Toward a Poetics for Collecting Poetry by Women

Abstract

To a certain extent the history of women's poetry in America is a tale of confinements,” writes Alicia Ostriker in the opening chapter of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. I would argue that it is less a tale of confinements than a tale still untold. Ostriker's own book on the topic, for instance, covers the entire period of women's poetry from 1650–1960 in a single chapter.