So, is there a difference between poetry written by men and that by women. Or, as the same question can apparently be put, is there such a thing as Women's Poetry. Many would seem to think so, including Fleur Adcock, and thus Faber, because I have a book called the Faber Book of C20th Women's Poetry.
Having been brought up, as it were, 'educated' some might say, at a time when the text was said to stand on its own with no reference to the author, Roland Barthes, Intentional Fallacy and all those orthodoxies were in fashion, I tended for a long time to think that surely poems are verbal constructs made of nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuation and grammar and such like and these things function in the same way whether put to use by a male or a female practitioner of the art. I probably still think that, or at least can't completely discount such a well-established idea after so long.
I don't see it as a feminist issue or of any political significance. That there are far more men than women in the historical canon of poetry, in English at least, is not something that is going to be easily reversed even if research could find an equivalent female body of work. Perhaps women had better or more important things to do than mooch about and jot down verses. But the politically correct conscience has gone too far when at least one magazine in my memory would publish the figures of poems received from each gender and then, to prove their purity of selection criteria, show that they published a very similar ratio. And Roddy Lumsden, however conscientiously, points out in the introductions of anthologies that he's edited, how close or spot on he's been in achieving a 50-50 split. It shouldn't come to that. Even though we have champions in Tae-Kwan-Do and Iron Triathlon in this country, the shortlist for Sports Personality of the Year was 10 out of 10 blokes. I'd be likely to prefer a triathlete over a golfer any day but media coverage doesn't agree but ideally we would be above this tokenism and quota system. If I had to select 10 poems from a big pile and found I'd picked almost all women, I wouldn't go back to try and fit some more men in, I'd trust my first instincts.
But there might be a discernible difference between poems written by men and women, a general, unquantifiable but nonetheless perceptible way in which men might be represented perhaps by a tendency towards 'ideas', in Virginia Woolf's phrase about the 'arid scimitar' of the male while women might sometimes concern themselves more with describing an emotional response. Is that fair. Does it hold any useful truth at all, or is it a lazy stereotype. Providing just one or two examples that contradict it wouldn't immediately destroy a basic acceptance that there is as broad difference.
Could Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas have been written by a lady. Do some poems by Sylvia seem so syntactically tough and hard-edged that they might have been written by men. I hope it doesn't work like that and I'm absolutely sure that there can be no litmus test, so I'm still optimistic that my first instinct, or that thing instilled by purely textual reading, might still be right. And it's much easier to be the one who asks the questions rather than provide the answers.
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