Women as Poets

Abstract

Less pliant, safer as a biological organism, she remains fixed in her famous attitudes, and indifferent to intellectuality ; thus John Crowe Ransom on The Poet as Woman. x Indifferent to intellectuality: Laura Riding, one-time winner of The Fugitive prize? Fixed in her attitudes: Marianne Moore, whose writing W. C. Williams characterized as swiftness impaling beauty? 2 Fixity is the last attribute Gertrude Stein assigns to Americans, men or women : it is some thing strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving, a space of time that is filled always filled with moving ... an American thing. 3 To what extent is Stein's infamous iteration a female, let alone an American mode? This is the kind of question that tends to be begged by Emily Stipes Watts in her well-documented survey of The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945.* She admits that her main preoccupation is thematic, and this correlates with her belief that most women's poetry in America has been com municative (p. 166). On the other hand, she claims as significantly female triumphs the formal experimentation of an H. D. or a Marianne Moore. For this last claim, she has T. S. Eliot's qualified sanction : Miss Moore's poetry is as ' feminine ' as Christina Rossetti's, one never forgets that it is written by a woman; but with both one never thinks of this particularly as anything but a positive virtue. 5 Yet, as Ms. Watts remarks, not one of the essays on Marianne Moore collected by Charles Tomlinson for the Twentieth Century Views series was written by a woman.6 It remains for the generation of women that has dis covered itself in the decade since that collection appeared to explore, with an open-mindedness previously impossible, the precise nature of such qualifications, and to establish not only an adequate feminist critique, but also a critique of simple-minded feminism.