1 - Introduction

Summary

The best women’s poetry may be still unrecognised if, as I suspect, we have not yet understood how to read it.

(Germaine Greer, 2001)

During the last two decades of the twentieth century, three inter-dependent questions evolved: who are the women poets? What is the persona of the woman poet? What is the aesthetic, that is, the distinctive ‘voice’, of women’s poetry? In this Introduction, I briefly summarise where these concepts have taken scholars, critics and readers; I then attend to Greer’s above challenge that Alice Entwistle and I cited in the Afterword to A History of Twentieth-Century British Women’s Poetry (2005) and that stimulates this volume: how do we talk meaningfully about poetry by women? In other words, how do we find a vocabulary that can distinguish and evaluate, that frames illuminating connections between poets and that neither ignores gender not reduces a poem to merely a gendered artefact? How do we conserve the century’s canons of poets, not simply by a roll-call of names but by identifiable practices that do not just keep pace with but also set the pace for critical and literary studies? The approaches that follow pertain to the selected poets in each chapter and are transferable to their predecessors, contemporaries and successors across national boundaries.