Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

"inspiration" associated with canonized
European male authors like Wordsworth is
doubly subverted: Hull not only claims the
tradition for black women, but posits a
communal voice for Clifton and Kendrick,
thus replacing the Romantic model of the
lonely but spritually superior solitary male
poet with a matriarchy in which one woman's
voice resonates not only with her
immediate personal past, but with the
untold stories of generations of women
who for various reasons were unable to
record in writing the details of their lives.
Other essays such as Margaret Homans'
"The Powers of Powerlessness: The
Courtships of Elizabeth Barrett and Queen
Victoria" concentrate not so much on
evolving a feminist reading of a given text,
but rather on what it means to be a woman
poet. Homans refers to the "pose of abject
humility" evident on both sides of the
Barrett/Browning correspondence, pointing
out that "this apparently gender-neutral
strategy has differing resonances for a
man's and for a woman writer's authority
in Victorian England"; for Browning, selfdeprecation
may be a pose, but for Barrett
it is all too congruous with her role as
"lady" (that is, lesser) poet. Homans goes
on to link Barrett's downplaying of her
powers as poet to Queen Victoria's undermining
of certain aspects of her authority
as monarch; according to Homans, both
women are allowed to keep their power
only by adopting a stance of powerlessness.
A woman in a position of power is thus
never allowed to forget her gender; she is
always woman first, and poet or monarch
second.
What emerges from Feminist Measures is
a woman's literary history: from Aemilia
Lanyer down through Elizabeth Barrett
Browning and Emily Dickinson to
Adrienne Rich, Marilyn Hacker and Alice
Fulton, women have been writing poetry
which explores what it means to be a
woman, and to be a woman writing. The
various authors represented in the collection
help us to lay claim to this heritage by
providing us with reading strategies which,
while they are by no means tentative, manage
to escape being prescriptive: to break
the critical silence around women's poetry
is only the beginning.
One in the Many
Zailig Pollock
A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet. U Toronto Ρ
$6ο.οο/$25·95
Reviewed by Jon Kertzer
Within the narrow (though generous) confines
of A.M. Klein studies, Zailig Pollock's
A.M. Klein: The Story of the Poet is something
of an event. Over the last decade
Pollock has established himself as the foremost
scholar of Klein's work, and after a
well-annotated parade of notebooks, stories,
essays, editorials, and an authoritative
edition of the poetry, here is a critical study
from the person who should know Klein
best. In his reviews, he has been politely
ruthless in exposing the errors of misinformed
critics, notably Miriam
Waddington and Solomon Spiro, whom he
virtually pickled. He is utterly at home
within Klein's intricate literary world,
indeed more at home than Klein was himself,
since the latter wrote painfully about
his anxiety as a poet exiled from his home.
Such familiarity gives an air of firm authority
to The Story of the Poet, especially when
it deals with biographical facts, chronology,
details of composition, literary models and
mentors, and aspects of Jewish thought or
Yiddishkayt. Even when Pollock admits to
being uncertain, his uncertainty seem
extremely well-founded. To cite one small
example: he observes that the metre of the
last line of "These Northern Stars" requires
that "mazel tov" be pronounced with an
Ashkenazi (eastern European) rather than a
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