Poland, poetry, and gender

Abstract

Although women figure prominently in contemporary Polish poetry, literary criticism has not treated them as a collective phenomenon. This is due to the great diversity of poetic voices, to the lack of a strong feminist tradition in Poland, but also to the unwillingness of some women poets to be labelled as authors of “women's poetry.” The term has for a long time been burdened with dismissive and pejorative meanings. Recent attempts to define women's poetry by a number of Polish and British critics have proved unsuccessful, since the characteristics of women's poetry — the interest in everyday detail as opposed to generalization, the intermingling of the private and the political — can be applied to much postwar Polish poetry, irrespective of gender.