Women Poets, 100 Years after Emily

"Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America" by Alicia Ostriker/Beacon Press

The bad news is that women are still earning 64 cents to the male American dollar, a generation after feminism got down to serious business.

The good news is that Rutgers scholar and poet Alicia Ostriker has written an absolutely convincing book affirming that, since 1960, American women have created a body of poetry of a heft comparable to Romanticism and Modernism as far as the literary canon is concerned.

Emily ("Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed") Dickinson might not roll over in the Amherst grave she departed for in 1886, but the emergence of her late-blooming sisters as a major voice in the choir of world poetry would surely have confirmed her intuition that "Much madness is divinest sense."

Ostriker begins with evidence of the appalling condescension even well-respected scholars laid down, especially when they meant to praise Emily's inscrutable quirkiness. And she gives hard-to-believe chapter and verse about the separate and highly unequal place men writers played in her own graduate training.

I add a few from my recollection for the record. Our American lit professor, a Henry James specialist, barely acknowledged the existence of Ellen Glasgow. (Needless to say, he didn't mention Kate Chopin.)

And I'm still embarrassed by the scandal of my wife's getting B's while I garnered A's in the same courses, when it was clear, even then, which cerebellum was turning out the most voltage. Sadder to say, whilst I made full professor in 1962, to this day she's still an associate.

It's no consolation to her or her sisters to remember that the full and proper text of Emily's 1875 Lyrics did not see the light of public day until Thomas Johnson pushed them through the Harvard University Press in 1955, an absurd 70 years after her death.

Still, all's well that ends better and better. We certainly have come a long way (you're not going to catch me saying "baby"!) from the "Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up" Anne Bradstreet who made preemptive strikes like:

I am obnoxious to each
   carping tongue
Who says my hand a
   needle better fits.

Needle indeed, pricking still, after three centuries, ironies or not. She further conceded:

Men have precedency
   and still excel . . .
Men can do best and
   women know it well.
Preeminence in each
   and all is yours,
Yet grant some small
   acknowledgment of
   ours.

Ostriker has a gift for the jugular on such retrospectively disillusioning citations, but she also has a nose for the nerdlike among many grisly eminences, such as R.P. Blackmur's demented putdown of Emily:

"She was neither a professional poet not an amateur; she was a private poet who wrote indefatigably as some women cook or knit. Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars."

Imagine. And he was being generous. As Ostriker nails him wriggling to his own wall of prose:

"This is to say: women do busywork. But it would be as reasonable to remark that Ezra Pound wrote the Cantos indefatigably as some men work on an assembly line, and that his gift for words and his cultural predicament drove him to poetry instead of bowling. Strike!

Ostriker divides her argument into six parts--the prehistory of the movement of achievement she celebrates, 1650-1960, appositely called "I'm Nobody"; the quest for identity; the liberation through the use of anatomical language; the release of anger that has accumulated over the patriarchy; the transcendence of anger through a poetics of intimate erotica; and he final and consummatory move--the revision of mythology that underlay the patriarchal ascendancy. Part of her counter-revolution is the inclusion of working class, lesbian and Third World poets, a congeries of mutually enriching sorties.

The first thing we learned in literary criticism, old style, was to distinguish between the poet and the personae created. Ostriker cautions, wait a minute: The "I" and the persona often merge in women's writing.

I do wish she'd drop the masculinoid tick of scientificating in her neologisms--such as "exoskeletel style," "gynocentric" and "gendered experience." But one poem like Alta's rejection of a passive Euridice is worth a thousand words of exegesis:

all the male poets
   write of orpheus
as if they look back and
   expect
to find me walking
   patiently
behind them. they
   claim i fell into hell.
Damn them, I say.
i stand in my own pain
& sing my own song.

Nonetheless, as a critic (or simply an informed guide in this terra incognita) Ostriker is invaluable. How illuminating, for example, to learn, however belatedly, about the male chauvinist emphasis in the Medusa myth: "Of Medusa, a perennial figure in male poetry and iconography, Ann Stafford's sequence 'Women of Perseus' and Rachel Blau DuPlessis' 'Medusa' both remind us of the key event in this female's life, though it goes unmentioned in either Bulfinch's or Edith Hamilton's Mythology: her rape by Poseidon before the snakes appeared on her head."

Talk about droits de seigneur. I really believe this nurturing spirit will enrich all of us, as the poet/critic implies in her closing words: "The subject of this book has been a collective endeavor to redefine 'woman' and 'woman poet.' From this endeavor, because the nature of poetry always is to illuminate our darkness, we should discover not only more of what it means to be a woman but more of what it means to be human."

The most touching anecdote in her book is the self-revelation of how liberating to her, a young Jewish American female, were the poems of that quirky English Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the realms of literature there are no X-Y chromosomes, only human beings making greater and greater sense of our common predicament. But 64-cent dollars impede that liberation just as surely as the received "wisdom" of critics like R.P. Blackmur.

As for Emily, one hundred years later, what better revenge does she savor against the sluggards of America than a generation of women telling the truth according to their slants? And there can't be a better way to celebrate this centennial than to metabolize this fine book--unless it be popping the $9.95 to Little Brown for the complete E.D. You'll never get more value for ten bucks.

reprinted from Welcomat, After Dark, August 27, 1986