The Penguin Book of Women Poets

...Symonds' statement in his Greek Poets (1873) that, "Among the ancients Sappho enjoyed a unique renown...

...Thus we are told in regard to Emily Dickinson that, "In spite of encouragement and opportunity, she refused to publish more than a few poems during her lifetime," while the editors' salute to Sylvia Plath's success-"Her first book, Colossus, was highly praised, but it was the second, Ariel, published after her death, that established her reputation as a major poet"-merely serves to remind us that no male poet of our time has reaped such a harvest of fame from so slender a talent...

...These pejorative connotations are the reason, say the editors, why a number of contemporary women poets would not allow their work to be included in the Penguin anthology...

...Alas, the editors seem never to have considered the possibility that the women who turned them down may not have wished to have had their work exploited by political myth-makers...

...The editors of the anthology begin their effort to turn poetry into a form of feminist politics with a brief-and atrociously written-Preface, in which they insist that although every poet, male as well as female, is conditioned by national history and cultural milieu, women poets across the centuries have been bound together in a special way by their endless struggle for acceptance as artists...

...It is no accident, the editors continue, that the proud title of "poet" has always had "an implicit masculine gender," whereas "poetess," connoting "sentimentality and dilettantism," is a word reserved for women...

...The climactic lines of the poem-"I offer him the magic of my thighs/He is caught in the spell" -are very much in the poetic vein of Pound himself...

...THE PENGUIN BOOK OF WOMEN POETS Edited by Carol Cosman, Joan Keefe, and Kathleen Weaver / Viking Press/Penguin Books / $15.00 Kenneth S. Lynn To William Stafford, author of Writing the Australian Crawl, the experience of reading The Penguin Book of Women Poets was a real thrill...

...The poems repeatedly speak of love and death, of seasonal changes, and of the beauties of landscape and seascape, but the voice of artistic complaint is rarely heard...

...Some critics say that most of the poetry of the world that is not widely known is probably not very good...

...It is because the world has always discriminated against women poets...

...masculine gender, either in common usage or in the lexicons...

...2) in the 1970s, the word "poet" does not have an implicit Kenneth S. Lynn teaches history at Johns Hopkins and is the author of The Dream of Success and Visions of America, among other works...

...The pages began to persuade me: I belonged here, or at least I wanted my nation allied with this one Reading po ems from across 3500 years, from about forty different traditions, and finding the power of feelings in com mon, one does have a new sense of women as a nation, or a United Na tions of an ideal kind...

...Unfortunately, the question of whether the Penguin anthology is full of under-recognized masterpieces or of deservedly forgotten clinkers is impossible to decide with precision because so many of the unfamiliar poems are translations...

...As he explained in a recent issue of Inquiry magazine: "This book from another nation, the wom en, I started to read, holding my head in my hands and staring...

...I myself find a certain weary wisdom in that statement, but to the Penguin editors it is anathema...

...What can be stated with precision, however, is that neither the themes of the poems in the Penguin anthology nor the editorial headnotes which are designed to inform us about their authors offer convincing evidence that the struggle for acceptance as artists has been the common fate of women poets around the world since the beginning of time...

...Even in the late twentieth century, we are informed, "very real barriers-economic, social, and psychological-still stand in the way of the production of art by women and the full acceptance of the woman artist...

...This sap-headed response at least manages to make explicit the deplorable purposes to which the Penguin anthology is dedicated...

...whether they also catch the spirit of the ancient and anonymous woman who wrote the poem is anybody's guess...

...She was called 'the poetess,' as Homer was called 'the poet.'" It is also worth noting that in spite of the fact that the decision to compile the Penguin anthology sprang out of a study of women poets conducted "in association with the Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley,'' the editors fail to address the question of whether their conception of "poetess" as a smear word also applies to the Italian "poetessa, " the Spanish "poetisa, " and the French "poetesse...

...3) while "poetess'' was heavily used in the Victorian era and sometimes carried an overtone of condescension, many critics of the period thought of the term as a high compliment, a good example being J.A...

...As for the assertion that "poetess" has been used as a smear word which has hounded women poets down the corridors of time, the editors ignore three important facts: 1) The term did not even enter English usage until the sixteenth century...

...If the poems of Hwang Chin-i of 16th-century Korea, or of her Turkish contemporary Mihri Hatun, or of Fadwa Tuquan, who was born in Jordan in 1917, or of Ingrid Jonker of South Africa, who died in 1965, or of the female singers among the nomadic Pashtoons in 20th-century Afghanistan, or of the Owl Woman of the Papago Indians in the post-Civil War American West, do not live in the minds of readers around the world, it is not because their work is not important...

...What conclusion, for instance, can we reach about the aesthetic merit of an Egyptian love poem, written more than a thousand years before Christ, which comes to us via Ezra Pound's and Noel Stock's translation of an Italian translation by Boris de Rachewiltz of the hieroglyphic text...

...As for the headnotes, they are so inadequate in every respect that they do not tell us much about anything, but to the extent that they touch upon the question of discrimination against women artists, they tend more to undercut the argument advanced in the Preface than to support it...

...Did they avoid this question, one wonders, because they knew that investigation of it would embarrass their myth-making...