One does have to tread carefully in these sensitive days and there might have been a danger at times of an assumption that girls are made of sugar and spice and all things nice and boys are horrid but it was noticeable that whenever a poem was read without the gender of its author being known, the vote usually got it wrong and I found that reassuring, especially as I voted for the wrong side every time.
I had introduced the subject thus,
Gender in Poetry – Is there a difference
between poetry written by women and by men.
Anthologies that bring together poems under
titles such as Scottish poetry, C16th verse, Carribean poetry, Chinese Verse or
on a theme of childhood suggest that such selections have common themes, issues
or styles that make it significant or of interest to read them together. There
are also such books as The Faber Book of Women’s Poetry. The question
seen from that perspective seems to ask what is there that those poems share
apart from not being written by men.
When I was at University, from 1978-81, the
prevailing orthodoxy on the Stylistics and Criticism course was the primacy of
the text based on the ‘intentional fallacy’ of Wimsatt and Beardsley, the
‘death of the author’ announced by Roland Barthes and the analytical methods of
Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short, all of which concentrated on the text as the
object of study to the exclusion of extraneous detail such as the biographical
details of the author, or even who they were. I took this to mean that poetry
was made of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and the way they were assembled and
the way they functioned was the same whether put together by male or female,
and I thought that for at least a couple of decades.
However, the orthodoxy changed, as they
usually do and, as they often do, it took a complete about turn. Literary
biography became the new fashion and started to concentrate on how the poetry
informed us of the life, although why a poet’s life was deemed to be so much
more interesting and suitable for such investigation than that of a grocer was
never made clear.
It didn’t really dawn on me that there
might be a decisive difference between women’s poems and men’s until a reading
by Deryn Rees-Jones at Oxford
We have had our thunder stolen somewhat in
discussing this issue by the winter edition of Poetry Review, which
included a piece by Pascale Petit entitled, Do Women Poets Write Differently
To Men? In it, she mentions women’s ‘closer relationship with the body, and
its wonder, shock and messiness’. This is the sort of thing I thought I found
in Deryn’s reading, with a closer engagement with personal feelings as well as
physicality.
However, Pascale expresses the significant
reservation that ‘it might be more useful to think in terms of ‘feminine’ and
‘masculine’ poetry rather than the division of gender, and that some men write
feminine poems and some women masculine poems.’
There are plenty of theories about the
differences between the genders, including Virginia Woolf’s identification in To
the Lighthouse of the ‘arid scimitar’ of the male and a female ‘rapture of
successful creation’, or the perceived polarities of logic and intuition.
Some themes are likely to be of more
interest to one gender than another. Kate Clanchy’s first three volumes- Slattern,
Samarkand and Newborn - might be read as a progress through
courtship, home-making and childbirth, for instance, but these are tendencies
or generalizations that we might identify rather than inviolable laws.
Another possible difference suggested by
Pascale Petit is that women’s poetry is that of ‘outsiders’ in a world where
men are ‘central’. On a more radically feminist agenda I have heard it
suggested that the ‘I’ in poetry stands for something male and stands thus for
the suppression of the female. I’m sure there would be plenty of objections
from male poets (me, at least) that we can also feel like outsiders and we have
absolutely no designs on making the ‘I’ specifically male.
Pascale’s conclusion is that women do write
differently to men but she acknowledges that ‘for many, gender is not relevant
to their craft’.
As with most of the commonly identified
divisions in the population- like ethnicity, religion, etc.- I prefer to
consider us all as individuals, each in a minority of one, rather than in
blocks that assume whole sections of the demographic can be bundled together.
