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UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREŞTI
FACULTATEA DE LIMBI ŞI LITERATURI STRĂINE
Contemporary British Women Poets
(1950-2005)
Conducător ştiinţific,
Prof. dr. Lidia VIANU
Doctorand,
Elena NISTOR
BUCUREŞTI
2011
CONTENTS
Prologue ...................................................................................................................... 3
1. Theoretical Considerations ................................................................................... 12
1.1. A Definition of Terms ............................................................................... 14
1.1.1. How Contemporary Is ‘Contemporary’? ..................................... 14
1.1.2. ‘What nation ye are’: Britishness vs Englishness ....................... 29
1.1.3. Writing as Women: Female, Feminism, Femininity ................... 36
1.2. Philosophical Background ....................................................................... 43
1.2.1. Structuring ‘indetermanence’: Postmodern Dichotomies ........... 44
1.2.2. Beyond Binary Oppositions ........................................................ 50
1.2.3. The Power of Words: Analytical Variables ................................ 57
1.2.4. Postmodern Reflections on Contemporary British Women’s
Poetry .......................................................................................... 65
2. Impossible Home - Displacement in Contemporary British Poetry ................. 72
2.1. Travelling as Self-revelation ..................................................................... 72
2.1.1. ‘That measure of breaking out…’: Relocations of the Self ........ 72
2.1.2. ‘Dying of homesickness’: Nomadic Destinies ............................ 82
2.2. Metropolitan Tales: Versions of Londonness ........................................... 110
2.2.1. ‘With folded wings’: Hedonism and Prudery ............................. 110
2.2.2. ‘Between heaven and humanity’: Legitimate Urbanites ............. 145
3. Id/Entities: Englishness Revisited ........................................................................ 167
3.1. The English Ego – A Rhetoric of Extreme Privacy .................................. 167
3.1.1. ‘Every-day poets, home-makers’: Domestic Devotions ............. 167
3.1.2. ‘Where are your great works?’: Dialogues on Femininity .......... 196
3.2. England – Past and Present ....................................................................... 215
3.2.1. ‘A tart with no heart’: 20th-Century History ................................ 215
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3.2.2. ‘Our principles’: Poeticians and Politicians ................................ 238
4. Alter(ed) Egoes ...................................................................................................... 261
4.1. The Fortress of Identity – Confessional Poetry ......................................... 261
4.1.1. ‘Why do I have to love you?’: Maladive Addictions .................. 261
4.1.2. ‘Discarded lovers’ vs ‘lasting friends’: Visions of Love ............ 280
4.2. Alienations ................................................................................................ 298
4.2.1. ‘At my wits’ end…’: Madness, the English Malady ................... 298
4.2.2. ‘Always spoiling everybody’s fun’: Alterations of the Body ..... 317
5. Ars Poetica ............................................................................................................. 335
5.1. ‘Released by language’: Core Metaphors in Women’s Poetry ................. 335
5.2. Different Metaphors or Metaphors Differently?: Men cf Women Poetry. 369
Conclusions ................................................................................................................ 404
Epilogue ...................................................................................................................... 417
Annex: About the Women Poets included in the Dissertation .............................. 424
Bibliography .............................................................................................................. 465
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The prologue to my PhD dissertation is an apology for postmodern poetry.
Characterised by speed and compression of time and space, the world of today has
separated people from their spirit: people rarely read poetry in a century so obviously
marked by technological progress. There are various reasons for poetry’s lack of popularity
nowadays and, one way or another, they all converge on the fact that this form of art
requires a particular state of mind as it is a pure act of individual imagination. Compared
with the every-day one which is concrete and has one single meaning, poetry presupposes a
different type of code which activates extremely personal experiences.
Contemporary UK provides an encouraging opposite example: probably as a result
of the suggestive metaphors, real-life topoi and unpretentious language that appeal to
modern readers, poetry has become increasingly popular in the postbellic era. This
socialisation of poetry results from the efforts to popularise literature and writers, poetry
and poets as a matter of making culture accessible to the general public. Desacralisation of
poetry has taken various forms: chapbooks, pamphlets and pocket-sized booklets circulate
largely and have higher appeal as they are inexpensive, easy to carry and read; art galleries
and theatres host poetry events; and tours are often organised across the country with the
aim to revive interest in poetry and create a sense of solidarity and spiritual belonging.
My thesis is a very personal exploration of poetry as a modus vivendi, primarily
based on the data collected from literature (pamphlets, full collections and anthologies as
basic sources) and supported by the previous examination of the domain communicated by
literary critics like Vicky Bertram, Deryn Rees-Jones and Jo Gill. To the self-experiential
knowledge accumulated from the above, I added secondary sources for an in-depth analysis
and understanding of some paradigms of western culture forwarded by Ihab Hassan, Michel
Foucault, Tzvetan Todorov and the French feminists as postmodern theories and
philosophies that can easily accommodate contemporary poetry.
My interpretive-relational approach is mainly persuasive, aiming to argue and
demonstrate the potential feminine-feminist creativity in the UK, with solid evidence from
the topics that connect artistic variables. In this respect, I have selected the poems that best
illustrate the value of poetry written by women, from the viewpoint of either imagery or
diction. With a particular focus on naturalness and authenticity, via the meanings assigned
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by the poets themselves, my project is aimed at decoding what I call the ‘subjective
idealism’ of contemporary poetry written by women.
The main novelty of my dissertation consists in its interactive character, resulting
from direct dialogue with many poets: informal talks, e-mail correspondence, interviews
(some of them published in the International Notebook of Poetry, a yearly literary journal
sponsored by LiterArt XXI, the International Association of Romanian Writers and Artists).
Approaching a topic less studied in Romania, my dissertation proposes an attempt to
identify a gynocentric aesthetic orientation originating in feminine identity and promoted
by a wide range of linguistic strategies that plead for a typically female and feminine
language reflecting not only its essentially biological nature but, especially, each poet’s
cultural differences and personal universes. The variety of discourses and ideologies
existent in contemporary British poetry by women reflects the dynamics of self-creation –
including self-deconstruction and reconstruction – through language since poetic discourse
is a specific way of making and understanding the world, of creating and organising reality,
of communicating in the sense of producing and exchanging meanings.
Given the amplitude of the topic under analysis, it is my convention that the
dissertation should go beyond the year 2005 and extend until 2010. The present-day
feminine-feminist poetic phenomenon in its organic totality requires a permanent update,
and the five additional years mark the publication of several remarkable collections.
Considering the literary value of these recent and very recent collections, I have decided to
include some of them within the thematic chapters of my project. Also taking into account
the substantial body of research, there are inevitable inclusions and exclusions. There are
poets whose work is equally important, but whom I was forced to leave out of – or only
mention briefly in – my study, due to length-imposed restrictions. However, I have every
confidence that their poems will constitute solid material for future research as proof of the
flourishing women’s writing phenomenon in the UK.
The introduction charts a map of thematic interests and formal concerns placed
under the notions of time and place which, in my view, seem to mark the major strands of
contemporary poetry written by women in the UK from the viewpoint of ‘the situatedness
of selfhood.’ The process of self-formation in poetry involves an inevitable sense of time
and place as the ego needs to anchor and identify itself with a reference point: to be located
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is to be bound by temporal and spatial presentness to a certain relevant moment and
territory. Consequently, the poet develops a complex relationship with a place, whether real
or imaginary, and poems arise as perfect acts of self-location, translated as:
- interest in geographic space and historic time, i.e. the realities of the UK in its neo-
Elizabethan era, from imperial power to EU membership through post-colonial isolation.
Over almost 60 years, the reign of Elizabeth II was marked by political, social, ideological
and cultural changes from the dissolution of the British Empire into a multicultural nation
to the terrorist London bombings on July 7th, 2005, followed by the return to Conservatism
and the current challenge of the first coalition in Britain’s modern history (between
Conservatives and Liberal Democrats);
- concern with personal space and time, i.e. the feminine-feminist perception of the
insular world which, even if not always overtly acknowledged, is inevitably political. The
three waves of feminism that marked the 20th century and their theorists (particularly the
French feminists Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva) advocated strategies to
establish a vocal authority in relation to female identity. The newly devised philosophies of
sameness in difference and centrality of the margins have added up to the doctrine of
oppositional doublets, leading to a more acute feeling of self-divisiveness articulated in a
unique, highly emotional mode of expression.
Loss of the stable, homogeneous self is significantly evident in the diversity of
styles, themes and motifs, life experiences and feelings disclosed in poetry. From this
perspective, women’s creativity can be decoded in either impersonal voices telling oblique
stories of light and positivity, middlebrow restraint and typical selflessness, or highly
emotional voices narrating harsh stories of dissent, narrated in darkness and denial.
As poetry appeals to the duality of human nature, understanding the contemporary
poetry phenomenon shaped by women poets in the UK requires an address to the cultural
concepts shaped by doublets. In order to avoid confusion, the first chapter is dedicated to
the theoretical considerations that justify the title of my dissertation and the approaches I
have employed in my demonstration. Thus, the term ‘contemporary’ in the title of my
dissertation, refers to the poetic vista and some of its prominent protagonists during the
period covered by the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, from her Coronation in the early 1950s
to the first decade of the Third Millennium. Chronologically, it refers to the collections,
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anthologies, compilations, books of criticism published since the Fifties until the first
decade of the new Millennium. Apart from this decade-by-decade overview, other
chronological categorisation is possible, with a focus on the literary generations of women
poets belonging to the 20th and 21st centuries and the influence exerted upon them by the
earlier generations. In the 1980s, Jeni Couzyn identified three clearly defined trends in
women writing of the 20th-century poetry scene: Mrs Dedication, best epitomised by
Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, characterised by romantic devotion to a man; Miss Eccentric
Spinster, personified by such poets as Emily Dickinson and Stevie Smith, apparent victims
of an unhappy love affair from which they never recovered; the Mad Girl, prototyped by
Sylvia Plath is the best-known poet belonging to the cases of tormented life and early
suicide. In my opinion, this narrow typologisation regards women poets as direct victims of
male domination; marital conformism, eccentric celibate, mental dislocation are versions of
the same essential repression. It is my assumption now, 25 years later, that Couzyn
appealed to these stereotypes to demonstrate her thesis according to which women poets
had long been ignored, and women poets were generally considered a rather inferior sub-
species of the genus Great Poet.
During my research, I identified a time-and-age criterion that may be applied to the
study of British women poets, as follows:
- predecessors: Maureen Duffy, Karen Gershon, Elma Mitchell, Kathleen Raine;
- transitional writers: Elizabeth Jennings, Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith – with voices
entirely her own, very much commented upon and anthologised in order to emphasise their
distinctive trait of creation;
- luminaries, the widely acclaimed Great Dames of English Letters who are an
inspiration to other contemporary poets: Fleur Adcock, Gillian Clarke, Carol Ann Duffy,
Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein, U.A. Fanthorpe, Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Alice Oswald,
Carol Rumens, Jo Shapcott, Anne Stevenson;
- late-bloomers, less known poets whose talent has already been acknowledged, such
as most of the poets belonging to the Second Light Network group: Connie Bensley,
Maggie Butt, June English, Ruth O’Callaghan, Maggie Sawkins, Hylda Sims, Anne
Stewart;
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- younger generations: Sophie Hannah and Joanna Ezekiel among others, whose
groundbreaking pamphlets and first full collections recommend them as truly gifted poets.
To illustrate the variety of the current poetic phenomenon, I have selected some of
their exemplary poems, masterpieces that work in their own way. In my opinion, these are
self-evidencing examples that may always sparkle in future anthologies owing to their
empathetic subjects and/or strong arguments and imagery – or, on the contrary, intriguing
poems, intention-based exercises in poetic form and/or imagination that serve for the
purpose of my present demonstration.
The great variety of poetry – or rather poetries – is generously fostered by the
binary oppositions advanced by the postmodern theories, allowing a greater freedom of
women’s poetic imagination. One of the oppositional doublets refers to the notions of
Englishness and Britishness. The debate over the terminological (and, consequently, social,
political, and cultural) distinctions regarding the sense of belonging to the archipelago lying
to the West of Europe is not new. In 1941, George Orwell drew attention to the diversity of
British identity as illustrated by the six different names given to the islands: England,
Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the UK, Albion. In later years, his view has been
taken over and documented in favour of the country’s versatility: ‘Britishness’ may stand
for the outer world, the image of the UK to Europe and worldwide, whereas ‘Englishness’
would be a ‘domestic’ face, the image of the islanders about themselves. Polemics on
autonomous national identity are fierce within the borders of the islands as topology and
traditions are more acutely perceived under the pressure of politics: the inhabitants of
northern Great Britain will proudly identify themselves as Scottish, southwesterners will
make obvious their Welsh origin whereas those from the main part of the greater island will
stress their English affiliation.
Given their place of birth or adoption, or cultural affiliation, numerous poets raise
identity questions, and their deeply personal testimonies arise as attempts to recover a
stable sense of selfhood in a sublimated spirit of anglophilia. Some of the poets are urban
while others display chronic displacement, partly justified by a nomadic life. Born from,
and raised on, English soil, numerous women poets are migrants within their own country,
as their biographies illustrate. Similarly, the biographies of the Scottish, Welsh, and
Northern Irish poets show their commitment to continual relocation, depending on personal
8
and professional advance. The contemporary cultural milieu includes other unusual life-
stories of women poets born and raised outside, but educated or residing and working in,
the UK. One of the classic examples was Sylvia Plath, born in the U.S. as daughter of a
German mother and an Austrian father, and resident in London until her death (which is
why both cultures reclaim her creation), an example followed by numerous other
contemporary women poets such as Ruth Fainlight and Anne Stevenson.
Other cultural migrants are fully aware that ‘nationality is a matter of allegiance and
cultural affiliation’, in most cases given by affective attachment: Fleur Adcock (born in
New Zealand), Moniza Alvi (born in Pakistan), Katherine Gallagher (born in Australia),
Maria Jastrzębska (born in Poland), Mimi Khalvati (born in Iran). Issues of affiliation and
uprootedness are also debatable in the discourse of certain women poets whose geographic
location may clearly define them as typically English but whose personal history reveals
them as instances of typical postmodern hybridisation: Patience Agbabi was born in
London to Nigerian parents, Joanna Ezekiel was born in Essex and grew up in Essex and
Kent. Her mother is Jewish of Russian-Polish descent, and her father is from the Bene-
Israeli Jewish community of India; Elaine Feinstein was born in Liverpool of Russian-
Jewish parents; Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Nigerian father and a Scottish
mother, and was subsequently adopted by a Glaswegian couple.
These poetic selves are able to exercise power via the agency of English – the
lingua franca of poetry, the marker of cultural and ideological diversity existing in the UK
nowadays, thus bridging the gap between identity and alterity. In poetry, English transcends
its strictly communicative function which defies the limits of experience, and employs its
vast symbolism to escape the acute divisiveness of personality through the syntagm
proposed by Katherine Gallagher in one of our informal talks: ‘poets writing in English
currently.’ The phrase is generous since it allows the inclusion of talented poets born
overseas who revaluate the sense of national affiliation through the linguistic filter,
summoning the English language to transcend all matters of cultural cringe or alienation
through their access to language – a place where they can test the limits of their creativity,
travelling without restrictions, constraints, and inhibitions. The linguistic factor is thus
deepening the cultural effect of globalisation, under the auspices of the new realities that
9
encourage the dissipation of borders and backgrounds, lifestyles and aesthetics, personal
logicality asserts the importance of subjectivity.
Given the regional restrictions imposed by the term and the fact that numerous poets
were born outside, or live in other areas of, the UK, it is my personal belief that ‘British’ is
a more comprehensive term. Moreover, as my project is devised from an outside,
Continental perspective on the contemporary poetry written by women born and educated,
or currently living and working in the UK, I will make deliberate use of the term ‘British’,
with no intention of simplifying the heterogeneous contemporary identity, either personal
or national, of the artists included in the analysis. Moreover, my approach is further argued
by the concept of ‘Britishness’ as a portmanteau term that allows me to pay due respect to
all the cultures of English expression currently existing in the UK.
Another important opposition is between femininity and feminism, i.e. biological vs
social issues. Both trends draw attention to the philosophical, linguistic and practical
aspects of women’s use of language. The feminine trend supports essentialism according to
which gender and sex are connected and natural; gender stereotypes are the social
expressions of biological truth. Sex means the anatomical differences between male and
female as fundamentally distinct types of being, whereas gender is natural and
differentiates men and women according to sexual characteristics. The other approach,
feminism, is based on social constructionism: if sex is socially determined, its opposite –
gender – is socially constructed. The sense of self includes the sense of gender. Connected
with social experience, gender employs the category of gender relations to create the two
individual types: man and woman.
In the UK, one can recognise a feminine-feminist aesthetic trend forged by the
realities of the Neo-Elizabethan island nation. Given the multitude of creative personalities
and rhetorical devices, poetry written by women provides a vast field of research from the
viewpoint of several essential postmodern philosophies. These epistemological trends
justify and validate the poetry phenomenon that has flourished in postbellic UK: on the one
hand, the French feminism (Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva) – whose
theoretical arguments originate in the Freudian psychoanalysis reinterpreted by Jacques
Lacan and the linguistic deconstructivism promoted by Jacques Derrida – calls in question
both the female subject and its experience; on the other hand, the Anglo-American
10
feminism (Rosalind Coward, Toril Moi, Juliet Mitchell, Elaine Showalter) – based on
Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power and Tzvetan Todorov’s idea of the Self
reinterpreted and redefined through the Other – supports the authority of the unique and
unifying female experience, in search of a homogeneous tradition existing beyond sexual
differentiation.
Further on, the Foucauldian theory of pluricentrism and the Todorovian principle of
power via personal discourse can both be defended by recent linguistic arguments offering
a challenging analysis of the identity formation process by turning from the reception to the
production of meaning. Analysing the feminine linguistic behaviour from the viewpoint of
the power relations existent in the society, such British researchers as Jennifer Coates and
Deborah Cameron have demonstrated the struggle for control over the Word as the main
instrument of cultural creation and definition by emphasizing the existence of sexual
differences in the organisation of communication. Thus, the identification of certain
syntactic, phonetic and lexical patterns and models pleads for a typically female and
feminine language which reflects not only its essentially biological nature but, especially,
the cultural differences and disputes, the active and interactive strategies of negotiating the
space and transmitting personal cosmologies, generating thus a specific linguistic conduct
which balances the power spheres. These theories are particularly validated in poetry where
identity emerges as a different mosaic of impressions, incorporated and further conveyed
through binary forms of discourse that revalue otherness within the self and celebrate its
outward opening.
Sometimes, binary oppositions are completed by the philosophy of triadic elements,
redefined by the French philosopher Jacques Lacan in the image of the Borromean Knot.
Called ‘Borromean’ after the Renaissance Italian family Borromeo who used the
configuration as its coat-of-arms, this type of knot is an unbreakable link between three
inseparable rings, a symbol of strength in unity. In this triple alliance, each component
acquires meaning from the other two. In the Lacanian philosophy, the three undetachable
units of the Borromean Knot epitomise a revolutionary type of writing, since they stand for
the interrelationships between the Real (the material world; whatever is impossible to
symbolise and/or inexpressible), the Imaginary (the world of vision and dreams, fantasy
and imagery) and the Symbolic (the world of language; the linguistic construction of
11
abstract thought). In contemporary poetry, there are numerous references to triadic relations
in which the terms are equal and strongly interrelated. In the interpretation of British poetry
written by women, the triadic symbols might be revised as follows: the Real is the
collective memory of feminine identity (the feelings, beliefs, past experiences, goals, needs,
and physical environment of the feminine self – all the hidden knowledge kept inside and
impossible to retrieve completely through memory or language); the Symbolic is the
linguistic dimension (the corporeality of words anchoring the woman artist linguistically –
the English language employed as a means of acquiring power, as the woman poet,
irrespective of ancestry or cultural allegiance, inscribes her creative self into a widely-
accepted language); the Imaginary is the creative dimension (poetic imagination re-creating
the feminine self – the alternative reality that bridges the acute divisiveness of postmodern
personality).
This Lacanian metaphorical pattern has also been adopted by the French feminists
as a major argument for their proposal of an innovative manner of expression devised and
developed by women writers to challenge patriarchal cultural structures. Feminine writing
(or écriture féminine‚ in original) is understood as a style which resists linearity and unicity
of interpretation, spliting into several possible interpretations, with the explicit intention to
obtain a strong emotional response from its reader. Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia
Kristeva urge women to explore ways of writing that harmonise with their experience of
difference. The metaphors imagined by Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva are attempts to find
strategies that can change the common perception of writing by women as stereotypically
associated with inferiority. Hélène Cixous in particular has coined several terms for this
revolutionary mode of writing alluding to the erasure of the division between sense and
nonsense, order and chaos: her philosophy includes ‘white ink’, ‘orange’, and the figure of
the mythological Medusa as tools facilitating the filtration of female thoughts into specific
language. The Cixousian metaphor of ‘writing in white ink’ authorises the re-writing of the
paradigm of femininity, conveying the idea of sisterhood, in the sense of both a reunion
with maternal corporeality and an unalienated female bond of friendship in general.
Another metaphor devised by Cixous is the orange – as noun and adjective, as fruit and
color –, functions as a symbol for restored femininity, a recovery of alterity within identity
and discovery of the ego in the other. Cixous also advocates radical action in the form of
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feminine writing as autonomy, which creates possibilities for the expression of
individuality in an extremely personal manner, in a writing style that is persistently ironic,
oscillating between playful irony and hostile sarcasm. As fundamental strategies of écriture
feminine, writing in white ink, living the orange, and the rebellious Medusan laughter are
major sources of formulation and re-formulation of the feminine (in its triadic
configuration: body, mind, and soul). Writing means resistance and central positioning
helps the self acquire a sense of personal power in its struggle to define and assert its
identity versus itself, as well as versus the other – or rather in accordance with the external
self and inner other. The flexibility of the word becomes an efficient instrument that models
and moderates, expresses and explains, asserts and confirms identity. In the poetic
discourse, power becomes even more active, as a specific modality of understanding the
world, of creating and organising the reality, of communicating in the sense of producing
and exchanging meanings.
In order to validate the theoretical premises taken as points of reference, I have
opted for a topical approach to contemporary British women poetry since the latter contains
similar themes and motifs based on the common ground of female experience. Marked by
anxiety and instability, frequently generated by a strong sense of alterity, contemporary
poems – either purely imaginary or based on real events – are often the outcome of a
dramatic conflict between individualities, attitudes, spaces, and also between the facets of
the self-divided personal identity which they either test or contest.
The obsession with inner alterity and outer identity translates into a plurality of
original and easily recognisable lyrical personalities, perceived in a pure Todorovian
manner:
a) either from outside in, as the world invades the subject – by minute investigation
of labyrinthine personal relationships:
- with space: from devotion to ‘home’ and commitment to tradition, to
transplantation into a somewhat familiar or completely different cultural space, which
generates an acute feeling of estrangement or, on the contrary, of ubiquity, or the attempt to
reconcile parallel worlds;
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- with the ego: either as feelling (vulnerable femininity, frustrated hypersensitivity,
balanced egocentricity and the privilege of difference as honour and destiny) or emotion
(freedom of rebellion and insolence of self-assertion as representation of the species);
- with family: from withdrawal within the simplicity of the domestic universe where
feminine personality is defined as a daughter, sister, wife, mother to disclosing an
exasperating confinement to a structure that suffocates female independence;
- with the other sex: from refined tenderness to caustic detachment, or same-sex
bonds as perfect mirroring of likeness in difference;
- with Divinity: from chronic disappointment and bold non-belief to unconditioned
obedience and fidelity to life’s complicated truths.
b) or from inside out, as the subject itself invades the world – by direct participation
and active involvement:
- travelling as a way to shape and re-shape personal cultural codes, from real-life
journeys to imaginary travels;
- political concerns, from the traditional values inspired by monarchy, geographic
isolation and the buldog spirit of the nation to nowadays rejection of false authority;
- the relationship of human mind with the material universe and its mysteries, from
the metaphysical quest for beauty and perfection, the attempt to decypher the philosophy of
life and nature to ecological activism;
- the assertion of the artistic creed: the woman poet’s role as a visionary and
prophet, and the poetic discourse as a way of challenging pre-established order and
providing an alternative lifestyle.
Some of the above are overlapping at times in the verse of certain poets, which
emphasises the synchronicity of topicality since they belong to the collective memory of
womanhood. Therefore, I have presented them in only one chapter, in order to avoid
unnecessary or awkward repetition. In each chapter there is a certain poem, sequence or
collection which I analysed more thoroughly as central to my demonstration. Numerous
poems, however, function like a kaleidoscope, their flexible symmetry standing as solid
proof that most themes, topics and motifs recurrent in poetry by women often rewrite the
same essential feminine-feminist ideas or emotions from different angles of female
sexuality and psyche.
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The first analytical chapter is aimed at scrutinising displacement in poetry,
exhibited as travelling. Travelling forges a sense of time and space which is inevitable to
the construction of the self, for to be located is to be bound to a certain relevant moment
and reference point. In the postmodern age of migration, location remodels the ego through
dislocation and relocation since the ontological movement from one place to another on a
temporary basis triggers major changes in personal and social identity: the voyage of
discovery enhances mental versatility and emotional metamorphosis, allowing
simultaneous placelessness and ubiquity that place the self on a border where all
differences are erased.
Poetry written by British women displays an obsession with geography since most
poems use places as a context that provides a sense of belonging. Even though temporary,
location validates the social self and assigns authority to the individual: thus, identity
becomes a continuum, with the culture of origin at one extreme and the host culture(s) at
the other, as illustrated by my selection and analysis of poems by Carol Rumens, Imtiaz
Dharker, Susan Wicks, Katherine Gallagher, Mimi Khalvati, Judi Benson, Muriel Spark,
Elizabeth Jennings, Leah Fritz, Carole Satyamurti, Zoë Skoulding, Maggie Butt, Sophie
Hannah. In other poems, women poets justify expansion into new territories through their
adaptation to new cultures, languages and mentalities while retaining some of their own
natural features. Elaine Feinstein is a remarkable example of universalism as her poems
propose an identity of infinite options, developing journeys perpetually altering, modifying,
and (re)constructing human personality without converting its true essence. Also, highly
personal travelogues, expressive of the cosmopolitan individual who lives in an
effervescent, multicultural world are forwarded by Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore,
Mimi Khalvati, Sylvia Kantaris, Carole Satyamurti.
The distinctive ethos of self-identification in relation to geographic space and
historic time, as well as personal topological and temporal presentness includes a special
attraction to the urban environment which opens great possibilities for spiritual
development. London in particular exerts the charm of the best of all possible worlds,
explained by its inhabitants’ opportunity of instantaneous identification with anonymity
and simultaneous regeneration. The chapter dedicated to representations of Londonnness
includes numerous poems in which poets scrutinise their relationship with the city
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governed by the strategy of self-liberation in narratives that generate almost endless
significations of the self. Carol Rumens, Moniza Alvi, U.A. Fanthorpe, Maura Dooley,
Myra Schneider, Ruth O’Callaghan, Kathleen Raine, Penelope Shuttle, Joanna Ezekiel,
Hylda Sims, Anne Rouse, Anna Adams provide genuine pictures of the multicultural
capital as a celebration of the common placed in the uncommon surroundings of an out-of-
ordinary place. In their urban verse, contemporary British women poets examine a world of
ordinary Londoners whose consistent presence is part of the English capital’s specific
features.
They are invisible actors on the every-day metropolitan scene, the ones who have
written their stories of identity since the beginnings of ancient Londinium. The suburban
inhabitants are its real owners; they are the ones who know the non-tourist, non-
conventional London, better grasped in its symbolic signs. The English metropolis is rich in
semiology; iconic insignia can be traced anywhere: from East to West, the Millennium
Dome, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, St Paul’s Cathedral, Piccadilly Circus,
Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, Victoria & Albert Museum, and from North to South, The
Zoo, Madame Tussaud’s and the Planetarium, Oxford Street, Covent Garden, Trafalgar
Square, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament – all are prominent landmarks that define
insular history and culture.
The Thames stands for London’s truthfulness, as a real archive of the nation, the
river conjures its history from its beginnings to postmodern times. The longest river in
England, and second-longest in the UK, has long been a subject in arts and literature.
Women poets could not remain indifferent to the outstanding charisma of the Thames.
Anne Ridler, Hilary Davies, Sarah Maguire, Helen Dunmore tell stories of a restless
watercourse impetuously embracing the conurbation; its majestic tide winding about the
natural and man-created landscape to evidence a river almost as sacred as the Egyptian
Nile. Bridges occur as necessary elements of subversion, stretching from one bank to the
other in order to unify them. In poetry, the 33 bridges crossing the Thames in London are
presences required to save individuals from the unavoidable selfishness of everyday life
and support relationships, however ephemeral they may be. Among them, the oldest bridge
in Central London, Westminster Bridge, distinguishes itself as a diary of times and human
nature, amplified by its cultural significance as a link between the Houses of Parliament,
16
the political centre of the country, and the southern district of Lambeth. Sophie Hannah and
Carol Rumens expose the symbolic connection as illusory, for the iron structure is
perceived as representative of power and indifference..
A distinct synchronous dynamics is captured in the poems inspired by the London
Underground. A place of anonymity and freedom, the 150-year old Tube is well
represented in contemporary poetry, both for its physical importance as the city beneath the
city, and metaphorical significance as a subcultural state of mind. Carole Satyamurti, U.A.
Fanthorpe, Katherine Gallagher, Alison Fell, Elma Mitchell, Linda France represent the
parallel subterranean metropolis in their poems while Hylda Sims and Sophie Hannah point
to the inimitable diversity of London, the city of no escape, proposing a mosaic of highly
personal imaginary accounts based on its multiple places of community and continuity. The
key word in relationship of the contmporary women poets with the English metropolis is
fascination as London is a microcosm of the World.
The following chapter deals with revisions of the concept of insularity from the
viewpoint of privacy. Most contemporary British women poets seem to derive their energy
from the realities of an average welfare suburban existence, moderated by their individual
condition. Their poems are often highly personal, emerging as expressions of intense
privacy certifying their determination to preserve stability and continuity. Guided by inner
drives that recommend them as nurturers and devotees to their familiar spaces, poets create
alter egos or personae who voice attachment to home as the place of personal success, the
personal universe where they strive to preserve the every-day balance between family
members, friends, companions. The ‘kitchen table poems’ are a constant presence in the
creation of numerous contemporary British women poets. Most of them recognise the
empowering condition of home-making and their verse is often an apology of femininity
accomplished through cyclical predictable events; these recurrent happenings secure peace
of mind and certainty of identity not only for themselves but also for the others around
them. Routine provides their lives with a mythical dimension, revealing their own
uniqueness within the global sisterhood. Ruth Fainlight provides an explanation to women
poets’ newly forged ideology of domesticity that brings about spiritual improvement and a
sense of personal and cosmic infinity. Victoria Field, Debjani Chatterjee, Myra Schneider,
Anna Adams, Joanna Ezekiel, Moniza Alvi, Kate Foley, Katherine Gallagher, Alison Fell,
17
Susan Wicks, Penelope Shuttle, Jeni Couzyn, Connie Bensley, Imtiaz Dharker, Kathleen
Raine write poems defining women’s relationship with the domestic environment as a place
where they gain unity and maintain self-coherence. There are times when routine activities
erode the strength and power of endurance of the female race and the impulse to escape
from the domestic universe becomes urgent as home is perceived as an empty space, devoid
of any personal meaning. Enwalling is a feminist symbol: in metaphorical interpretation,
being walled up alive acquires a double meaning to a woman, both as the vertical solid
structure erected by the will of a male authority and as the female body, the anatomical
structure that confines a woman to a socially inferior status of wife and mother, nurturer
and care-taker. The poems by Mimi Khalvati and Imtiaz Dharker are amazingly
reminiscent of an old Romanian myth: ‘Master Manole’, the myth of creation – one of the
most beautiful expressions of the human attempt to surpass its mortal condition at the most
painful cost. Selima Hill rises against the limits – and limitations – of feminine experience
and attacks the patriarchal mentality that alienates women from the real world, assigning
their meanings, experiences and perspectives to a subordinate status in society. Other
rebellious poets, like Ruth Fainlight, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Gillian Clarke, Carole
Satyamurti, Myra Schneider vocalise their revolt against small duties and invent a
grandiose escape to personal freedom or, by scrutinising routine activities as mystical
experiences, their household-related verses transcend the borders of strictly individual
concerns, becoming an ongoing process of discovering the mysteries of life.
The simplicity of the domestic universe opens new horizons to a better and deeper
understanding of human nature in its variety. Sometimes the poets extend their concerns
beyond their microcosm to a larger scale: imagining the world as a larger family which they
are called to take care of as universal mothers responsible for global welfare, analysed in
the next chapter. As poetry is a special area where women reject inertia and express their
ideological diversity, their imaginary recollection or narration of public events arises as a
subversive discourse that prompts immediate reaction. With each stage of development, the
collective memory of a nation configures a new ethos from a double perspective: the shared
individual memories co-author the narrative identity of otherness while the self is validated
by being assigned an archetypal dimension. There are numerous poems remembering the
British heritage and praising the nation’s strength, continuity and renewal while exposing
18
the indecency of international hostility and the drama inflicted upon individual lives: June
English, Stevie Smith, Katherine Gallagher, Ruth Fainlight, Maggie Butt, Carol Rumens,
Elaine Feinstein, Val Warner.
As the second half of the 20th century opened the political, social and cultural scene
of the UK to numerous feminine role models, women have gained the right to criticise the
status quo of the nation, exposing the injustice and inequality nurtured by the new realities.
In poetry, the consequences of individual alienation, often displayed as civic aversion and
communal spleen, are reflected in acid verse that arises as a subversive alternative
encouraging the practices of personal freedom. Contemporary British poets often propose
versions of anti-heroism, as their reference to personal histories are merely pretexts to
observe the relativity of history and to obliquely criticise their contemporary national
narratives. Like all other national identities nowadays, Britishness is exposed as a powerful
but time-bound construction; and, in the Neo-Elizabethan era, under the Thatcherite and
Blairite regimes and further on, Britishness has become, in itself, a condition of sheer
postmodern displacement. Estrangement from both the self and the others affects – and
sometimes destroys – all structures of human identity through political and social
uncertainty, together with the moral degradation that spreads across the whole nation like
an infectious disease. Maureen Duffy, U.A. Fanthorpe, Elaine Feinstein, Stevie Smith,
Anna Adams, Fiona Sampson, Carol Rumens, Fleur Adcock, Ruth Fainlight are only some
of the poets who draw attention to the subtle political abuse and injustice in postmodern
Britain.
The following chapter deals with detailed self-scrutiny: in women’s poetry, freedom
of consciousness can be achieved only by absolute individual freedom which turns women
poets from frustrated outsiders into enthusiastic participants in the adversarial discourse.
The need for defiance and challenge finds expression particularly in relationships
characterised by anti-emotionalism, ostentatious inconsistence and clamorous
independence. Revisiting the female body from the inside, the perception of maternity is
altered, sometimes resulting in extreme versions of intimate alienation and lack of
communication: Anne Stevenson, Jackie Kay, Judith Kazantzis, Liz Lochhead, Anne
Stewart narrate bitter stories that reduce womanhood to failure and deceit. Impairing
obsessions are also depicted in the relationship with men: in many postmodern poems, the
19
most prominent figures are the absent father, the abusive acquaintance and the inadequate
lover. Selima Hill, Sylvia Plath, Fleur Adcock echo this unhealthy attachment in a dark
poetic language often composing discontinuous stories of sexual abuse resulting in severe
dislocation of emotions and passions, vulnerability and emotional pain. Developing
memories of past torture, the ego can categorise and manipulate feelings in name-calling
and broken idols, recapturing the sense of self in a ritual of survival, without being able to
elude the sense of betrayed expectation and deceived faith.
As a form of écriture feminine, poetry devoted to the examination of the everyday
minutae demands other modes to validate identity than simple retreat into family
relationships. The conventional image of the good marriage and dutiful wife, abnegating
mother, conformable daughter, etc. are ridiculed by many contemporary women poets,
following the steps of Sylvia Plath whose lyrical sneers were frequently directed to
conventional models and patterns. Nihilism turns into an obsessive attachment to the ideal
of solitude, preserved through sarcasm and bitter tantalisation from a distance. Fleur
Adcock, Selima Hill, Wendy Cope and Jo Shapcott are only a few poets who propose a
new – either icy or cynical – perspective on the relationships between men and women. On
the other hand, however, there is a trend that rediscovers sophisticated forms of tenderness.
Moderate romanticism and commonsense have not disappeared from contemporary British
poetry which presents some of the most remarkable love verses. Elizabeth Jennings, Anne
Stewart, Katherine Gallagher, Mimi Khalvati, Carol Ann Duffy, Kathleen Raine provide
minute celebrations of the strength of warm affections, devotion and allegiance that identify
and validate sameness in otherness.
Another facet of self-analysis deals with personal ‘indetermanence’, manifested as
disintegration, deconstruction, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition affecting the
individual body and mind and, consequently, the discourse of identity. If socially the
defiance of authority is exercised as either extreme reserve or eccentricity, psychologically
it takes the form of madness. Britain is a particularly rich area for investigation because of
the long-standing cultural specificity of madness. Since the 18th century, the links between
an ‘English malady’ and aspects of national experience such as commerce, culture, climate
and cuisine have been the subject of both scientific treatises and literary texts. Alongside
the general ‘English malady’, explained as intellectual and economic pressure, psychiatry
20
describes a typically female malady pertaining to sexuality and the essential nature of
women. Explicitly autobiographical accounts of mental disturbance are offered by Sylvia
Plath, Elizabeth Jennings, Maggie Sawkins. The pressure of successful interaction and the
desire of assimilation as narrow conventions and inflexible formalism trigger powerful
messages of disobedience and anarchy, acknowledging multiple female identity, in a
neverending play of interchanging identities, as in the unequivocally narcissistic poems of
Jackie Kay and Elizabeth Bartlett while the ambivalence of human nature is often explored
in lines pointing to a multiplicity of responses and divisiveness of individuality like
emancipatory verses by Carol Rumens, Liz Lochhead and Myra Schneider.
Another way to escape narrow societal typologies may be found in the return to the
inside, creating one’s own universe and a language of its own logic attempting to turn
weakness into power. In the creative act, the boundaries between madness and sanity are
broken down and the balance between the inside and the outside is achieved through the
agency of the word. Disempowerment and lack of strength, generated by illness and
suffering, are explored by Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay, Julia Darling, Ruth Fainlight, Maria
Jastrzębska, Myra Schneider, Jackie Wills, Patience Agbabi who create genuine visions in
order to deal with the suffering that brings the self on the verge of abjection.
The last two analytical chapters are dedicated to the various visions of poetry and
the role of the poet in the world, displayed by contemporary British women poets. The first
chapter on the art of poetry decodes the messages articulated by the specific poetic tools
and devices employed to perpetually create and re-create personality and unify apparently
irreconcilable dichotomies. Myra Schneider, Ruth Fainlight and Mimi Khalvati provide
several examples that poetic discourse is imperiously necessary as it authorises the
acquisition of power. It is precisely in this spirit of the relation between power, knowledge
and truth that contemporary women poets regard creation for this triadic structure makes
poetry an ultimate form of empowerment. The production and exchange of poetic meaning
can be decoded through several metaphors proposed by postmodern philosophies – among
them, Hélène Cixous’s metaphors of feminine writing. Maria Jastrzębska, Myra Schneider,
Maggie Sawkins, Selima Hill, Vicki Feaver, Ruth O’Callaghan, Mimi Khalvati, Carol Ann
Duffy, Fleur Adcock, Stevie Smith, Jenny Joseph and Jane Holland assimilate, in their
poems, the Cixousian metaphors of ‘writing the orange’, ‘writing in white ink’ and the
21
Medusan ironic laughter. These feminine-feminist symbols allow a space of infinite
possibilities for a new creative style that attempts to capture the living world in language.
The final analytical chapter is a comparative approach devised as a personal
response to the question concerning men and women poets’ use of different, typically male
and female, languages or different linguistic areas in order to express their poetic
subjectivities. As my brief analysis of several representative contemporary poems shows,
some of the poems are different in form but similar in theme; others, on the contrary,
employ the similar linguistic structures or stylistic devices to create completely divergent
poetic images. Alan Jenkins and Frieda Hughes, Michael Swan, Katherine Gallagher and
Debjani Chatterjee, Peter Dale and Elaine Feinstein, Benjamin Zephaniah and U.A.
Fanthorpe, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols, Kit Wright and Carol Rumens, André
Mangeot and Hylda Sims, Philip Larkin and Ruth Padel approach daring topics and their
poetic techniques display creative intelligence, incorporating the concepts of ‘male’ and
‘female’ together in the creative process. Either man or woman, every poet brings a new
feeling to the world, a revelation of life and reality in a new, previously unconceived of,
form that discloses personal knowledge. In my opinion, it is less important to identify the
creator of a brilliant poem as a man or a woman, for the real poet is the one gifted with the
inherent talent for writing.
The conclusions of my dissertation stress the new pluralism that grants greater
diversity in terms of age, race and gender, ethnicity and sexual affiliation, concerned with
the new personal versions of postmodern Britain. Women poets assert their identity in an
unmediated manner, replacing their formerly sacrosanct personal loci with imaginary sites
where the open border allows playful journeys between identity and alterity. To dissolve
their poetic imagination into language, poets employ a wide range of strategies: vigorous,
biting poetry (Fleur Adcock, Wendy Cope, Carol Ann Duffy, Selima Hill, Carol Rumens,
Stevie Smith); glacial, unsympathetic tone (Alison Fell, Liz Lochhead, Sylvia Plath, Jo
Shapcott, Penelope Shuttle, Val Warner); flexible, energetic voices (Gillian Clarke, Helen
Dunmore, U.A. Fanthorpe, Katherine Gallagher, Sophie Hannah, Jackie Kay, Anne
Stevenson); generous, benevolent poems (Anna Adams, Ruth Fainlight, Elaine Feinstein,
Elizabeth Jennings, Myra Schneider); tender, emotional lines (Mimi Khalvati, Kathleen
Raine, Carole Satyamurti). These particular ways of delivering their highly private
22
messages make women poets successful communicators in clearly distinct, easily
recognisable, voices. Often governed by understatement and sarcasm, poetry written by
women is persistently ironic, oscillating between the hostile, detached irony of feminist
poets and the playful, emotional irony of feminine poets. Moreover, feminine poetry is
introvert, extremely personal, the inclination towards the inward reflecting attachment to
tradition and conservatism. In contrast, feminists’ verse poses an interest in specific female
emotions characterised by logos rather than pathos: often thematically and lexically
innovative, feminist poems are often recalcitrant and propose a fresh, sometimes shocking,
but nevertheless natural poetic imagery.
Compared with contemporary American or European poetry written by women, the
lyricism of Albion’s daughters is passing through a stage of self-discovery and self-
communication that explain and redefine subjectivity by dispelling lack of personality.
Interpreted through different philosophical and theoretical ideas developed under the
generous umbrella of ‘postmodernism’, the various forms of imagination and expression
existent in contemporary poetry by women prevents a clear-cut categorisation. The
fundamental postmodern theories of identity and alterity forwarded by Tzvetan Todorov,
intersecting with ideas from Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, French feminist theories
advocating a woman-centred language, supported by Michel Foucault and, at times, by
linguists like Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron prove that women creators are striving
to find their own poetic forms in order to express their experience.
However, the theoretical approaches employed in my project allow the
identification of several features of present female-feminine-feminist poetry in the UK.
Thematically, I have identified several common features:
1. Displacement: Feminine-feminist verse displays an extreme sense of
estrangement and need to find refuge in imaginary unnamed and unnameable locations.
Even when places are known, boundaries are blurred and consistent identity turns into a
ceaseless string of selves imposed by specific topology and chronology.
2. Confessionalism: The highly autobiographical poems written by women poets set
the self in relation with the other. Identity is defined in connection – and opposition – with
other entities and further conveyed through language, a tool that reveals the inner self,
adjusting it to reality.
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3. Duality: There is a thin line distinguishing between the ‘real’ self and the other
one, either within or outside: the self is aware of its own boundaries and tries to cross them
to the other. Poems arise as a complex migration between the self and the other,
emphasising the personal over the objective by multiple and merging points of subjectivity
and identification.
4. Domesticity: The philosophy of routine is conspicuous in women’s poetry.
Homeplace can be both the locus of oppression and the source of power, cooperation and
solidarity. Symbolic of feminine experience, it is a network – rather than hierarchy – that
emphasises identity and strengthens the sense of socialisation and community, in contrast
with another tendency: resistance to home-related subjugation.
5. Seclusion: Feminine identity is articulated in a confident language that dispenses
with conventional patterns of representation and traditional rigid language. The newly-
forged diction develops freely in harmony with the feminine instinct in a new form of
playful symbolic plurality. Writing is a reclusive act and the woman poet can find and
exploit her inspiration only by retreating into solitude. As negative versions to creativity
and plenitude, illness and suffering are also factors that dissolve the self into loneliness and
isolation.
6. Multiplicity: Reality is constructed and reconstructed through the the language,
emancipating the individual who transcends personal limits and achieves an endless
disposal of imaginary selves. Repeated multiplication allows identity to generate renewed
alter egoes through which the permanent exchange of meaning allows interaction and
communication with the other.
7. Myth-revisioning: Contemporary poetry by women is concerned with reshaping
the exemplary stories of ancient mythology in order to devise alternative tales that describe
feminine experience. The perfect characters of the primordial fictions turn into common
women with ordinary responsibilities, among which supporting their ‘better halves’.
8. Metropolitanism: British women poets exhibit a marked preference for the urban
environment, as proof of the emotional division between London and the rest of Britain.
Often terrifying, the capital is a dystopian universe that nurtures estrangement and
dissolution of identity. And yet, poets dedicate numerous love odes to London, either
directly or obliquely.
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9. Emotional disorder: In poetry, mental imbalance takes various forms:
infantophobia, sexual fascination with cruelty, madness – the typically ‘female malady’
since women are socially and culturally associated with irrationality and emotionalism. The
outsider’s acute feelings of inadequacy require dissenting strategies and forms of
communication that challenge narrow conventions and inflexible formalism.
10. Eccentricity: Milder version of madness, unconventionalism and behavioural
oddities occur as neurotic outbursts that provide the self with the freedom to make bold
statements. Rebellion and insolent self-assertion replace vulnerability and emotional
suffering in brave stories compensating for all the restrictions and limitations imposed by
self-censorship and social mores.
11. Irony: Banter and mockery codifying a mode of self-expression that help the
spirit survive and live with oneself at peace. They arise as strategies of excess that undo the
logical binaries of Western rational thought, undermining the prevailing patterns, exposing
stereotypes and ridiculing clichés that would be pathetic if they were not made sympathetic
by a slightly perceptible inward laughter.
12. Subversion: Refusing withdrawal within the simplicity of the personal universe,
women poets engage themselves in clever sneering at conventional norms and standards.
Poems that seem apparently apodictic are, in fact, virulent reactions against hypocrisy and
discrimination, directly attacking real or imaginary official positions of power.
From the viewpoint of the linguistic and stylistic devices employed by women
poets, the arguments of such linguists as Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron, who
sustain the idea of women’s unassertive speech as a social norm for womanhood, can be
either accommodated or challenged by the present-day poetry written by women. Poetry
either tests or contests the common findings and hypotheses forwarded by the linguistic
theories: with the help of new rhetorical strategies and the generosity of the English
language, British women poets refresh old structures and syntagms that forge a previously
unknown mode of expression. Most poems echo linguistic assumptions as they mimic the
social function of language as communication, becoming available to a wide audience.
Contemporary poetic diction is generally consistent with the linguistic observations
concerning the use of colours, for example, as women poets are highly imaginative with
respect to tinges and hues, as illustrated by numerous poems. Nevertheless, they defy other
25
findings, replacing them innovatively to express their various feelings and emotions – for
instance, taboo language is not a rarity in women’s poems: still considered unfeminine,
verbal aggressiveness is an effective instrument to express contempt and, at the same time,
emotional honesty.
The intention and importance of language reside in dynamism and inventiveness as
poets’ imagination provide words with new connotations that lead to the creation of a
linguistically innovative writing style that can be defined by several features:
1. Orality: Conversationalism arises naturally as a psychological disposition
towards openness; this open style favours free verse as the patterns of everyday language
create vivid situations and lively personae, which gives popular appeal to contemporary
poetry. The colloquial tone, sometimes close to gossip, illustrates the islanders’ inclination
to small talk, the exchange of utterances not for the purpose of finding real information but
rather to establish a connection between the interlocutors. Free verse promotes natural
poetic voices and imaginative authenticity as feminist aesthetics is located in content rather
than form, insisting on the importance of accessible reportage and genuine personal
testimony.
2. Formalism: Women poets generally avoid the rigid and intransigent canon of
formal verse, rarely employed to convey feminine subjectivity in disruptive forms.
Nevertheless, there are poets who respect tradition and appeal to such stanzaic forms as
sonnets, villanelles, limericks, tercets, quatrains, cinquains in order to order their feelings
and emotions.
3. Rhetorical devices: In order to avoid monotony and facilitate the reception of
their work, women poets supplement conversationalism with poetic techniques that
enhance the vigour of their verses: from patterns of sound (alliteration and assonance –
there is a predisposition for the repetition of certain sounds, internal or end rhyming) to
figures of speech (allusion and personification, metaphor and simile, hyperbole and
repetition) illustrating various aspects of identity, from highly intimate to overtly social
experience.
Generally, poets avoid abstracts in favour of concretes by the specific use of the
simile rather than metaphors. Nevertheless, there are numerous examples of metaphors in
women’s poetry. Among them, the mirror and the knot are two frequently recurring figures
26
of style. An attribute of civilisation, the mirror functions as knowledge and deceit for it is
an alien eye where the self looks for its real essence, finding instead its reversed image – an
often malevolent double. It contains a promise which is never fulfilled for the mirror
guarantees no other existence but can only duplicate a personal microcosm from which
escape is illusory. A metaphor favoured by many British women poets, the knot reflects the
tight connection between the self and the other beyond any substantial contact – an
unalienated relationship permanently nourished by the word. Language is not a simple
instrument but a mode to reflect human experience and the most direct means of connecting
the self with the other. At the same time, the phonetic versatility of the English language
(where ‘knot’ is pronounced the same as ‘not’) may emphasise the refusal to obey the
poetic tradition dominated by male poetic discourse and create a female-centred tradition.
Considering the above considerations and enlarging upon Jeni Couzyn’s
classification presented in the introduction, it is my personal belief that British women
poets can be roughly included in a mythologically understood, temperament-based
typology whose principles overlap, owing to the diversity of themes and motifs approached
in their poems:
- Amazons, champions of free-thinking, liberated and liberal spirits creating their
own tradition: R.V. Bailey, Carol Ann Duffy, U.A. Fanthorpe, Maria Jastrzębska, Jackie
Kay, Ruth O’Callaghan;
- Medusas, conspicuous through pervasive humour, direct or oblique irony,
sarcasm, eccentricity and mental dislocation: Fleur Adcock, Sophie Hannah, Selima Hill,
Jenny Joseph, Liz Lochhead, Sylvia Plath, Hylda Sims, Stevie Smith;
- Syrens, singers of the female body and feminine plenitude: Jeni Couzyn, Linda
France, Mimi Khalvati, Grace Nichols, Carol Rumens;
- Caryatids encompassing the wisdom of the millennial woman: Ruth Fainlight,
Elaine Feinstein, Elizabeth Jennings, Penelope Shuttle;
- Sibyls, eternal wanderers who inhabit one place and remember another, always
between two countries: Fleur Adcock, Debjani Chatterjee, Katherine Gallagher, Maria
Jastrzębska, Mimi Khalvati, Grace Nichols;
- Muses with a strong sense of creative identity: Ruth Fainlight, U.A. Fanthorpe,
Elaine Feinstein, Myra Schneider.
27
Considering each poet’s poetic temperament and linguistic skills, Britain’s current
literary world is becoming conspicuous through its creative potential and experimental
resources. In this respect, poetry written by women born or currently living in the UK –
through the typical poetic ego, topics approached, and lyrical modus operandi – may be
defined by a single goal: the development of a unique language, defined in relation to the
female subjectivity that opens the borders of poetic language and imagination to the new
Millennium. From this viewpoint, my dissertation proposes an attempt to identify a
gynocentric aesthetic trend that is specific to the contemporary lyrical landscape which
promotes a particular tradition by deconstructing and reconstructing the literary canon.
The original contributions brought by my project consist in the following:
- the correlation between British poetry written by women and the contemporary
cultural context: Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of identity and alterity, Jacques Lacan’s
structuralism summarised in the symbol of the Borromean knot, Michel Foucault’s doctrine
of self-empowerment by language and the French feminists’ philosophy of liberating the
female mind and body – particularly Helene Cixous’s metaphorical system of feminine
writing;
- thematic systematisation: the binary structuring of the chapters into
complementary modules facilitates the perception and reception of the mostly inward-
centred themes and topics expressed in open forms, and constructs a system of
understanding the new metaphors and models that compose Britain’s contemporary poetic
phenomenon;
- also, it is an interactive enterprise based on direct collaboration with numerous
poets (via meetings, workshops, interviews, informal talks and correspondence).
My quasi-exhaustive presentation of the present-day creative effervescence has
immediate purposes:
- to contribute to the creation of a cultural bridge across Europe and promote poetry
written by women in the UK by emphasising its singular character within the European
cultural milieu;
- to increase academic and public interest in contemporary poetry written by women
whose kaleidoscope of themes and motifs illustrates a whole range of feelings and
28
emotions, in all their shades and nuances, all converging to one conclusion: the undeniable
value of the poets and their work.
This is the reason why I have also included an appendix at the end of my
dissertation, in hope that the bio-bibliographic data will prompt the reader to continue the
fascinating journey into the creative universe of the poets comprised in my analysis.
In the epilogue to my dissertation, I reiterate that the variety in the ever-expanding
corpus of work provided by British women poets over the past few decades is
overwhelming: apart from the already established publishing houses and institutions
concerned with promoting poetry written by women, there are numerous literary circles and
organisations that support and popularise female-feminine-feminist creation. Among them,
Second Light – the largest network of communicant poets in the UK, dedicated to women
who have discovered the pleasure of writing later in life. The organisation was founded by
the poet Dilys Wood in 1994, with the specific purpose of offering women the opportunity
to find and develop their creative self through workshops and poetry events, a biannual
poetry journal of women’s poetry and anthologies of women’s writing.
With the same belief that contemporary poetry is both creation and self-creation,
Anne Stewart has shaped a more integrative vision in her poetry p f project which includes
men and women poets altogether in a showcase aiming to provide a non-discriminatory
image of the contemporary British literary phenomenon. The website (www.poetrypf.co.uk)
and the events promoted by the project demonstrate that the verse created by more than 250
men and women members displays an equal – and equalitarian – rhetorical sensitivity
perceptible both through the poetic language they employ and the meta-messages they
encode in their poems.
As poetry p f is thriving, the need has arisen to extend the expressive level beyond
strict localisation and cultural arbitrariness, and to experience equality in difference by the
cultural crossing of frontiers in order to discover a sense of compatibility and communion
in the collective identities existing in Europe. The result is the translation projects
developed between poetry p f and the University of Bucharest (pRO) and the Ludwig-
Maximilians-University in Munich (tREnD) as direct derivation from the intellectual
experience of postmodernism – a time of increasingly urgent self-communication and
demandingly positive mutual understanding. Started in 2008 as a translation collaboration
29
between poetry p f, administered by Anne Stewart, poet and literary agent (London) and
Prof. Dr. Lidia Vianu (English Department, University of Bucharest), the poetry pRO project
initially involved over 100 contemporary British poets (men and women) and about 80
translators (MA & PhD students, English to Romanian). So far, the joint efforts of the
project participants have resulted in online publications (http://www.e-
scoala.ro/ctitc/translation_cafe.html), periodical radio shows, literary journals and a
Romanian UK Tour organised in Spring 2009, with the generous support of the Romanian
Cultural Institute in London and Arc Publications.
These ventures are neither singular nor one way: some of the British poets have
developed a specific interest in particular Romanian poets and are looking forward to
understanding some of the specificities of Romanian language and culture. Their
undertaking to transplant creative sensibilities from the original realm into a cultural
context located on the other extreme of the European continent is a perfect example of what
Tzvetan Todorov named ‘the dialogue of cultures’. Fleur Adcock provided English
versions of poems by Grete Tartler and Daniela Crăsnaru; Fiona Sampson included poems
by Magda Cârneci, Ioana Ieronim and Diana Manole in her 2002 volumes of Orient
Express, a literary journal for EU enlargement countries; in 2004, Arc Publication included
the young Romanian poet Ioana Nicolaie in A Fine Line: New Poetry from East and
Central Europe, an anthology edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Alexandra Buchler and Fiona
Sampson. There are other poets who have developed a real or imaginary relationship with
Romania: Elaine Feinstein, Jackie Kay and Michelene Wandor visited our country and
filtered their impressions in poems while Mimi Khalvati and Frieda Hughes recorded their
visions in some imaginary encounters with Romania.
Challenged by these ample open forms of expression, my quasi-exhaustive study is
a persuasive updated review of identity coming out of variety: an invitation to reading, a
return to poetry – always food for the soul in troubled times. A dissertation can only
provide a small-scale evaluation; therefore, a larger scale will be necessary in the future
since there is a growing interest in women’s poetry, which indicates, in the words of the
poet Maureen Duffy, that ‘In the end there is no end.’
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