Anthologies of women's poetry

canon-breakers; canon-makers

Jane Dowson

pp. 237-252

in: Gary Day, Brian Docherty (eds), British poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

In her introduction to Sixty Women Poets (1993), Linda France alludes to a "renaissance" in women's poetry; the proliferation of poetry collections and the number of anthologies of poetry by women certainly indicate the growth of literary and commercial interests in women's poetry over the last fifteen years. These anthologies also chronicle the discourses concerning women's relationship to the traditions of British poetry. The majority of anthologies and of feminist criticism of women's poetry have been published since 1980, significantly later than the equivalent recuperation of and attention to women's prose. The editors' introductions to these anthologies record developments in the exploration of a specific feminist poetics, from the questions of who are the women poets? and what is a woman poet? to an examination of the nature of women's poetry.