Mentoring and the Female Poet's Voice

Abstract

Female poets in the twentieth century faced well-documented challenges in finding a place in the masculine hegemony of modernist poetic values and practice. Their strategies for seizing the culturally sanctioned role of “poet” were often subversive—as William Drake, Cheryl Walker, and others have shown—or compulsively self-protective. Marianne Moore’s armored animals, Elinor Wylie’s “masks outrageous and austere” (65), Louise Bogan’s prescriptive obscurity, and Elizabeth Bishop’s famous reticence all seemed necessary to avoid the damning and oftdeployed charge of “writing like a woman.” Even in the years following the Second World War, retrenchment and conservatism in the culture at large sparked a forceful—if temporary—resurgence of modernist values in poetry that severely challenged young female poets in their search for credible poetic voice. Alicia Ostriker, in Stealing the Language (1986), chronicled the “quest for identity” that was the first task of the female poet coming of age in a culture “external and internal, which opposes female autonomy” (59). One reason each generation of female poets seemed to struggle anew with finding an authoritative voice is that the culture had done so much to obscure the tradition of poetry by women that preceded them. The twentieth century forcefully dismissed and then forgot the “poetesses” who dominated popular poetry in the nineteenth century, and the generation of female modernist poets was generally loath to claim those ancestors, or to identify in solidarity with one another. The following generations, with notable exceptions, found the female poets accepted into the modernist canon—Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein—too idiosyncratic