— page 6

The Poetess Tradition

        Independently of romanticism and modernism, the poetesses developed and explored their own poetic traditions and techniques to embody their view of a shared, accessible world, open to tradition and convention, and an often diffused, uncentered self that did not have a privileged subjectivity. The poetesses built very successful careers writing formal, accessible poems about spiritual and political as well as domestic and emotional themes.  Lydia Sigourney was paid the then-huge sum of $500 annually by Godey’s Lady’s Book just to list her name on their masthead.  Edna St. Vincent Millay enjoyed celebrity status unheard of for a poet today, as well as gigantic book sales.  And, as the decades went on and women won more power in society, early twentieth-century poetesses such as Teasdale, Millay, Wylie, and Adams adapted many of their precedessors’ Sentimentist techniques to a wider range of attitudes and themes.

        But in spite of these poetesses' successful careers, the poetess tradition had most of its impact during the late twentieth century based on the work of Emily Dickinson.  Dickinson was herself an admirer of many of the poetesses, and the traits she shares with them include her use of ballad stanza instead of iambic pentameter; her unashamed whimsicality; her commitment to making poetry part of daily life, the writing of poems for friends and relatives; and most of all her ability to locate her own subjectivity outside of the central lyric persona.

        One of the specific techniques that Dickinson must have learned from the poetesses is the stated or implied question, emphasizing the speaker's inability to understand nature fully:  “The tidy Breezes, with their Brooms / Sweep vale—and hill—and tree! / Prithee, My pretty Housewives! / Who may expected be?” writes Dickinson.  Sigourney asks the stream, “Stream!  why is thy rushing step delayed?”  "O helpless body of hickory tree,/What do I burn, in burning thee?’” asks Helen Hunt Jackson.  And Dickinson:  “What tenements of clover / are fitting for the bee.”   And Dickinson uses several such techniques to diffuse the impact of her own lyric subjectivity; in fact, some of the qualities that have made Dickinson seem so utterly alone and anomalous among “poets”  are the very qualities she shares with the invisible tradition of the poetesses.

        But Emily Dickinson, as a female poet, was a very lonely figure in the American poetic landscape during most of the twentieth century.  In the five decades following New Criticism the once-thriving classic tradition of women’s poetry had been torn apart.  As Gilbert and Gubar explain in their essay “Forward Into the Past” (1983), the price of poetic success for any woman after mid-centry has been to despise virtually all pre-twentieth poetry by women, ignoring the closeness of Dickinson, not to mention the intriguing affinities of H.D. and Stein, with the poetesses. Feminist poets who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s distanced themselves from the poetesses because of subject matter, not to mention form.   In the postmodern climate of the 1980s and 1990s, the hermetic tradition of Stein and H.D. pushed the poetesses even further distant on the basis of accessibility, while the intimate connections between Dickinson and the poetesses continued to be ignored.           

        But even in the late twentieth century, the poetess tradition continued to live on in unlikely places.  Marianne Moore's quirky approach to description and Elizabeth Bishop's discomfort with using simile and metaphor both have their roots in poetesses' poetics.   More recently, Carolyn Kizer has made her link with poetesses' poetics a conscious, if an ambivalent, one.  In her long poem “Pro Femina,” Kizer writes:

     I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket. . .
     Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman.
     And our saddest conspicuous failures?  The married spinsters
     On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.
     Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not very distant,
     Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns.
     Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;
     Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists
     Through lust-of-the-mind; barbituate-drenched Camilles
     With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas
     When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,
     The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail.

        Kizer’s description here leads to an attack on poetesses like Teasdale and Millay, both childless, married to older businessman husbands, and eventually suicidal.  Yet the number of lines that Kizer devotes to these “conspicuous failures” shows how impossible it is for her to ignore them completely, and her tirade incorporates a note of compassion for the early twentieth century poetesses' attempt to combine heterosexual love with artistic freedom.

        While Kizer's connection with the poetess tradition is made ironically clear in "Pro Femina," numerous other contemporary poets both wellknown and unknown also write in ways that are influenced less self-consciously by Sentimentism.  Jorie Graham's use of natural objects such as butterflies and flowers as starting-points for meditations on subjectivity; Lucille Clifton's use of direct emotional statement and repetition; and Louise Gluck's use of dialogue with nature in her book The Wild Iris are just a few examples.  At the same time, male writers who participated directly in the poetess tradition,  such as Longfellow with his careful craft and conscious artificiality, and Poe (friend and reviewer of many poetesses) with his intense, palpable verbal repetition, are beginning to be reevaluated as well.

        It may be no coincidence that the work of the poetesses is starting to enjoy a revival in an age dominated by postmodernist ideas about the contingency and fluidity of the self, because in many respects the work of the poetesses is oddly consistent with the tenets of late twentieth-century experimental poetry.  The poetesses do not write with the same kind of “I” that Romantic poems do; instead, they imbue their lyrics with multiple interacting voices and perspectives, both human and natural.  The poetess does not objectify the natural world with the proprietary ease of the Romantic poet.  Instead, she approaches nature with multiple points of view and continual questioning.  She is just as likely to objectify herself as to objectify the natural world.     But the product of the poetess’s diffuse subjectivity is not the fragmented presentation of self and nature that characterizes so much postmodern writing. For the poetesses, a fluid self is not linked to outer chaos; in fact, self-diffusion may only be possible insofar as the outer world is perceived as a stable place linked by natural cycles and the ties of community.  

        The Sentimentist women poets have been relegated to silence in our century because their poetry threatens the most basic tenets of Romanticism.   Their poems call into question the importance and solidity of the individual self; the possibility of objectifying nature; and the fundamental alienation of self from the world.  Insofar as the poetess poetic tradition involves particular techniques and strategies that are markedly different from those of the Romantic and post-Romantic poetic traditions, a poet such as Sara Teasdale is a poetess; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who adopted many of the strategies of Romanticism, is not; and Dickinson falls somewhere in between.  From Lydia Sigourney through Leonie Adams, the poetesses have been united not so much by an interest in common subject matter as, much more importantly, by a consistent alternate approach to the lyric poem that relies on “anti-Romantic” or “Sentimentist" assumptions which run counter to current standards of literary value.  For exactly these reasons, the “poetesses” offer a valuable strategy of renewal for poets in the twenty-first century, particularly for women poets who need a new way to connect with pre-twentieth century poetic traditions. 

        In a cycle of self-fulfilling prophecies, poetess poetry has been so routinely dismissed as trivial and inferior over the last 150 years that it is difficult to gain the critical distance to even begin to read it on its own terms, apart from the criteria established by Romantic dominance.   Yet it is important to attempt do so, for three reasons:  the fresh perspective the poetess tradition offers from which to view Romanticism; the light that understanding of poetess aesthetics can shed on the practices of a range of canonical and contemporary poets; and the potential vitality of poetess poetics in its own right.

Selected Bibliography

        Peggy Davis, Annie Finch, and Laura Mandell, eds. Poetesses' Poetics: Reevaluating the Hierarchy of Poetic Traditions [NOTE: Publication Information Will be Available Before Entry Goes to Press]. Comprehensive anthology of the most important criticism on poetess poetry, both American and British, from contemporaneous reviews to current theoretical reevaluations. A good critical starting point.

        Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington, In. , 1991. Reexamines the aesthetic strategies of "sentimental" poetry during the Modernist period.

        Drake, William. The First Wave: Women Poets in America, 1915-1945. New York, 1987. A general inroduction, the first and most thorough study of early twentieth-century poetesses.

        Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. "'Forward into the Past': The Complex Female Affiliation Complex. " In Historical Studies and Literary Criticism. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Madison, Wi. , 1985, 240-65. A groundbreaking theoretical examination of 20th century women writers' complex relationship to their precursors.

        Gray, Janet. She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Iowa City, 1997. Anthology of poetry including more representative work on domestic subejcts and more ethnic diversity than earlier anthologies.

        Petrino, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verse in America, 1820-1885. Middletown, Ct. , 1999. A thorough and illuminating discussion of Dickinson's relation to the poetess tradition.

        Sherman, Joan. African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington, Il, 1992. Anthology of poetry representing many significant poetesses whose work is not available elsewhere.

        Walker, Cheryl. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, N.J. , 1992. Anthology of poetry including poems on non-domestic subjects that help to combat easy stereotyping of the poetesses' themes.

        Walker, Cheryl. The Nightingale's Burden: Women Poets and American Culture Before 1900. Bloomington, In. , 1983. Influential introduction, with a strong biographical angle, to themes and motifs in 19^th century poetess poetry.

        Watts, Emily Stipes Watts. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin, TX. , 1977. Readable and original, the first book to take seriously the writers of the poetess tradition and to discuss the aesthetics of poetess poetry.