By the time I graduated from high school I had discovered the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, then very much in fashion. The spring of 1937 is a long time ago, and it may be that I only imagine what I seem to recall—namely, aspiring to what the first of her Figs from Thistles called "burning at both ends." Oh yes, I was going to be a Writer, but that was no more than ancillary. To put it another way, it meant getting out—out of the rural scene where my own psychic halts and festinations, my lunges toward self-definition, were all egregiously out of sync.

Looking back, I'm not sure how much gender had to do with this quasi-paralysis. My parents had been similarly lacking in assurance; but I have a sense that it was my father, as head of the household, on whom the burden of anxiety chiefly fell. His father had left a poignant record, whose importance to me can scarcely be exaggerated, of anxiety amounting almost to terror. It may be that my mother and my grandmothers suffered no less; but if so, they set down no such record. For my mother there was the recourse of tears, which made everybody feel guilty, whereas for the men in my family, whatever feeling was openly expressed took the form of anger. Setting things down could make a difference, as I seem to have known from an early age; but the legacy of self-doubt remained.

Why were we all so unsure of ourselves, so fearful of exposure, so open to ridicule, to throttling worry about what other people might think or say? It wasn't simply money, though we were pinched for it. As I would learn much later, such anxieties had been known to Virginia Woolf; and it was she, through the language of The Waves, who seemed to be speaking to and for an isolation so precarious that I, as a college sophomore, hadn't dared suppose it could be the plight of anyone else. Her being a novelist, so called, rather than a poet, had perhaps something to do with the kind of writer I now intended to be.

Back in high school, I'd written a number of sonnets—Shakespeare, not Millay, being the real exemplar, so far as I remember. But in those days (however improbable it might seem, given the ever-dwindling margin of concern with what is wistfully called "the examined life" as a matter of public discourse), the notion of becoming a poet was more fraught with ridicule than now. The sources of this paradox are for cultural historians to mull over. One effect of the sixties was a general blurring of the old stereotypes, that of the poet among them. I seem to remember, from Ernie Kovacs' long-gone gallery of losers, one Percy something—was it Silvertonsils? He was, at any rate, unmistakably, effeminately, The Poet. Nowadays, live poets from time to time make an appearance on television—marginally but without (so far as I know) being lampooned. Men once sneered at Culture because they felt in some way threatened by it, in much the same way (I believe) that they felt threatened by women. The way men feel threatened by women has changed; as for the feminine aspect associated with Higher Things, the sneer would seem to have been replaced by indifference. In my own reluctance to assume the label of poet(ess), gender must thus have been a factor, but one so pervasive that I hardly knew how to think about it.

Others did, certainly: the most vivid member of the campus literary elite (who would go on to write prose, not verse) addressed herself, in a poem I still remember, to Milton's "He for God only, she for God in him"—though in a tone more adoring of a particular male than bitter concerning the female condition.

Having geared myself toward prose, I never considered taking a course in verse writing. One had been offered, taught by a woman who never, if I remember correctly, got past the rank of assistant professor. (The department included two other women; all three were single, and their position on campus and beyond was, accordingly, the more anomalous.) After college, I was not to attempt anything in verse for something like fifteen years. As for that alluring First Fig, I can only say that lasting the night, and still more the feat of getting through the day, had given me pause. During those years, sporadically, I tried my hand at fiction. The reluctant and gradual conclusion that I must after all be, if anything, a poet, coincided more or less with the upheavals of the sixties. The exhilaration of those upheavals was liberating for me, bringing me as near as I've ever come to the equivalent of "burning at both ends." The anxiety that had kept me throttled now lift of possibility. I am simplifying, I suppose; but as though for the first time, I felt free to be a poet. It was even, in the lingo of the moment, a neat thing to be.

I was reading Sylvia Plath in those days, and at the same time I was aware of scathings from the blast furnace of radical feminism. My response to both was initially one of resistance: a poem entitled "After Reading Sylvia Plath" began, if I remember right, by saying, "No, no, I do not want it," and one called "Models" ended with an appalled repudiation of what I had heard at one highpitched gathering, where women were "afraid of not agreeing, it will mean they are not brave." If I did pick up, perhaps, a bit of swagger, a change of manner, from what was being resisted, it was little more that that. Emily Dickinson had not yet spoken to me, nor had Marianne Moore; the few anthologized pieces I knew would remain impenetrable for a while longer. The day would come when, awakened to the inclusiveness and particularity of Marianne Moore's work, I would discover in it a new way of proceeding. Even then, the poets whose longtime influence chiefly obtained were Keats and Hopkins, Milton and Donne. No wonder, then, that an offering to the editors of Aphra came back with the complaint, "We don't hear your voice." From other periodicals, years of silence—broken finally, as it happens, by an editor who happened to be male.

Do I feel left out? From the perspective of one who has been helped more by men than by women, the question has a ring of almost comic irrelevance—the one reasonable answer being, Of course, who doesn't? My own case (as one critic, a woman, a bit crossly called it) may itself be irrelevant, a mere anomaly. Or is it perhaps that to be anomalous is finally inseparable from what makes a poet, of either sex?