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Essay on Feminism in Poetry
Women poets in the nineteenth century were certainly encouraged to be merely histrionic. They were sometimes inclined to be merely therapeutic. They were not poets in Heaney's sense. With the exception of Emily Dickinson, none loved language enough to revise her literary conventions radically. Few bound themselves to Heaney's religious principle, and when they did, they wrote thoroughly undistinguished verse. And yet they are interesting, as much because of their attempt to reconcile art with life as for the opposite attempt, to reconcile life with art. Life predominated for most of them, life which demanded of them certain sacrifices leisure, development of their talents, serious attention to revising and perfecting.
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich challenges others to give full support to change that will better conditions for women, and her writings reveal a break from those traditions that have linked women solely with sex and death. The life-orientation of her work is remarkable, and her hopes for changing patterns of behavior and opening up the arts to the full participation of women are consistently apparent. As a feminist and a writer, she attempts not only to shake free from a history that limits woman to a procreative function and unreasonably aligns her with destructiveness and death, but also to find new ways of showing woman as a many-sided aspirant to a full life instead of a scapegoat, memento mori, virgin denying life, or victim to be mutilated, beaten, and murdered for sexual pleasure. She has brought feminism in poetry out of the closet and in so doing has helped strip away the unreason that has hovered over the image of woman in literature and life. Her success is a landmark in the long process of helping free the language so that it can register women's lives and achievements on a scale not realized before. (Cheryl Walker, 1982).................
