Women’s poetry

Abstract

Women writing poetry during the English Civil Wars did not think of women, or of poetry, in the ways which are familiar to us. The idea of the 'woman poet', if it can be said to have existed at all, would have had little resemblance to the way in which we understand those words today. The frames of interpretation brought to poetry, and more specifically to poetry by women, were very different. What we have come to think of as 'selfexpression' was not important until after the Romantic era; the poets examined in this chapter (with the possible exception of Margaret Cavendish) wrote in a world where poetic skill was measured by emulation of Classical and other texts, by use of form, by elaboration of image. Women's poetry, however, was also interpreted in terms of what made a good or bad woman, so frames of interpretation linked women's poetry to feminized standards of intellectual achievement and to assumptions about the place of women in the public eye - in short, to what Jonathan Goldberg calls the legend of good (or bad) women. While women were not necessarily discouraged from writing by their families they certainly were not expected to participate in public literary culture; women's poetry had to make difficult negotiations amongst institutions, audiences and texts.