Gendering Poetry: Contemporary Women and Men Poets

Offering a new approach to reading poetry, this book combines discussion of the subjective elements of interpretation with a critically rigorous attention to style and technique. This system is introduced by examining gender in the writing of poets, both men and women, in Britain today, and by providing close readings of works from the best of them, including Ted Hughes, Grace Nichols, Carol Ann Duffy, and Jo Shapcott. Included are a survey of feminist critics in Britain and North America, discussions of several of the most famous anthologies of women's poetry, and explanations for why women poets are often ignored in mainstream critical studies of poetry. Critiques of power relations in the contemporary poetry scene and the influence of English poetic tradition in contemporary literary aesthetics are offered. Developing the thesis that the lyric voice is intransigently gendered, a controversial argument is made that the poems in Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters demonstrate Hughes' preoccupation not with Sylvia Plath, but with a masculine rivalry.