I took a look at two contemporary antholgies which I keep near my desk for reference purposes - Twentieth Century American Poetry by David Mason, Dana Goia and Meg Schoerke; and Sam Gwynn's Poetry: A Pocket Anthology (Third Edition). Clearly, if you go back to the first half of the century, male poets predominated. But what happens if you look at poets active more recently - the last thirty or forty years or so? Arbitrarily, I chose poets born in 1936 (my own birth year) or later, and added up the numbers:
Twentieth Century: 33 male poets/29 female. (But, if I change the cutoff to 1941, the ration changes to 23 male/26 female.)
Pocket Anthology: 31 male/25 women for 1936. 23 male/18 women for 1941.
Only two anthologies, and possibly reflecting enlightened editors, but the Cantor Bookshelf Survey doesn't indicate a significant problem with contemporary poets. Nor does the Sphere and Gazebo Submission Study I cited earlier.
|