Anne Spencer’s Feminist Modernist Poetics

Although Anne Spencer has been regarded as one of the significant female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, less attention has been given to her role as an important innovator of American modernism. Spencer’s modernist formal experiments enabled her to express and enact her feminist aspirations for modern women. Her poems, including “Before the Feast at Shushan,” “Letter to My Sister,” and “The Lemming: O Sweden!,” explore the psychodynamics of male dominance and female resistance, affirming literary modern-ism’s liberatory potential for women in its ability to convey the affective experience of subordination and to disrupt older discursive structures rooted in masculinist ideology.