American Women Poets (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

243 Pages·2011·0.92 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
African-American Gwendolyn Brooks Octavio Paz
Poets: Volume 1 Hans Christian Paul Auster
African-American Andersen Philip Roth
Poets: Volume 2 Henry David Th oreau Ralph Ellison
Aldous Huxley Herman Melville Ralph Waldo Emerson
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Hermann Hesse Ray Bradbury
Alice Munro H.G. Wells Richard Wright
Alice Walker Hispanic-American Robert Browning
American Women Writers Robert Frost
Poets Homer Robert Hayden
Amy Tan Honoré de Balzac Robert Louis
Anton Chekhov Jamaica Kincaid Stevenson
Arthur Miller James Joyce Th e Romantic Poets
Asian-American Jane Austen Salman Rushdie
Writers Jay Wright Samuel Taylor
August Wilson J.D. Salinger Coleridge
Th e Bible Jean-Paul Sartre Stephen Crane
Th e Brontës John Donne and the Stephen King
Carson McCullers Metaphysical Poets Sylvia Plath
Charles Dickens John Irving Tennessee Williams
Christopher Marlowe John Keats Th omas Hardy
Contemporary Poets John Milton Th omas Pynchon
Cormac McCarthy John Steinbeck Tom Wolfe
C.S. Lewis José Saramago Toni Morrison
Dante Aligheri Joseph Conrad Tony Kushner
David Mamet J.R.R. Tolkien Truman Capote
Derek Walcott Julio Cortázar Twentieth-Century
Don DeLillo Kate Chopin British Poets
Doris Lessing Kurt Vonnegut Walt Whitman
Edgar Allan Poe Langston Hughes W.E.B. Du Bois
Émile Zola Leo Tolstoy William Blake
Emily Dickinson Marcel Proust William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway Margaret Atwood William Gaddis
Eudora Welty Mark Twain William Shakespeare:
Eugene O’Neill Mary Wollstonecraft Comedies
F. Scott Fitzgerald Shelley William Shakespeare:
Flannery O’Connor Maya Angelou Histories
Franz Kafka Miguel de Cervantes William Shakespeare:
Gabriel García Milan Kundera Romances
Márquez Nathaniel Hawthorne William Shakespeare:
Geoff rey Chaucer Native American Tragedies
George Orwell Writers William Wordsworth
G.K. Chesterton Norman Mailer Zora Neale Hurston
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
AMERICAN
WOMEN POETS
New Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: American Women Poets—New Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Infobase Learning
Introduction © 2011 by Harold Bloom
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American women poets / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
— New ed.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60413-991-4
ISBN 978-1-4381-3828-2 (e-book)
1. American poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Women and
literature—United States—History—20th century. 3. American poetry—20th
century—History and criticism. 4. Women in literature. I. Bloom, Harold.
PS151.A44 2011
811.009'9287—dc23
2011025761
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Contributing editor: Pamela Loos
Cover designed by Alicia Post
Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY
Cover printed by Yurchak Printing, Landisville PA
Book printed and bound by Yurchak Printing, Landisville PA
Date printed: March 2011
Printed in the United States of America
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Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity 3
Henry Taylor
“Never Having Had You, I Cannot Let You Go”:
Sharon Olds’s Poems of a
Father–Daughter Relationship 25
Brian Dillon
Rita Dove: Identity Markers 39
Helen Vendler
New Dreaming: Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose,
Leslie Marmon Silko 61
Jeanne Perreault
Louise Glück’s Nine Lives 79
James Longenbach
And This Poem Recognizes That:
Embracing Contrarieties in
the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni 93
Virginia C. Fowler
vi Contents
Maya Angelou on the Inaugural Stage 117
Zofia Burr
Black Names in White Space:
Lucille Clifton’s South 135
Hilary Holladay
Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath,
and the Allure of Incest 149
Gale Swiontkowski
Drifting in the Weeds of Heaven:
Mary Oliver and the Poetics
of the Immeasurable 175
Rose Lucas
Adrienne Rich’s Anti-Confessional Poetics 191
Jane Hedley
Chronology 219
Contributors 229
Bibliography 231
Acknowledgments 235
Index 237
Editor’s Note
My introduction cites some of the defining women poets leading up to our
current time, and I rely on the authors assembled here to fill in and extend
that legacy. Henry Taylor astutely walks us through the world of Gwendolyn
Brooks’s poetry, followed by Brian Dillon’s appraisal of one of Sharon Olds’s
central preoccupations, the father-daughter relationship.
Helen Vendler richly explores Rita Dove’s rethinking of the lyric poem
in relation to American black history. Jeanne Perreault then sheds some light
on a trio of Native American poets.
Th e poet James Longenbach discusses Louise Glück’s welding form of
and experience in a search for lyrical transformation, after which Virginia C.
Fowler embraces the contrarieties in Nikki Giovanni’s work.
Zofi a Burr visits Maya Angelou on the inaugural stage, followed by Hil-
ary Holladay’s extensive elucidation of the late Lucille Clifton’s southern-
infused poems.
Gale Swiontkowski revisits the incest fantasies haunting the work of
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, followed by Rose Lucas’s assessment of Mary
Oliver’s immeasurable poetics. Th e volume concludes with Jane Hedley’s
interrogation of the confessionalist tensions informing the writings of Adri-
enne Rich.
vii

HAROLD BLOOM
Introduction
A
tradition of poets that includes Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore,
and Elizabeth Bishop has a palpable distinction, but it may be too soon to
speak or write of a canon of “American women poets.” The poets studied in
this volume are not chosen arbitrarily, yet consideration of the book’s length
as well as the poets’ canonical probability have entered into my selection.
But the poets studied here do seem a central grouping, and the canonical
process is always an ongoing one anyway. Future editions of this volume may
be relied on to correct emphases and clarify choices.
Two distinguished critics of literature by women, Sandra M. Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, have taught us to speak of “the tradition in English,” yet with
characteristic fairness they quote the great poet Elizabeth Bishop’s denial of
such a tradition:
Undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the making of
any art, but art is art, and to separate writings, paintings, musical
compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them
that are not art.
Bishop, a subtle intellect, makes clear that gender is a source of values in
the genesis of art but asserts that such values are not in themselves aesthetic.
Th ough my inclination is to agree with her, I am wary of arguing against the
tendency of origins to turn into ends or aims in the genealogy of imagination.
Since I myself am frequently misunderstood on this point by feminist crit-
ics (though never, I am happy to say, by Gilbert and Gubar), I have a certain
desire to illuminate the matter. Most Western poetry has been what Gertrude
1
2 Harold Bloom
Stein called “patriarchal poetry,” and most Western criticism necessarily has
been patriarchal also. If Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Dr. Sigmund Freud are to be considered patriarchal, then I as
their ephebe presumably must be patriarchal also. So be it. But such a color-
ing or troping of critical stance is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Most
strong Western poets, for whatever reasons, have been male: Homer and the
Yahwist, presumably, and certainly Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, on through
Dante, Petrarch, and Chaucer to Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Word-
sworth, Goethe, Shelley, Leopardi, Hugo, Whitman, Baudelaire, Browning,
Yeats, Rilke, Stevens, and so many more. To this day, the only woman poet
in English of that stature is Dickinson. Not every poet studied in this vol-
ume seems to me of proven achievement; I have grave reservations about
Plath and one or two others. However, there are values also, in nearly all the
others, that seem to me rather diff erent from the qualities of their strongest
male contemporaries, and some of those diff erences do ensue from a vision,
an experiential and rhetorical stance, that has its origin in sexual diff erence.
To locate the diff erences in stance seems to me the admirable enterprise of
the best feminist literary criticism. Th at polemic and ideology should be so
overt in much feminist literary criticism is understandable, and unfortunately
aesthetic considerations sometimes are submerged in political and program-
matic designs, but nothing is got for nothing, and I foresee that the emphases
of feminist criticism will be modifi ed by the success of that criticism. Th ough
I attempt to isolate diff erences in vision from male precursors in regarding
the poets included in this volume, I am aware that I am a patriarchal critic,
and I cannot attempt to mask my own sense of the dilemmas confronted by
women poets and poetry.