I Made You to Find Me: The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address (review)

I Made You to Find Me, the title bracketed on the cover of Jane Hedley's book, comes from the well-known poem "The Double Image," written by Anne Sexton to her second daughter and published in her first book To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). Chosen to dramatize the issue of poetic address in poetry by women, the title focuses attention on the poetic convention of the "apostrophe," but the four main chapters describe different rhetorical strategies used by four women (Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Gwendolyn Brooks) to gain authority in the male-dominated genre of lyric poetry. Among the first women to achieve prominence as poets in the 1950s and 1960s in the U. S., these poets are the subjects of a seminar Hedley has been teaching at Bryn Mawr College. Indeed, the book's main value may be to demonstrate a successful approach to teaching poetry.

Hedley posits that since the "universal" voice of poets in the 1950s was assumed to be male, the success of women as poets depended on their being able to make up a convention for speaking ('I') to find the reader ('you') whom they wanted to address. Sexton adopted the "confessional" stance newly authorized by her teacher Robert Lowell, sparing neither herself nor her readers in her inquiries. Rich refused the confessional strategy because of its potential to compromise significant others in her life and created a distinctive mode of address that Hedley calls dialogic (p. 5). Plath spoke from the point of view of a highly crafted personae who enlarged and intensified the sufferer's agony (p. 92) in a mythic "system of illusion" (p. 95). Brooks gave much more direct access to her world, but in her case, both the 'I' and the 'you' in the poems became 'we' as her subject shifted to blackness itself.

These contrasts, while useful, could have been managed in a journal article. The longer format is justified by a secondary set of comparisons with Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes, and Amiri Baraka; an exploration of ekphrasis, primarily in relation to Plath's personae; and a foray into theory about the 'I/you' relationship in lyric poetry. Hedley claims that "Who 'I' can be in a poem depends on whom I have chosen to address and what is at stake between us" (p. 144). The "apostrophe," or direct address to a second person, often used by Sexton, provides the best-known kind of "interlocutor" in lyric poetry. The other kinds are more obscure. Hedley calls Rich's mode "dialogic," but the poems she discusses seem more like efforts to protect the subject from distortion or harm. Brooks's mode of address is termed "epideictic," meaning that it "calls upon us to join with our community in giving thought to what we witness" (p. 134). I doubt, however, that any poet would willingly embrace this tongue-twisting term. Other problems that Hedley acknowledges include the fact that Brooks is best-known for narrative, not lyric, poems, and Rich's latest book, Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007), is "bent on persuading us of the insuperable difficulty . . . of constructing a viable 'I/you' relation" (p. 147).

There are also problems with the literary history in Hedley's account. Muriel Rukeyser had already provided a strong model for women poets by 1949 and had embraced "confession" as a way to give form to emotional and imaginative experience. Levertov's early books also presented the voice of a woman who did not accept the status quo, and Carolyn Kizer's poem "Pro Femina" had appeared by 1962. The list of breakthroughs for women poets in the 1950s and 1960s is long, and the question about how each woman gained authority as a speaker of poems cannot be answered without a...