This is a silly idea. Why a list of women poets? Is this because I like poetry—or women?

And if I made such a list—let’s say the top 100 poems, wouldn’t half the poems be Emily Dickinson’s?

What would this do for equity and equality?

If there are differences between men and women—and if poetry is humankind’s most delicate and subtle expression, why are there no means to tell whether or not a poem—by its poetry—has been written by a man or a woman?

There is a far greater gulf between a 19th century poet and a 20th century poet or between Emily Dickinson (b. 1830) and her ‘hearts and flowers’ peers than between men and women poets.

How, then, would a list of women poets mean anything at all?

There are two reasons yet standing which might urge one to compose such a list.

Women poets have been neglected—and here is a way to honor them.

The topic or POV chosen for a poem is not insignificant—could this, at least to some degree, define women’s poetry?

The Romantic poets, by confining poetry to certain universal topics—nature, love, subjective feeling—tended to put men and women into the same poetic box, the same hill, the same wood. Was this a good thing? A subtle trick to bring man into woman’s more sensitive and tender orbit and to break down the walls between the two? Perhaps Romanticism knew what it was doing!

As I peruse an old anthology of “Great Poems by American Women” (dutifully following footsteps) I am struck by this: many neglected women poets wrote fantastic stanzas—and yet there are too many flaws in the poem as a whole to be remarkable. Emily Dickinson was wise, I think, to make her poems brief—genius often comes in short bursts—brevity is no reason to doubt the genius. I would hate to see beautiful stanzas by forgotten poets languish, so perhaps the best thing is to highlight greatness wherever I find it, and not worry about the “greatest poems.”

Many forgotten sisters were as good as Dickinson—but in stanzas alone. And women, especially in the 19th century, also wrote many great but slightly imperfect poems.

I will plunge forward, then, at random, and collect a few lights before they fade.

I think I will begin with Sara Teasdale (b. 1884) who is not entirely neglected, but does not enjoy real fame. It might be because she does not have a striking biography. Certainly very few are talking about Sarah Teasdale. You can tell us of your Sappho or Emily Dickinson, but look at these two poems by Teasdale. Are they not moving in the extreme?

The Kiss

I hoped that he would love me,
And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
That cannot reach the south.

For though I know he loves me,
To-night my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
As all the dreams I had.

I Shall Not Care

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Though you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace as leafy trees are peaceful,
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

“I Shall Not Care” represents perhaps the highest perfection of the art. The intention fits the result, and as we dreamily fall towards the result rhythmic beauty abounds.

Christina Rossetti, a wonderful 19th century poet from England, has a poem similar in theme to “I Shall Not Care” and it is very beautiful. It would surely make the list, as well. My guess is that three quarters of the list would be 19th century poets; women poets (especially in America) dominated the 19th century. I wonder why?

The first stanza of Sarah Teasdale’s “The Kiss” lacks a subtle rhythm and the transition from I was ‘kissed on the mouth’ to ‘I am a stricken bird’ feels a bit jarring but the poet is saying a great deal in 8 lines and the poem as a whole succeeds wonderfully, I think. “As all the dreams I had” says so much.

The following poem of two stanzas by Charlotte Perkins Gilman has a much wider sweep; it does not belong to the canon but perhaps it should:

A Common Inference

A night: mysterious, tender, quiet, deep;
Heavy with flowers; full of life asleep;
Thrilling with insect voices; thick with stars;
No cloud between the dewdrops and red Mars;
The small earth whirling softly on her way,
The moonbeams and the waterfalls at play;
A million million worlds that move in peace,
A million mighty laws that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, hidden by small weeds,
Rich with eggs, slaves, and store of millet seeds.
        They sleep beneath the sod
             And trust in God.

A day: all glorious, royal, blazing bright;
Heavy with flowers; full of life and light;
Great fields of corn and sunshine; courteous trees;
Snow-sainted mountains; earth-embracing seas;
Wide golden deserts; slender silver streams;
Clear rainbows where the tossing fountain gleams;
And everywhere, in happiness and peace,
A million forms of life that never cease;
And one small ant-heap, crushed by passing tread,
Hath scarce enough alive to mourn the dead!
        They shriek beneath the sod,
            “There is no God!”

There are millions of poets who have never written a work as fully realized as “A Common Inference” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her poetry in general is spoiled by an inclination for the didactic—but this poem should be high on any list.

We might as well get right to this and print the following without further ado as perhaps the greatest sonnet ever written:

Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

The author is Edna Millay, who has a gossipy biography, but wrote many selfless and timeless poems.

America really was given its song by women. Poe dedicated his Poems 1845 to Elizabeth Barrett. Once the era of Byron was over, the women took over poetry. Julia Ward Howe (b. 1819) wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

How many know that “America the Beautiful” was written by a woman? Here is the final stanza of the poem by Katherine Lee Bates (b. 1859):

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

And this, too, was written by a woman:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Emma Lazarus (b. 1849) joins the company of women who gave us soaring rhetoric—the highest pinnacle of sublime expression actually belongs to women.

“The New Colossus” and “Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare” are similar; both, strangely and magnificently, recall Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert”).

It is no exaggeration to say that women poets dominated the late 19th century and early 20th centuries to such an extent that the Pound/Williams “revolution” nearly obliterated the stunning decades of women’s lyric accomplishment. Any success which that “revolution” may have had depended a great deal on making women feel ashamed that their glory was merely an imitation of Shelley, Thomas Moore, Byron and Poe.

Two things had to happen at once. Pound and Williams had to gain readers for themselves (obviously) but those readers first needed to be convinced that Shelley, Byron, and Poe were less than satisfactory. TS Eliot (loyally ran interference for Pound—who introduced Eliot to poetry society) viciously trashed Shelley and Poe (the melancholy Eliot possessed an iron fist). Eliot was the smoother and more talented enforcer of Pound’s rather crackpot ambitions.

The women poets of Pound’s day (and somewhat earlier) are forgotten—or dismissed as hopelessly sentimental—which if you read their best work is absolutely not true, even if we insist that any kind of sentiment is always bad. Marianne Moore was the one prominent, praised, female in the Modernist men’s club, and she wrote explicitly against the beautiful poetry which elevated her sisters:

“You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability…” opens Moore’s odd poem, “Roses Only,” and she continues without irony in a prose lecture, ending, “Your thorns are the best part of you.” O mind of ice! She belonged to the Eliot/Williams/Pound clique, and one can see why. Ted Hughes reported that Moore did not hide the fact that she preferred him to Sylvia. Why am I not surprised? Plath’s “Daddy” would of course be on the list, as well as a poem or two by Sexton, who was just as good as Plath. I find Moore insufferable and she would not make my list. Bishop, anointed by Moore, I’m told, would make the list with “The Fishhouses.” That description of the cold water!

In Poe’s lecture, popular in its day, finally published as “The Poetic Principle,” in which Poe famously warns against both the “long poem” and the “didactic poem,” the first poem the Virginian quotes for praise is by Shelley; Poe also quotes approvingly Thomas Moore, Byron, and Tennyson.

One can see how mainstream poetry criticism once judged poetry—simply by quoting Poe’s “Poetic Principle:”

“The rhythmical flow, here, is even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious.”

“The versification, although carrying the fanciful to the very verge of the fantastic, is nevertheless admirably adapted to the wild insanity which is the thesis of the poem.”

Sara Teasdale’s “I Shall Not Care” exemplifies the kind of poem Poe praised—he was especially keen on contrast: for instance, between the happy, oblivious, life just above the grave and the grave. Teasdale’s “though you should lean above me broken-hearted,/I shall not care” aches with the moral drama Poe loved.

The Pound/Williams revolution had to get rid of all of this. With a manifesto or two, they did. Flowery doggerel fell without a fight. The best of the rest is barely hanging on.

Let’s quote the first stanza of Mary Ashley Townsend’s “Creed,” which goes on for seven uneven stanzas. This is glorious:

I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids when I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And, from its exile in the isles of death,
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

I said Emily Dickinson chose well to make her poems brief. 19th century poets who composed musically took risks—the smallest metrical lapses can ruin poems committed to formalist and musical strategies, and the longer your poem is, the more it has a chance of being ruined by mistakes, even subtle ones—it’s the difference between a long foul ball and a home run.

But Dickinson embraced more than brevity. Unity exists in Dickinson, too.

Harriet Monroe (b. 1860) has a brief poem:

A Farewell

Good-by: nay, do not grieve that it is over—
The perfect hour;
That the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover,
Flits from the flower.

Grieve not,—it is the law. Love will be flying—
Yea, love and all.
Glad was the living; blessed be the dying!
Let the leaves fall.

This is a compressed lyric on a melancholy subject but still manages to be wordy and matter-of-fact: “it is the law,” “Let the leaves fall.” To describe a bee with this many words: “the winged joy, sweet honey-loving rover” is a bit much.

“A Farewell” is an accomplished poem. To write a poem of this type may look easy, but it is not.

Harriet Monroe is not known for her poetry, but for founding Poetry magazine and knowing Pound. Gradually the journal Poetry stopped publishing poetry like Teasdale’s. Today the magazine is unreadable.

Now let us look at Dickinson:

I Never Saw A Moor

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

Emily doesn’t waste words—her poem makes Harriet’s poem sound like a lengthy treatise by comparison.

Emily’s poem is mystical and personal—I know nothing, but I know.

Harriet’s poem is impersonal and this makes it weaker; often I hear the “lyric I” faulted—one might as well fault the lyric itself.

Speaking of faulting the lyric itself, the Modernist revolution of WC Williams and Ezra Pound demanded that hard, impersonal, thing-ism replace Romantic sentimentality—banished forever was the German Romantic poet Goethe’s “Eternal Feminine.” Song, feeling, and beauty had to go.

A poet is always looking for irony to elevate simple passion and sentiment—it’s a common sense strategy for all writers. Only the most reckless, French Revolution radical, in a manic frenzy and bleeding from the eyes, would eliminate passion and sentiment from the process itself, since feeling is the very ground of all human expression. Once thing-ism becomes the decree, anything associated with feeling must be cast aside; once feeling is banished, hundreds of poetic attributes associated with feeling are (passionately!) banished, as well.

But of course feeling was not banished forever. How can it be? At the very worst, the Pound/Williams revolution and its various obscure camp followers was only a corrective, a turning away from the excesses of Romantic rhyme and sentimentality. This is how it was, and still, is generally seen. The fact is, Williams and Pound as poets themselves are not very remarkable and their revolution was really not influential except that it provided license to a host of bad prose poets. 20th century poets succeeded in spite of Pound and Williams (and M. Moore) and this is the truth. We need not trouble ourselves over Pound and Williams.

There was one great drawback of High Modernism, however:—for poetry, especially—it discouraged the Romantic, formalist template, which was never, in itself a bad thing. Poetry can expand without murdering; if metrical skill is not encouraged and admired, what happens to it? As a skill not easily attained in the first place, it begins to disappear. And those not skillful at all rush in to be crowned as the poet involved in a different kind of difficulty, one that puts off readers—yet pleases certain critics of questionable talent defined by large ambition and their friendships—with these same less than talented poets.

Poetry certainly did embrace personal feelings even as the 20th century, beating back Romanticism in a fashionable fit, went on. If you can’t talk in rhyme, like a Wordsworth or a Byron, if you aren’t that one in a million Millay or Frost who has the talent to talk in rhyme, well then of course you start expressing yourself passionately in prose. When metrical skill finally stopped being a pre-requisite in the late 20th century, the entire scene began to fill up with bad rhyming poets, really difficult prose poets and Billy Collins. This was probably worse than the 19th century which had good rhyming poems, bad rhyming poems, and good prose—which people were generally wary of calling poetry.

But it’s no use in crying over spilled milk. Poets are ultimately responsible for themselves.

Let me copy “The Drowned Mariner” by Elizabeth Oakes-Smith (b.1806)

A MARINER sat on the shrouds one night;
    The wind was piping free;
Now bright, now dimmed was the moon-light pale,
And the phosphor gleamed in the wake of the whale,
    As he floundered in the sea;        
The scud was flying athwart the sky,
The gathering winds went whistling by,
And the wave as it towered, then fell in spray,
Looked an emerald wall in the moonlight ray.

The mariner swayed and rocked on the mast,        
    But the tumult pleased him well;
Down the yawning wave his eye he cast,
And the monsters watched as they hurried past
    Or lightly rose and fell;
For their broad, damp fins were under the tide,      
And they lashed as they passed the vessel’ s side,
And their filmy eyes, all huge and grim,
Glared fiercely up, and they glared at him.

Now freshens the gale, and the brave ship goes
    Like an uncurbed steed along;        
A sheet of flame is the spray she throws,
As her gallant prow the water ploughs,
    But the ship is fleet and strong:
The topsails are reefed and the sails are furled,
And onward she sweeps o’ er the watery world,        
And dippeth her spars in the surging flood;
But there came no chill to the mariner’ s blood.

Wildly she rocks, but he swingeth at ease,
    And holds him by the shroud;
And as she careens to the crowding breeze,        
The gaping deep the mariner sees,
    And the surging heareth loud.
Was that a face, looking up at him,
With its pallid cheek and its cold eyes dim?
Did it beckon him down? did it call his name?        
Now rolleth the ship the way whence it came.

The mariner looked, and he saw with dread
    A face he knew too well;
And the cold eyes glared, the eyes of the dead,
And its long hair out on the wave was spread.        
    Was there a tale to tell?
The stout ship rocked with a reeling speed,
And the mariner groaned, as well he need;
For, ever, down as she plunged on her side,
The dead face gleamed from the briny tide.        

Bethink thee, mariner, well, of the past,—
    A voice calls loud for thee:—
There’ s a stifled prayer, the first, the last;—
The plunging ship on her beam is cast,—
    Oh, where shall thy burial be?        
Bethink thee of oaths that were lightly spoken,
Bethink thee of vows that were lightly broken,
Bethink thee of all that is dear to thee,
For thou art alone on the raging sea:

Alone in the dark, alone on the wave,        
    To buffet the storm alone,
To struggle aghast at thy watery grave,
To struggle and feel there is none to save,—
    God shield thee, helpless one!
The stout limbs yield, for their strength is past,        
The trembling hands on the deep are cast,
The white brow gleams a moment more,
Then slowly sinks—the struggle is o’ er.

Down, down where the storm is hushed to sleep,
    Where the sea its dirge shall swell,        
Where the amber drops for thee shall weep,
And the rose-lipped shell her music keep,
    There thou shalt slumber well.
The gem and the pearl lie heaped at thy side,
They fell from the neck of the beautiful bride,        
From the strong man’s hand, from the maiden’ s brow,
As they slowly sunk to the wave below.

A peopled home is the ocean bed;
    The mother and child are there;
The fervent youth and the hoary head,        
The maid, with her floating locks outspread,
    The babe with its silken hair;
As the water moveth they lightly sway,
And the tranquil lights on their features play;
And there is each cherished and beautiful form,      
Away from decay, and away from the storm.

Elizabeth Oakes-Smith was popular in her day and also lectured and wrote plays. She made the claim after Poe’s death that his death was due to a physical assault, a claim which history has mostly ignored.

“The Drowned Mariner” has the high feeling and passion which Williams and Pound sought to eliminate—but this 20th century poem by Marilyn Chin also has strong feelings, and of a more personal nature:

How I Got That Name

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g
of “becoming.”  Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paperson
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse—for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”
She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot”
for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die
in sublime ignorance, flanked
by loving children and the “kitchen deity.”
While my father dithers,
a tomcat in Hong Kong trash—
a gambler, a petty thug,
who bought a chain of chopsuey joints
in Piss River, Oregon,
with bootlegged Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity given
his nice, devout daughters
and his bright, industrious sons
as if filial piety were the standard
by which all earthly men are measured.

*

Oh, how trustworthy our daughters,
how thrifty our sons!
How we’ve managed to fool the experts
in education, statistic and demography—
We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the “Model Minority” is a tease.
We know you are watching now,
so we refuse to give you any!
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!
The further west we go, we’ll hit east;
the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China.
History has turned its stomach
on a black polluted beach—
where life doesn’t hinge
on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover
in the final episode of “Santa Barbara”
will lean over a scented candle
and call us a “bitch.”
Oh God, where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources!

*

Then, one redolent spring morning
the Great Patriarch Chin
peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge
Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad, brutish one
may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite—
“not quite boiled, not quite cooked,”
a plump pomfret simmering in my juices—
too listless to fight for my people’s destiny.
“To kill without resistance is not slaughter”
says the proverb.  So, I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.

*

So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch”
and the brooding Suilin Fong,
daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous,
sister of a dozen, cousin of a million,
survived by everybody and forgotten by all.
She was neither black nor white,
neither cherished nor vanquished,
just another squatter in her own bamboo grove
minding her poetry—
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe,
nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed!  Solid as wood, happily
a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized
by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away!

Can we find any meeting point between these two poems, “The Drowned Mariner” and “How I Got That Name?” One flies downward on the wings of a visionary dream, the other flies outward by way of reference, autobiography, and history. Both use real life (a horrific shipwreck tragedy impacted Oakes-Smith personally)—no one ever said Romanticism was not real; it just sounds to modern ears more removed from reality. Is this merely a matter of taste and fashion? This must be the common sense view—and since the Modern defines Romanticism as lacking common sense (how can we take the swooning music of Shelley seriously? etc) the Modern is forced to admit: yes, it is just a matter of taste and is trapped in the long arc with Romanticism forever.