Preface

Summary

The women poets who have graced our last century with work of nervy, graceful, ragged, lyrical, stunning, and word-ful wonder are no conforming group, nor can they be easily pegged or pinned down or silenced or ignored. The poetical means through which twentieth-century American women have explored relationships to language, society, history, aesthetics, and the material conditions of life constitute an aesthetic bounty and a cultural labor remarkable in its diversity. And, until the advent of contemporary feminist scholarship's interventions and recoveries, these poetical means have often been met, across the century, with diminishment, indifference, obfuscation, or tokenism within standard literary and critical histories. This collection of essays joins ongoing projects bringing poetry by women into greater visibility to not only situate this work within the century's poetical histories but to reconsider how those histories are revised or altered when women – and their often gender-conscious poetics – are more fully a part of the picture. Adopting the critical stance that maintains a separate attention upon women poets, their poetic connections to one another, and their poetical developments, these essays further insist upon the significance of moving beyond and unsettling “the picture” by reading outside the frames of literary histories we have inherited, most often constructed around (and by) the work of men. Resituating our critical vision to focus on women allows us to strategically explore the poetic histories their work creates and to enrich broader understandings of twentieth-century American poetry.

A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry embraces the concept of history as multiple and layered, maintaining a keen awareness of the impossibility of a singular, comprehensive history of such poetic activity on the part of women writing between 1900 and 2000. Collectively, the twenty-four scholars contributing to this volume cover a wide swath of ground in charting the century's poetry by women, and each chapter's slice of history helps make visible the integral and vital importance of women's poetic activity to the development of American poetry in the modern and contemporary eras. New material, new readings, new connections, and new frameworks are brought together in an astonishing range of critical investigations in each chapter. Gaps remain, in part for the reasons that affect any such collection: choices must be made, space must be limited, contributors must be gathered, and the scholarship must materialize.