The appreciation of Bogan's "Women" is a generational thing, I think. The poems spoke to me at once because I grew up surrounded by women who would not color outside the lines to save their lives--in an almost literal sense--and who expected the young (like me) to live the same way. It must be hard now for young women to imagine themselves in such a situation, or understand fully the frustration and irritation that Bogan is conveying in that poem.
There's a beauty by Elinor Wylie that conveys something very similar:
Let No Charitable Hope
Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope;
I am in nature none of these.
I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.
In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file,
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.
The body language that goes with this poem strikes me as something between an uptilted chin and an upraised finger. There's a lot of anger in it, under that courageous final smile, and a degree of contempt for the unnamed source of the hardness of life as she perceives it.
And of course there's Charlotte Mew in England, another woman who deserves to be read much more.
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