Wright, Judith - Philip Lindsay (essay date 1950)

Philip Lindsay (essay date 1950)

SOURCE: "Poetry in Australasia: Judith Wright," in Poetry Review, Vol. XLI, No. 4, July-August 1950, pp. 207–11.

[In this essay concerning Wright's Woman to Man, Lindsay asserts that Wright is the first woman poet to speak of love with a truly female voice.]

Of Judith Wright's poetry it might well be said that she is the only woman who has kissed and told. Other women have sung of love, but apart from Sappho—and she, after all, was a man in female skin—none have written honestly and without shame of their desires. Usually we find that women poets were sexually inexperienced ladies, transmuting their desires into religious or metaphysical ecstasies, as with Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti, or, like Emily Dickenson, they have had to invent a lover on whom they could pour the passion of their starved hearts. The last thing I wish is to start a discussion on this question, and, of course,...

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