When I read collections of forgotten and "neglected" poems by women, I rarely encounter poems I am sad to have missed. I do not think, "Why, that's every bit as great as Ode on a Grecian Urn; how could they have missed it?" What I do think is something more like, "These are mostly terrible, and yet the women who wrote them were as smart and as capable as the men who wrote good poems. In a just and equitable world the development of their talents would not have been mishandled this way." I don't regret not having more poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I regret that she was pressured into a shape where she had to express herself through stereotypical ladies' verse. I do not think Phyllis Wheatley was a good poet; I think it's our loss that she was not given the chance to be; and I will not resort to the condescension of, "She's a really good poet, considering...."
RHE
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