems by men, the Oscar Wilde trial, and the literary marketplace. Volume 1 suggested that pages devoted to poetry were a contested space: no poems by women appeared alongside masculine contributions that celebrated male poetic tradition or objectified women. New Woman poems began to appear in volume 2, however. And after Wilde's trial, it was poetry by women that sustained the journal's decadent content and obliquely expressed sympathy with Wilde.