Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Beginning in the 1980s and building in the 1990s, anthologies and critical collections focusing on contemporary women's poetry in Britain have galvanized attention for a diversely inventive but too easily neglected body of writing (see Further Reading, below). While various anthologies spurred by the women's movement and its aftermath introduced many women poets to the reading public, the extraordinarily meager critical discussion of women poets writing at that moment made small headway against a tenaciously held assumption that the great British poetic tradition and the vocation of poetry were best occupied by men. Against the long-standing reluctance to allow women onto this hallowed ground, the poetry of contemporary women has sought to challenge the versions of literary history that ignore their female predecessors and to address, in their own poetry, the ideologies of gender fueling masculine models of tradition, poetry, and the poet. By the mid-1990s, feminist critics, editors, and poets themselves aimed to make a difference through launching projects that would bring contemporary women poets into greater visibility by illuminating elided traditions of women's poetry and through theorizing new ways of thinking about poetry, language, and gender, often from a feminist critical perspective.The lyric remains an important site for discussions of poetic tradition, language, form, ... log in or subscribe to read full text