outline_us_lit

acial differences have shaped theirwork. Among distinguished womenpoets are Amy Clampitt, Rita Dove,Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, CarolynKizer, Maxine Kumin, DeniseLevertov, Audre Lorde, GjertrudSchnackenberg, May Swenson, andMona Van Duyn.Before the 1960s, most womenpoets had adhered to an androgynousideal, believing that gendermade no difference in artistic excellence.This gender-blind positionwas, in effect, an early form of feminismthat allowed women to arguefor equal rights. By the late l960s,American women — many active inthe civil rights struggle and protestsagainst the Vietnam conflict, orinfluenced by the counterculture— had begun to recognize theirown marginalization. Betty Friedan’soutspoken The Feminine Mystique(1963), published in the year SylviaPlath committed suicide, decriedwomen’s low status. Another landmarkbook, Kate Millett’s SexualPolitics (1969), made a case thatmale writings revealed a pervasivemisogyny, or contempt for women.In the l970s, a second wave offeminist criticism emerged followingthe founding of the NationalOrganization for Women (NOW) inl966. Elaine Showalter’s A Literatureof Their Own (1977) identified amajor tradition of British andAmerican women authors. SandraGilbert and Susan Gubar’s TheMadwoman in the Attic (l979)traced misogyny in English classics,exploring its impact on works bywomen, such as Charlotte Brontë’sNIKKI GIOVANNIPhoto © Nancy CramptonJane Eyre. In that novel, a wife is drivenmad by her husband’s ill treatmentand is imprisoned in theattic; Gilbert and Gubar comparewomen’s muffled voices inliterature to this suppressed femalefigure.Feminist critics of the secondwave challenged the accepted canonof great works on the basis that aestheticstandards were not timelessand universal but rather arbitrary,culture bound, and patriarchal.Feminism became in the 1970s a drivingforce for equal rights, not onlyin literature but in the larger cultureas well. Gilbert and Gubar’s TheNorton Anthology of Literature byWomen (1985) facilitated the studyof women’s literature, and awomen’s tradition came into focus.Other influential woman poetsbefore Sylvia Plath and Anne Sextoninclude Amy Lowell (1874-1925),whose works have great sensuousbeauty. She edited influential Imagistanthologies and introduced modernFrench poetry and Chinese poetry intranslation to the English-speakingliterary world. Her work celebratedlove, longing, and the spiritualaspect of human and natural beauty.H.D. (1886-1961), a friend of EzraPound and William Carlos Williamswho had been psychoanalyzed bySigmund Freud, wrote crystallinepoems inspired by nature and by theGreek classics and experimentaldrama. Her mystical poetry celebratesgoddesses. The contributionsof Lowell and H.D., and thoseof other women poets of the early20th century such as Edna St.90