A gulf so deeply cut: American women poets and the Second World War

Abstract

In A Gulf So Deeply Cut Susan Schweik looks at poems written by American women between 1941 and 1945 and, on a larger scale, examines the workings of gender in the politics of war. The Schweik writes of is the gulf between the sexes, between homefront and frontline, between the male soldier, traditionally understood to have experienced too much, and the women left behind, assumed to have experienced nothing at all. Calling into question experience of war as an ideological construct, Schweik traces its limits to masculinity and considers its implications for writers and reades of both sexes. She closely reads the poems of Louise Bogan, Marianne Moore, H. D. Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Gwendolyn Brooks, Muriel Rukeyser, Toyo Suvemoto, and Mitsuve Yamada, as well as the work of male poets such as Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Wilfred Owen, and Randall Jarrell. Schweik draws upon an unusually wide variety of sources - not only published books of poetry but also manuscripts, letters, anthologies, government-sponsored propaganda, private journals and notebooks, material from the Black and Yiddish presses, and work published in the internment camps by Japanese Americans. She reads the poems in relation to the social practices of war-making and of gender-making, showing how they both reproduce and contest dominant perceptions of and gender. A Gulf So Deeply Cut should prove invaluable as an analysis of the ideology of 20th century Anglo/American poetry and as a mulitcultural history of modern American women's poetry.