The Critical Reception of Twentieth Century British and American Women’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper argues that British and American women’s poetry has suffered critical victimization in terms of the canonization of great writing.  It recognizes and exposes some examples of great women poets and shows how the work of such women has been neglected, slighted or at least not given enough critical attention. The paper investigates the hypothetical contention that British and American Women’s poetry continues to suffer critical victimization at a set of values and concepts of poetic vocation set by men with the assumption that all poets are men. It also does a comparative examination of the appreciation of women’s poetry in Britain and America and surmises that American women poets have been more critically received than their British counterparts. On the whole, the paper shows that women’s poetry has not yet received the appropriate critical acclaim that it deserves. Rather, it has been neglected, denigrated, and misread, being judged by the inappropriate standards of a literary establishment put in place by and for men. It is for this reason that no definitive history of women’s poetry has yet been written.