[An American educator and critic, Broyard served for fifteen years as a New York Times book reviewer and feature writer. In the following review of Loveroot, he faults Jong's poetry as pretentious, commenting, "Ms. Jong is too full of herself."]

When Fear of Flying ended with the runaway wife returning to scrub her infidelities in her husband's bathtub, some feminists saw Erica Jong's novel as a washout. She may have come to agree with them, for she has since divorced her second husband and written an article in Vogue magazine on the obsolescence of marriage. She has her own bathtub now, and her own bathos. She says, for example, that Loveroot, her third book of poems, was written to prove that women poets need not commit suicide.

The author leaves us in no doubt as to why some women poets did commit suicide. In a poem on Sylvia Plath and other "martyrs," she says, "Men did them in." They will not do her in, however, for she has seen through their "doom-saying, death-dealing" ways. She is in her own hands, her "big mouth / filled with poems," and I think it should be interesting to see what she does with her independence. History has many cunning corridors, as T. S. Eliot remarked, and in the history of the feminist movement Mrs. Jong's corridor probably has a cunning peculiar to itself.

She has come out of the bathtub to "teeter on the edge of the cosmos," to "write in neon sperm across the air." Her sisters in arms may question this reference to sperm with its suggestion of men, but it is to the author's credit that she writes as if she had generated it herself. Perhaps we have here a more modern version of Rimbaud's "alchemy" of language.

It is curious to see in how many ways women have modified Freud's famous dictum that anatomy is destiny. Recently, I suggested that, for some new women novelists, anatomy is irony. I believe Mrs. Jong would say that it is poetry. It makes up, at any rate, a good part of her own. "My breasts ache … my womb pulls earthward …" "The poems keep flowing monthly / like my blood." "I offered my belly as a bowl … my breasts as the chafing dish / to keep us warm … I offered my navel / as a brandy snifter."

Blood recurs often enough to clot Loveroot's pages. I think that, in the author's mind, blood stands for sincerity. Her poems must pass some blood test of her own devising. While only women bleed, they may soon, if I can read the signs, teach men to ejaculate blood. In spite of her proud protestations, Mrs. Jong is rather ambivalent about her body. While it is not a party to the "orgasms of gloom [that] convulse the world," it does have its burdens. It leaves her a prey to "the loneliness of pregnant whales," and it is threatened by a "blockage" which can be cured only by love, whose "first sure sign … is diarrhea."

In their movement toward emancipation, woman sometimes see fit to put aside coquetry, to adopt a flat-footed stance of "authenticity." "Mistakes:" the author writes, "she will make them / herself." "Life: not reasoned or easy / but at least / her own." Under the influence of this authenticity, the author tends to blunt her poems—"truth is often crude"—until the message becomes the medium. Confounding truth and poetry is one of the fond homilies of our time. I will not attempt to seduce you with poetry, Mrs. Jong implies. You must take me as I am. Sublimation is just so much hypocrisy.

Here is the cult of identity again, in one of its many manifestations. Love me, love my identity, and a militant woman's identity must be seen without bra or embellishment. She refuses any longer to be an interior decorator of the womb. Poetry is not a bauble, but a speculum.

In the "zoo-prison of marriage," the husband sleeps through his wife's "noisy nights of poetry." "The pages of your dreams," she muses in tender condescension, "are riffled by the winds of my writing." The husband dozes like a baby while the wife adventures among emergencies. The supermarket is a concentration camp where "the blue numerals" of the tally are "tattooed / on the white skins / of paper …" While men can "yearn / with infinite emptiness / toward the body of a woman," she "must not only inspire the poem / but also type it, / not only conceive the child," but bear it, bathe it, feed it and "carry it / everywhere, everywhere…." In the author's view of marriage, there are no maids, no day camps, no anticlimaxes. The uncharitable might say that there are no children either, except for rhetorical ones.

In Loveroot, the drama of anatomy elbows out the drama of poetry. The blood's pulse dulls the meter. The "I" blinds the eye. The bombast drowns the music. The sincerity stifles the wit. Mrs. Jong is too full of herself. We might say of this book, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, that it belongs more to the history of publicity than to the history of poetry.

The poetry is in the pity, Wilfred Owen observed, but perhaps this sort of sympathy no longer suits our pitiless age. The poetry is in the publicity—there, isn't that more like it? Women poets need not commit suicide; Mrs. Jong is right. Still, I think she ought to be reminded that, for her, fame too may be a form of death.

Anatole Broyard, "The Poetry Is in the Publicity," in The New York Times, June 11, 1975, p. 41.