Poetry by Women in America: Esthetics in Evolution

Poetry byWomeninAmerica: EstheticsinEvolution Karen Alkalay-Gut Unborn sisters, look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, see us not one-dimensional but with the past as your steadying and corrective lens. -Adrienne Rich, ..Turning the Wheel" 1 In the past sixty years women in America have come to enjoy a general recognition for their poetry that their ancestors could not have imagined. Although women have written poetry throughout history, and a great deal from earlier periods is now being rediscovered, the quantity of published workwas small, the audience select or non-existent, and the general attitude negative. Muriel Rukeyser sums up the problem of women poets in courses andanthologies: ·'One undergraduate said to me 'There are no women until afterEaster."' 2 Historical editions of literature present an extremely low percentage of women, but contemporary anthologies are becoming better balanced.:1 Women are simply writing more today, are writing as women to a universal audience, and are being taken seriously as poets. Yet this development has come about gradually, and the form and character of poetry bywomen in the twentieth century is still in a state of evolution. Although this phenomenon seems to be true of many western countries, the radical development of poetry by women is so pronounced, so extreme and self-aware in the United States, as to constitute a unique experience. Three specific stagesmay be distinguished: the period beginning with the enfranchisement of women following World War I and concluding with the reintroduction ofthe "feminine mystique" in American culture following World War II; the period between World War II and the politicization of women's lives through the war protest, the civil rights movements, and other national concerns; CanadianReview of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 3, Fall 1983,239-57 240 Karen Alkalay-Gut and the present period of the psychological, political and social revolution in the form of the feminist movement. The three parts of this essay trace these stages. I A woman writing poetry in the beginning of the 1920sin America-unlike a prospective novelist-would have almost no respectable precedents. Emily Dickinson was unknown until 1924and Christina Rossetti or Elizabeth Barrett Browning were so removed from the spirit of the roaring twenties that their impact, although serious, could not have been thematically relevant. Effected by the increased freedom generated by women's suffrage, the independence comprehended during World War I, and the moral relaxation of the Jazz Age, women in many fields were endeavoring to carve out careers from previously all-male strongholds, and they were beginning to find ways to write ooetrv as women. Not that they did not write before. The ladies' magazines of the nineteenth century are replete with timely, proper poets. In fulfilling the stereotypes of the woman poet and ladies' poetry in order to be published, however, these women in many cases sacrificed their individuality and were dismissed as lacking significance and poetic value in the literary world. When women were serious, they were not writing as women. Gertrude Stein and Amy Lowell, from the beginning of the century onward, made enormous impact on the poetry scene, Mina Loy created a sensation in New York with her boldness, and there were others. But women who wrote poetry, who respected their art and were not ashamed of their audiences, wrote as men, addressing men, concerning "universal" experiences and points of view that were not unique to women or that denied their sex. Stein and Lowell did not associate themselves with "the cause," and were probably taken more seriously because ofit. Mina Loy's"Aphorisms on Futurism" are revolutionary, but they address the male reader, enjoining him to free his life-style. It would have been absurd to address women at this stage in history or to speak with authority by speaking as a woman, or about women. Other women wrote as well but, like Dickinson, poets like Adelaide Crapsey did not publish, and others, like Alice Dunbar Nelson, did so reluctantly or were not popularized. Perhaps too they obscured their message: Gertrude Stein's famous "Patriarchal Poetry" makes an extremely significant subject comprehensible to only a few. The twenties, however, brought the first burst of women poets who wrote...