- 6 x 9.
- 288pp.
- Paper
- 1985
- Available
- 978-0-472-08061-8
Add to Cart
- $22.95 U.S.
This collection of sixteen essays helps bring light to questions central to feminist criticism of poetry: How have women achieved distinction as poets in a tradition scarce in exemplary women? How does their poetry derive from specifically female experience in our polarized gender system?
Coming to Light considers the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Lucille Clifton, H.D., Denise Levertov, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, and Native American poets, as well as the broad relationship of women poets to American literary tradition.
“An extremely important book, both in illuminating feminist poetics and in providing a historical overview of women poets in the 20th century – from Mina Loy’s revolutionary erotic free verse to Anne Sexton’s ironic restructuring of myth in her Transformations… A feast of information and insight.”
– Choice
Contents
Prologue: Coming to Light
Diane Wood Middlebrook 1
The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking
Alicia Ostriker 10
The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy
Carolyn Burke 37
To Have the Winning Language: Texts and Contexts of Gertrude Stein
Ulla E. Dydo 58
H.D.: Hilda in Egypt
Albert Gelpi 74
"My Scourge, My Sister": Louise Bogan's Muse
Mary DeShazer 92
Trial Balances: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore
David Kalstone 105
At Home with Loss: Elizabeth Bishop and the American Sublime
Joanne Feit Diehl 123
Poetry and Political Experience: Denise Levertov
John Felstiner 138
In Yeats's House: The Death and Resurrection of Sylvia Plath
Sandra M. Gilbert 145
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Related Poems
Sylvia Plath's Baby Book
Barbara Antonina Clarke Mossberg 182
"I Tapped My Own Head": The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton
Diane Wood Middlebrook 195
Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times
Andrea Benton Rushing 214
Answering the Deer: Genocide and Continuance in American Indian Women's Poetry
Paula Gunn Allen 223
"I Go where I Love": An Intertextual Study of H.D. and Adrienne Rich
Susan Stanford Friedman 233
Epilogue: Philomela's Loom
Patricia Klindienst Joplin 254
Contributors 269