SOURCE: Schenck, Celeste M. “Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion.” In Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, pp. 225-50. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Schenck discusses the poetry of female modernists in terms of their state of being exiled from the political, cultural, and social mainstream.]

When I first mapped out an essay on what I'd like to call modernist women's exiles, I envisioned an article on the exchanges between gender and genre, raised exponentially to include geography in the case of those triply exiled expatriate women poets. The task has been more difficult than I imagined for two reasons: first, my perfectly sonorous third—gender, genre, geography—collapsed under pressure of a less concordant trio—race, class, and sexual preference; second, because Gilbert and Gubar's observation that “verse genres have been even more thoroughly male than fictional ones” (Madwoman, 68), with its corollary that women writers able to make themselves at home in the house of prose were exiles when it came to poetic genres, simply did not hold up as a theory in a period that willingly consigned poetic forms into the hands of genteel poetesses, keeping the “new poetry” safe for the experimenters, the form-breakers, and the vers-librists—that is, the men.

It may seem old that I take up the banner of genre at a moment when Modernists were doing all they could to dislodge it as an evaluatory criterion of poetry, but in fact the debate raged in periodicals of the day in a manner I find chillingly gendered. In a 1914 polemic against that “decorative straight-jacket, rhymed verse,” a Little Review essayist asks us: “Suppose I were a Bluebeard who had enticed a young girl into my dim chamber of poetic-thought. Suppose I took the little knife of rhyme and coolly sliced off one of her ears, two or three of her fingers, and finished by clawing out a generous handful of her shimmering, myriad-tinted hair, with the hands of meter” (Bodenheim, 22). Although the butchered victim in this fantasy is poetry, the hostility generated by rhymed verse extends metonymically to her largely female practitioners. For example, John Crowe Ransom, in “The Poet as Woman,” an essay in condescending praise of Edna St. Vincent Millay, quibbles with her choice of the indeterminate word comfort, shortened to keep meter. Accusing Millay of obedience to “the mechanical determinism of metrical necessity,” he turns the Procrustean metaphor back on her by ending his essay with an image of female dismemberment, once again, ostensibly, of poetry: “Procrustes, let us say with absurd simplicity, finds the good word comforter too long for the bed. So he lops off her feet” (110).¹

But in the foregoing examples I have only described the woman poet's Charybdis. She is equally censured, often out of the other corner of the male critic's mouth, for being inadequately formal, that is, ill-suited to mastery of poetic genres by temperament and education. In the same essay quoted above, Ransom calls Millay “not a good conventional or formalist poet … because she allows the forms to bother her and to push her into absurdities. I imagine there are few women poets of whom this is not so, and it would be because they are not strict enough and expert enough to manage forms,—in their default of the disciplines under which men are trained” (103). William Archer says, apparently in praise of Alice Meynell:

Few poetesses of the past have shown a very highly developed faculty for strict poetical form. I am not aware that the works of any woman in any modern language are reckoned among the consummate models of metrical style … ladies as a rule seem to have aimed at a certain careless grace rather than a strenuous complexity or accuracy of metrical structure … Mrs. Meynell is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. Within a carefully limited range, her form is unimpeachable.

(Quoted in Schlack, 112)

It is little wonder, given the prescriptive nature of Archer's praise, that Meynell wrote a poem called “The Laws of Verse” in which she invites the erotic embrace of a controlling prosody and rhyme.

          Dear laws, come to my breast!
Take all my frame, and make your close arms meet
Around me; and so ruled, so warmed, so pressed,
I breathe, aware; I feel my wild heart beat.

(Poems, 173)

The double bind of the woman poet, as I redefine it for the female Modernist, her simultaneous exile from and to poetic form, almost makes comprehensible Edith Sitwell's defensive ars poetica in this peevish letter to Maurice Bowra:

Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho … and … “Goblin Market” and a few deep and concentrated, but fearfully incompetent poems of Emily Dickinson, is simply awful—incompetent, floppy, whining, arch, trivial, self-pitying,—and any woman learning to write, if she is going to be any good at all, would, until she had made a technique for herself (and one has to forge it for oneself, there is no help to be got) write in as hard and glittering a manner as possible, and with as strange images as possible—strange, but believed in. Anything to avoid that ghastly wallowing.

(Letters, 116)

The ample quotation from Sitwell is intended to illustrate that this debate over genre not only installed itself along gender lines, inscribing itself in a familiar binary opposition between male Modernists and female poetesses, but cut across gender lines to enforce differences among women poets. In an essay titled “Some Observations on Women's Poetry,” for example, Sitwell praises Rossetti's Goblin Market—“the perfect poem written by a woman” (59)—and censures Barret Browning's Aurora Leigh—“Mrs. Browning used a technique and a manner which is only suitable to a man,” that is, she avoids versification and the control it implies. The result, according to Sitwell, is a kind of ill health in Barrett Browning's poetry that is emblemized by the vision of her “horsehair sofa”: “She is always prostrated and never in fine fighting trim—the pink of condition for a poet” (59). The issue for Sitwell, who, like Meynell, feels “we cannot dispense with our rules,” is to achieve a glittering hardness that will compensate for the sickliness/softness of what Sitwell would call, excepting Sappho, Rossetti, and herself, “women's poetry.” In drawing out the implications and undertext of Sitwell's judgment on Barrett Browning, I mean to expose the bind she is caught in. She is committed both to a separate tradition of women's poetry—“it is of a different kind altogether, needing different subjects and a different technique” (59)—and to outdoing male poets in fashioning a poetics that is anything but wallowing and soft. Her recourse to form, then, was both prescribed and understandably defensive.

Why might women poets be especially susceptible to the (contradictory) criticisms of being too strong/too weak, too rigid/too flabby, too hard/too soft?² Theodore Roszak, in an early discussion of the sexual politics of Modernism, “The Hard and the Soft,” points to the sexual imagery in the discourse of the period more generally, to its obsession with male impotence, sterility, and fears of castration in the face of female strength; that is, he views the contrast of a male and female Modernism in terms of the familiar opposition of his title. Gilbert and Gubar destabilize this binary scheme at the end of their “Tradition and the Female Talent” by suggesting that the “female half of the dialogue is considerably more complicated than the male” because women writers respond to male anxiety with guilt of their own rather than with the heightened competency men fear (204). I would suggest, framing the problem in Sherry Ortner's now famous anthropological terms, that women are always subjected to competing stereotypes: they are both “beneath” culture—too mired in nature to master the codes or poetic forms—and (notably in and after the Victorian period) “upholders of” culture—hence, rigid, conservative, form-bound, repressive of spontaneity and experimentation. The whole idea of the “genteel” against which Modernism defined itself seems to be inextricably bound to these contradictory, even schizophrenic, notions of femininity. One wonders, for example, which of the two Max Beerbohm is censuring in his faint praise of Virginia Woolf's writing for its likeness to her father's: “If he had been a ‘Georgian’ and a woman, just so would he have written” (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, “Tradition,” 183). If gentility in poetry carries the disparaging connotation of soft and female, or worse, not male enough, it can also bear the opposite meaning of conservative and rigid, rhymed, and therefore masculine and hard. Given the impossibility of separating the two valences of the term, it is no wonder that women poets found themselves divided in the debate over genre.

Not only, then, must we contextualize the notion of poetic form during the period known as Modernism—conventional form, although alive and well in genteel Georgian verse, was the bête noire of the Modernist movement in poetry, and therefore, although devalued, comparatively open to women poets. I will also ask that we attend to the differences between the female voices of rear-guard and avant-garde modernism. If we listen to the more traditional meters of Anna Wickham, Charlotte Mew, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Alice Meynell, and even Edith Sitwell (not to mention the some five hundred British women who wrote strong war poetry during the years around 1914) as attentively as we now hear the daring verbal experiments of H.D., Stein, and increasingly Mina Loy, we must renounce, I believe salutarily, any hope for a unitary, global theory of female poetic modernism.³

My polemic must be taken in the context of the ongoing project of Modernism's revisionary history, that is, the critique of the ideology of Modernism from the vantage point of all the new politics—Marxist, feminist, neohistoricist. I could not argue for a reconsideration of Modernism's foreclosed archives, except after and in light of Georg Lukács's essay on Modernist ideology in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, Lillian Robinson's and Lise Vogel's 1971 polemic against the detachment of culture from history in Modernist art and for the study of race, class, and sex as factors of exclusion, and, finally, feminist critical salvaging of H.D., Stein, and Loy from the overwhelmingly masculine domination of the period. Without the work of Susan Stanford Friedman, Rachel DuPlessis, and Cyrena Pondrom on H.D., Catharine Stimpson, Marianne DeKoven, and Shari Benstock on Stein, and Carolyn Burke, Virginia Kouidis, and Roger Conover on Mina Loy, it would not be possible for me to argue for further opening of the canon to women poets. After all, H.D. had to be carried out of the burning city on the shoulders of her literary daughters if Robert Graves's dismissive censure of her is to be considered typical: “The only excuse to be made for those who once found H.D. ‘incomprehensible’ is that her work was so thin, so poor, that its emptiness seemed ‘perfection,’ its insipidity to be concealing a ‘secret,’ its superficiality so ‘glacial’ that it created a false ‘classical atmosphere.’ She was never able, in her temporary immortality, to reach a real climax in any of her poems. … All that they told was a story of feeble personal indecision; and her immortality came to an end so soon that her bluff was never called” (Riding and Graves, 122-23).⁴

But my business is not with the now safely restored H.D., or with Stein, or with Hugh Kenner's canonized Six, on which Modernist board only the sanitized Miss Moore sits as representative female (49-61),⁵ nor even with what Virginia Kouidis calls, making a place for Mina Loy, the “Stein—Pound—Williams—Moore current of modernism” (24). In fact, the hard question I would like to pose is whether we feminist critics, in privileging those female poets who broke form with the boys (even if, as it turned out, they broke form for the boys), have reproduced the preferences of dominant critical discourse and extended the hegemony of an exclusive, in this case antigeneric, prejudice which consigned most women poets to debased use of tired forms. Shouldn't the canonizing of Stein and H.D., like that of Dickinson at the behest of the elegant deconstructors, give us pause, if it is accomplished at the expense of striking poets like Wickham and Mew, Wylie and Meynell, from the Modernist register? Furthermore, linking poetic practice to politics, might our collusion with the aesthetic Aryanism of the Modernist canon and its inevitable tendency to produce elite readers, even when we open that canon to women, amount to an enforcement of its exclusionary politics? Sonia Saldívar-Hull's reading of Stein in another essay in this volume poignantly forces us to confront a Chicana reader's alienation before Stein's racism and classism. How shall we choose to address those moments when Stein—formally and politically—has more in common with William or Henry James, Picasso, or for that matter Jacques Derrida, than with Ma Rainey⁶ or Melanctha? Will the motley multiple determinants of literary modernism—gender, genre, geography, class, race, and sexual preference—finally force us to abandon a specious and essential, although for a time useful, difference between male and female Modernism?

My project here will be to isolate a few instances that roughen up the history of literary Modernism and present a paradox: if, as both Lukács and feminist critics have demonstrated, the radical poetics of Modernism often masks a deeply conservative politics, might it also possibly be true that the seemingly genteel, conservative poetics of women poets whose obscurity even feminists have overlooked might pitch a more radical politics than we had considered possible? I wish, in short, to question the equation both conservative Modernists and radical theorists have made between radical form and radical politics—even a critical theorist like Julia Kristeva might co-conspire in a Modernist hegemony that fetishizes formal experiment. The situation of marginalized modernists such as Wickham, Mew, Townsend Warner, Meynell, and Sitwell has much to tell us not only about the dispersive underside of the Modernist monolith but also about the politics of canonicity and even about inadvertent feminist adherence to a politically suspect hierarchy of genre.

“EXILE BEGINS AS AN APPREHENSION VISITED IN SECRET”

The female affinity for fixed forms has been explained variously—in terms of the woman poet's reproduction of the struggle against cultural containment, of her need to “rein in her strong, unruly feelings” by recourse to formal strictures like the straitjacket of rhyme mentioned above (Fried, 2), finally of formal counter to very real social and sexual marginality. Marianne DeKoven explains female reticence to engage in experimental writing by arguing that “women writers, until, literally, now [with Stein], have been struggling to gain the position which male writers have been free to see as false” (Different Language, xx). Elaine Marks, Susan Gubar, and Elyse Blankley all note the coincidence of Renée Vivien's exotic sexuality with her self-exile into rhymed Alexandrines in an expatriate tongue of a century before, and others suggest that her incarceration in sentimental, imitative verse parallels her bodily anorexia or her imprisonment within the “doomed lesbian” image of the nineteenth century (Faderman, 268). Similarly, Louis Kannenstine, in a massive dismissal of all of Djuna Barnes's early verse, considers that her “conventional use of metre and rhymes was perhaps intended to provide a neutral ground to counter the strain” of her sexual preference (23). I would argue that recourse to convention does not always constitute a desire for constriction—Debra Fried's stunning reading of Millay's sonnets, for example, demonstrates that the freeing-by-binding trope might very well prove more explanatory of male than female formal experiment. Although certain of the vague pastorals sandwiched between stories in Barnes's A Book might have merited Kannenstine's disdain, the rhymed, “matched accentual lines” (Field, 70) of A Book of Repulsive Women do not in my view function as a safety valve or counter to the transgressiveness of the subject matter, nor are they the result of pure “stylistic excess” (Kannenstine, 32). Mina Loy's formal experiments with “Pig Cupid,” “rooting erotic garbage”—sans commas, sans rhyme—seem tame next to the sexual radicalism of Barnes's unnervingly regular, rhymed syllabic verse:

Someday beneath some hard
Capricious star,
Spreading its light a little
Over far,
We'll know you for the woman
That you are,
See you sagging down with bulging
Hair to sip,
The dappled damp from some vague
Under lip,
Your soft saliva, loosed
With orgy, drip.

(“From Fifth Avenue Up,” 1-2)

In short, an alternate sexual politics is surprisingly announced in the Repulsive Women “rhythms”—a politics that would both impose exile and profit by it, a politics that would defiantly set itself up in the conformity of rhyme and meter, a politics that would challenge the heterosexism and homophobia of the dominant Modernist discourse in perfectly rhymed verse. Still, Barnes would shortly, largely as a result of her prose, achieve canonicity among the avant-garde, and her place in the feminist canon will be assured by the publication of Mary Lynn Broe's forthcoming revaluation of Barnes, Silence and Power.

Whereas Barnes's lesbian eroticism may no longer provoke surprise, it does startle to find the following lines in Charlotte Mew's “On the Road to the Sea”: “We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way, / I who make other women smile did not make you” (29). The achieved smile by the end of the poem is associated with dying climactically: “Reeling,—with all the cannons at your ear.” In “The Fête” female sexuality receives equally delicate but nonetheless explicit treatment:

          At first you scarcely saw her face,
          You knew the maddening feet were there,
What called was that half-hidden, white unrest
To which now and then she pressed
          Her finger-tips; but as she slackened pace
And turned and looked at you it grew quite bare:
          There was not anything you did not dare:—

(Warner, 6-7)

“Absence,” perhaps more than any other Mew poem, evokes both delight in female sexuality and conflict over its homoerotic expression. As anatomically suggestive of female anatomy as Sappho's imagery, Mew's adumbration of hooded female pleasures safe from the destructive beat of masculine hooves eases the traditional sapphic concern for a lost maidenhead, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains upon the ground.

In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose
          Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those
Your guarded heart; as safe as they from the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.

(Warner, 47)

But the cost to the post-speaker of answering the call of her female lover's eyes is conveyed in an arresting image of silencing at the hands of Christ:

But call, call, and though Christ stands
          Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So,
I will come—He shall let me go!

Even more unsettling is the morbid but fascinating exploration of enveloping female eroticism in “The Forest Road” (Warner, 20-22), a poem pronounced pathological by a contemporary physician. It is, no less than Shelley's Alastor, a quest for what the speaker thinks is other and learns is in fact same. By the close of each, a binding love tryst gives over to death, as the poet-speaker confronts his/her own soul in the figure of the other. But whereas Shelley's poet's pursuit of an elusive maiden brings him to the grave, “The Forest Road” explores the contours of a female symbiosis that reads simultaneously as ecstasy and death. The poet knows she “could go free” if only she could separate from the other's enlacing hair: “I must unloose this hair that sleeps and dreams / About my face, and clings like the brown weed / To drowned, delivered things.” Trying to quiet her female other, to “hush these hands that are half-awake / Groping for me in sleep,” at the last she cannot separate from her. The image of double suicide that closes the poem marks a mutual female climax as well: as the “dear and wild heart” of the one has been broken in its breast of “quivering snow / With two red stains on it,” the other determines to “strike and tear / Mine out, and scatter it to yours.” In spite of its exploration of the dangers of giving in to the “poor, desolate, desperate hands” of the other, the poem ends ecstatically: “I hear my soul, singing among the trees!” Although Mew's biographers agree that her love for women remained to the end of her days a locus of conflict and psychic pain, her appreciation of female sexuality, in both benign and threatening manifestations, is at the heart of her best poetry.

The violence of “The Forest Road” is balanced by the delicate evocation of autoerotic pleasure in Mew's magnificent “Madeleine in Church.” These lines fairly exult in the capacity for female self-enjoyment apart from the determining sexual presence of an other.

                                                                      I could hardly bear
          The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
                                                  The thick, close voice of musk,
                              The jessamine music on the thin night air,
          Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere—
          The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the
                                                                                scent of my own hair,
Oh, there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat
                                        Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat
          My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.
                                                            I think my body was my soul,
                                                            And when we are made thus
                                                                                Who shall control
Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet

(Warner, 23).

This long poem of over two hundred lines, Mew's best poem, is composed of both varying rhyme schemes and stanza structures; each movement of this dramatic monologue is accompanied and marked by elaborate formal variation. In this section in particular, the incantatory rhythms and the sexual content of the lines invite enormous variation in length and emphasis, whereas other, less dreamlike and more conversational sections call for greater regularity in meter and line length. As a whole, “Madeleine in Church” should be seen as the culmination of a genre, a revision of the Victorian Fallen Woman poem, which Mew appropriates to champion rather than punish female sexuality, a revision informed as much by her own sexual conflicts as by her impatience with traditional mythologies of the “pécheresse” (Mizejewski, 283, 301): Mew gives her modern magdalen both a voice—of which the canon, preferring to describe her, had deprived her—and entitlement to full sexual enjoyment, autoerotic, heterosexual, or lesbian.

Although Virginia Woolf once wrote to Vita Sackville-West that she had just met “Charlotte Mew, (the greatest living poetess),”⁷ critics have only begun to revalue the corpus that Mew's contemporaries, Woolf and Thomas Hardy among them, and even some followers, most notably Marianne Moore, so admired. Val Warner's 1981 reissue of Mew's Collected Poems, accompanied by her complete prose, and Penelope Fitzgerald's tasteful but forcibly limited biography, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends, praised by Brad Leithauser in a kind but still somewhat patronizing review essay on Mew in the New York Review of Books (called “Small Wonder”), have brought her work back to light. Although a number of critics, most notably Leithauser, have singled Mew out for her “indigenous originality” (25), her distinctive voice, they tend to censure her at the same time for her small, unoracular formalism—“her pitch is refined and her scale is modest” (31). When they do attribute to her some “nervy bravado,” they do so for the Hardyesque roughed-up rhythms, the ventriloquistic experiments with dialect, the perseverance of repeated rhyme which Marianne Moore would later make famous and acceptable (Leithauser, 26). In fact, “Madeleine in Church” is anything but regular in rhythm, anything but conventional in line length and stanza form—its enormous formal variety marks its dramatic and sophisticated shifts in tone. Additionally, in their haste to excuse her “measured and unspectacular” production aside the form-shattering norms set by a masculinist Modernism, these critics fail to read beyond what they see as rhythmical familiarity and rhyme to a strikingly unconventional content (Leithauser, 25). But the sexual radicalism of this untypically formal corpus has been overlooked even by feminist critics attuned to Mew's revisionary impulses. Even Linda Mizejewski's sensitive reading of the Fallen Woman poems stops at Mew's poetic protest against heterosexual inscription into femininity. Beyond Mew's personal and idiosyncratic voice, beyond even her occasional generic daring, is an elected erotic politics belied by the shape of the poems.

Not just the experimental female modernists, then, but a good number of those faithful to meter and rhyme as well wrote a poetry of marked sexual preference: Anna Wickham, married mother of four, who developed a passionate attachment to Natalie Barney late in her life, freely admitting to her “biting lust” (Writings, 46); Charlotte Mew, pictured in her Collected Poems in full cross-dress, a would-be lover of novelist May Sinclair; Sylvia Townsend Warner, who copublished Whether a Dove or a Seagull with her lover, effacing the distinction of authorship from the face of the poems in a perfect emblem of their symbiosis (Marcus, 59); and even Edith Sitwell, probably asexual but certainly galvanized by her intense relationship with her governess, Helen Rootham. Each shares a politics with the more critically fashionable Barnes, coding in what we have learned to call conventional poetry the secret exile of sexual preference.

“ONE STEPS ABOARD; / THE BOAT SLOWLY / ABANDONS THE PORT / AND NOTHING HAS CHANGED”

Anna Wickham, like her contemporary Charlotte Mew, has lapsed into obscurity for reasons that have everything to do with the form of her verse and the manner of her dress—Harold Acton, for example, found her poetry as unfashionable as her person (Smith, 2). Unlike Mina Loy, whose elegance after four babies was continually remarked, Wickham was large and haphazard in appearance (gypsylike if the critics were feeling kind). She once deliberately wore a wool jumper to an affair at which Edith Sitwell was sure to show up in gold brocade. Charlotte Mew always wore a tweed topcoat over her often frankly masculine dress and sported a “felt pork-pie hat put on very straight” (Monro, viii). Wickham was prolific (nearly fourteen hundred poems in twenty years) where Mew was spare (her first book came out in 1916, when she was nearly fifty), yet both wrote overtly feminist poetry that was highly recognized in its day. Thomas Hardy called Charlotte Mew “far and away the best living woman poet—who will be read when others are forgotten” (quoted in Fitzgerald, 174), and Anna Wickham had by 1932 an international reputation—anthologies of the day printed more of her poems than those of Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, and in some volumes, even William Butler Yeats (Smith, 23). Neither Wickham nor Mew had anything like a formal education and no formal study of poetry, although Wickham's father apparently made her promise to become a poet. Mew destroyed everything that might constitute a record of her life except for the few pieces that make up her Collected Poems and some stories, and most of Wickham's papers and letters were lost during the 1943 bombing of her Hampstead home. Both Wickham and Mew questioned the church, but whereas Wickham's revisionary supplication of the feminized deity poignantly redresses banishment—“In nameless, shapeless God found I my rest, / Though for my solace I build God a breast”—Mew's resignation, in “Madeleine in Church,” is complete—“I do not envy Him His victories, His arms are full of broken things” (Warner, 26). Finally, both Wickham and Mew committed suicide. The indignity of Mew's death by the ingestion of disinfectant was matched only by the carelessness of her obituary: “Charlotte New, said to be a writer” (Monro, xii). Wickham's fate is as banal: The London Picture Post did a feature on her in 1946 called “The Poet Landlady” (Smith, 28).

A closer look at the life's work of the colorful Wickham, a free-spirited, half-working-class Australian émigrée, who began her career as an opera singer and then divided her life between London and Paris, might cause us to agree with Stanley Kunitz that the neglect of Anna Wickham is “one of the great mysteries of contemporary literature” (quoted in Wickham, Writings, front blurb, n.p.). A pacifist who nonetheless supported the Great War effort, a deprived and unhappy wife who remained faithful to her husband during the entire course of their tumultuous relationship until his death, an acquaintance of Pound, Barnes, D. H. Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas who was as comfortable in a London pub as she was on the fashionable Left Bank, a staunch feminist and supporter of women's rights who harbored a masochistic sexuality founded in mother-lack and Catholic education, Wickham was an exciting mass of contradictions of which her poetry is the record. Her Australian childhood offered freedoms unknown to Englishwomen and seems to have stamped Wickham with a robust sense of sexual entitlement, a view of social inequity, and an authentic personal voice, all of which set her apart from other women poets of that period. For all the exhilaration of her Australian exile, however, the return to England and her sensitivity to inequities of class heightened her sense of herself as an outsider. The social rivalry between her mother's and father's families finds its way into poems like “Descent of Dorelia” and “The Little Old House.” And her own marriage into a family of aristocratic birth initiated her into the oppression of the female spirit in Victorian bourgeois culture. The rhyme scheme and alternating meter of the following poem sets off rather than contains the rage of “Nervous Prostration”:

I married a man of the Croydon class
When I was twenty-two.
And I vex him, and he bores me
Till we don't know what to do!
It isn't good form in the Croydon class
To say you love your wife,
So I spend my days with the tradesmen's books
And pray for the end of life. …
I married a man of the Croydon class
When I was twenty-two.
And I vex him, and he bores me
Till we don't know what to do!
And as I sit in his ordered house,
I feel I must sob or shriek,
To force a man of the Croydon class
To live, or to love, or to speak!

(210)

There is defiance in the emphasis of the rhyme scheme and not a little irony in its metrical regularity. The poem is closer to folk balladry than to the genteel metrics of the Croydon class; we might even term it deliberately low-bred, even doggerel, a formal as well as political spoof on bourgeois values. This poem, “Dedication of the Cook,” “The Angry Woman,” “Definition,” “The Wife,” “All Men to Women,” “Divorce,” and “The Song of the Low-Caste Wife” criticize prevailing domestic politics, especially in their analysis of sexual difference within the culture that Wickham, marginalized by caste and country as well as gender, could see clearly as triple outsider. Wickham's formal conventionality is often the very vehicle of her poetic politics: her forced rhymes are meant to be funny and irreverent and to set off the political conflicts of which her poetry is made; they should not merely be read as unsophisticated concessions to the popular conventions of the day. “Meditation at Kew,” outlining a poignant but humorous utopian program for marital reform, is the poetic version of her 1938 feminist manifesto, The League for the Protection of the Imagination of Women. Slogan: World's Management by Entertainment (Smith, 27).

Alas! for all the pretty women who marry dull men,
Go into the suburbs and never come out again,
Who lose their pretty faces and dim their pretty eyes,
Because no one has skill or courage to organize.
What do pretty women suffer when they marry?
They bear a boy who is like Uncle Harry,
A girl who is like Aunt Eliza, and not new,
These old dull races must breed true.
I would enclose a common in the sun,
And let the young wives out to laugh and run;
I would steal their dull clothes and go away,
And leave the pretty naked things to play.

(45)

Wickham's poems range from feminist pieces on marital relations and on the conflict between mothering and writing, to analyses of the domination of one class by another as in “Laura Grey,” “Comments of Kate the Cook,” “The Butler and the Gentleman,” “Daughter of the Horse-Leech,” and “Woman to a Philosopher.” “Song of the Low-Caste Wife,” unlike “Meditation at Kew,” is rhythmically uneven and unrhymed, but it is no less than revolutionary in its analysis of the healthful dilution of the bloodline, its dramatization of the rift between herself and the women of her husband's family and class, its claim for “new myths” on the brains of “new men” mothered by underclass women, its valorization of lust and energy, change and growth, over “old glories” and “dead beauty.”

What have you given me for my strong sons?
O scion of kings!
In new veins the blood of old kings runs cold.
Your people thinking of old victories, lose the lust of conquest,
Your men guard what they have,
Your women nurse their silver pots,
Dead beauty mocks hot blood!
What shall these women conceive of their chill loves
But still more pots?
But I have conceived of you new men;
Boys brave from the breast,
Running and striving like no children of your house
And with their brave new brains
Making new myths.
My people were without while yours were kings,
They sang the song of exile in low places
And in the stress of growth knew pain.
The unprepared world pressed hard upon them,
Women bent beneath burdens, while cold struck babes,
But they arose strong from the fight,
Hungry from their oppression.
And I am full of lust,
Which is not stayed with your old glories.
Give me for all old things that greatest glory.
A little growth.

(165)

“The Angry Wife” is similarly unremarkable in its formal aspects but trenchant in its analysis of motherhood as both experience and institution. The poem first describes marriage in political terms—“If sex is a criterion for power, and never strength / What do we gain by union?” (202)—and then protests the institutional version of parenting which issues from that sexual politics, necessitating the (male) child's revolt against the mother.

I am not mother to abstract Childhood, but to my son,
And how can I serve my son, but to be much myself.
My motherhood must boast some qualities,
For as motherhood is diverse
So shall men be many charactered
And show variety, as this world needs. …
Why should dull custom make my son my enemy
So that the privilege of his manhood is to leave my house?

(203)

“The Fired Pot” is a representative Wickham poem, combining personally registered awareness of the suffering of others with her characteristic directness about her own experience. In this poem, as in “The Song of the Low-Caste Wife,” she claims a right to her own sexual desire; here, as in that poem as well, lust is a motivating energy that propels action and promotes change. In the monotonous life of the town she describes, it is, even when unconsummated, a mode of survival.

In our town, people live in rows.
The only irregular thing in a street is the steeple;
And where that points to, God only knows,
And not the poor disciplined people!
And I have watched the women growing old,
Passionate about pins, and pence, and soap,
Till the heart within my wedded breast grew cold,
And I lost hope.
But a young soldier came to our town,
He spoke his mind most candidly.
He asked me quickly to lie down,
And that was very good for me.
For though I gave him no embrace—
Remembering my duty—
He altered the expression of my face,
And gave me back my beauty.

(47)

The reference to duty here is probably to the bounden husband to whom Wickham professed lifelong fidelity, but a humorous interpretation of those lines would not be uncharacteristic of her. She may in fact be referring to the wartime decree, under the Defense of the Realm Act, that it was a penal offense to communicate a venereal disease to a soldier.⁸

Finally, in “The Mill,” the concord of heart at one with specific, palpably felt environment is expressed by means of a regularized rhyme scheme, the purposive flowing of alternating rhyme into matched concluding couplets.

I hid beneath the covers of the bed,
And dreamed my eyes were lovers
On a hill that was my head.
They looked down over the loveliest country I have seen,
Great fields of red-brown earth hedged round with green.
In these enclosures I could see
The high perfection of fertility,
I knew there were sweet waters near to feed the land,
I heard the churning of a mill on my right hand,
I woke to breathlessness with a quick start,
And found my mill the beating of your heart.

(48)

I do not mean to suggest that the enormously uneven Wickham corpus remains undiscovered as a pretext of literary Modernism. Mew must be admitted to the canon as an overlooked treasure of the period, while Wickham remains important for reasons other than either experimentalism or formalism in verse. I would, however, like to see the personal and material specificity of “The Mill” have its history among our modernisms, reflecting—alongside Eliot's phlegmatic portrayals of deceptive lovers, Joyce's spoofs on the magazine romanticism of the day, Loy's send-ups of the masculine sexual principle, and Barnes's decadent New Woman poems—its own particular vision, neither ironized nor sentimental, of the way we loved then.

“NO ONE COMES AFTER YOU / IN THIS RAIN.”

When Wickham writes at the head of her extraordinary autobiography: “I am a woman artist and the story of my failure should be known” (52), she compels the rereading I urge upon us here, not only to account for her disappearance from the annals of Modernism but also to understand the politics of our collusion as feminist critics in that exile. Wickham's poems of class consciousness are a salutary addition to a Modernist canon insufficiently concerned with the differentials of class and ethnicity. And next to Mina Loy's explorations of the decadent “Café du Néant” we will want to place Charlotte Mew's poems of France, among them “Pécheresse” and “Le Sacré-Coeur,” “Monsieur qui Passe,” and the Madeleine poem mentioned above, all of which analyze the uses to which female sexuality is put: “Une jolie fille à vendre, très cher, / A thing of gaiety, a thing of sorrow, / Bought to-night, possessed, and tossed / Back to the mart again tomorrow” (Warner, 31). Mew also wrote a handful of war poems during the years 1915-19, which are among the most iconoclastic and feminist of that period: rhymed, metered, and divided conventionally into stanzas, “The Cenotaph” and “May 1915” are pacifist hymns that re-member the “young, piteous, murdered face[s]” of the war dead by giving voice to grieving women, those “watchers by lonely hearths” who “from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled” (Warner, 35).

Similarly, our analysis of Stein's linguistic iconoclasm should not eclipse Sitwell's accentual and rhythmic experiments. She set herself against the Georgian tradition of the day and counted herself among those Modernist poets who sought a reflection of the disintegration of Europe in their disruption of conventional form, although literary history has not preserved her inclusion. For all the ornamentation of her verse and person, the idiosyncratic nursery vocabulary of the early poems, and the lapidary persistence of her imagery, Sitwell also wrote some of the best poems we have about World War II. “Gold Coast Customs,” “Still Falls the Rain,” and “A Mother to Her Dead Child” (Collected Poems, 237-52, 272, 286), representatively, reach beyond the Chinoiserie for which she has been limitingly known, beyond the occasion of the poems themselves—the devastating air raids of 1940—to broad cultural criticism for which she has been inadequately recognized.

Our work must also include greater attention to comparison among women writers, especially across the Modernist barrier of form. We must, for example, continue to read H.D. in context of other women poets, not merely as that Pound-fashioned founder of Imagism resultingly isolated from less “fashionable” women poets. Alice Meynell's revisionary maternal theology, for example, admittedly conventional in its formal expression, bears comparison with H.D.'s feminized mythologies: Meynell's “Aenigma Christi” revises the mother-and-male-child configuration by centering upon the mother—“Yet I saw the whole / Eternal, infinite Christ within the one / Small mirror of her soul” (Poems, 195)—in much the way that H.D. encircles Mary at the end of Trilogy. Similarly, Meynell engaged head-on with the experience of World War I in her “Parentage” and “A Father of Women: Ad Sororem E.B.” by aligning destruction with the patriarchal fathers and refiguring the place of the feminine in a reconstructed cultural ideology in much the way that H.D. maternally salvages the postwar wasteland in Trilogy. Although Meynell was of aristocratic birth, a devout, converted Catholic, and a happily married mother of eight, and H.D., by contrast, lived an expatriate life on the margins of conventional sexual and professional choices, both were ardent feminists with uncannily similar strategies for revising inherited mythologies. Our failure to read H.D. and Meynell together for the possibilities comparison offers enforces a masculinist Modernist prejudice against the practice of all but experimental form.

The differences among women modernists, particularly as established across the divide of poetic form, encourage us to think of genre, not as a pure, hypostasized, aesthetic category, but instead as a highly textured, overdetermined site of political contention, a literary space constructed often ex post facto from the conflicting materials of critical, political, racial, and sexual bias. A function of gender and geography, of class as well as critical consciousness, of exile at times imposed and at others elected, poetic genre not only divides male from female authors in the period we have come to call Modernism. I will argue in closing that, as a conflictual site, genre itself might serve as that Archimedean point of contradiction and comparison Myra Jehlen imagined in her “Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” that necessary ground we stand so as to question our own assumptions. But Jehlen's scheme now requires revision: it is no longer the contrast between men's and women's writing that will save us from critical solipsism but the “radical comparativism” among women writers which we have just begun to practice, a comparativism alert to the politics of exile and exclusion that still underwrites canonicity.

Notes

1. See Gilbert and Gubar, “Tradition and the Female Talent,” for similar examples of sadistic imagery in short stories by male Modernist writers.

2. I am grateful to Lisa Ruddick for encouraging me to deepen my analysis of this point and for suggesting the anthropological reading of the woman (modernist) poet's bind.

3. My polemic throughout this essay is the dismantling of a monolithic Modernism defined by its iconoclastic irreverence for convention and form, a difference that has contributed to the marginalization of women poets during the period and even division among them, a difference I have taken care to signal by substituting the plural and uncapitalized “modernisms” for “Modernism” as a marker of such omissions and exclusions. It is my contention, shared by Susan Stanford Friedman in her unpublished essay, “Forbidden Fruits of Lesbian Experimentation,” that the “presumed chasm between experimental and realist writing is misleading for the study of women's writing” (2). I also suggest that although a certain stylistic designation is lost if we open up Modernism to anything written between 1910 and 1940, we lose in at least equal measure if we restrict that literary critical marker of periodization to experimental writing alone. We lose, in short, all the other modernisms against which a single strain of white, male, international Modernism has achieved such relief.

4. Riding has since repudiated collaborative solidarity with Graves's position on “woman.” See her response to John Wain's review of volume 1 of Richard Perceval Graves's (Robert Graves's nephew) study of the poet (“Taking His Measure,” 59-60).

5. Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop are the only women poets to be embraced unreservedly by the male Modernist establishment in a token stroke of inclusion that isolates them from other women poets. As a counter to Kenner's canonization of Miss Moore for her muscularity of style, her minimalism, her daring verbal experimentalism, in short, her “hardness” as a poet, I would direct the reader to Bonnie Costello's repositioning of Moore as a modernist. Rescuing her from Eliot's, Jarrell's, Blackmur's, and Ransom's approval of her “ladylikeness,” Costello regenders Moore as a woman poet. Adrienne Rich, too, notes that “the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet” (“Re-Vision,” in Lies, 39). Equally dangerous to women writers of this period is their reverse idealization—for their “ladyhood,” or ethereal softness—in such articles as Earl Rovit's patronizing “Our Lady-Poets of the Twenties,” published in 1980 and seemingly in ignorance of feminist criticism on Teasdale, Millay, Moore, and others. It is precisely this marginalization which Sitwell resists in the passages I quote above.

6. My allusion here is to the compelling peroration of Catharine Stimpson in a paper read at MLA (New York, 1986) on Stein and Moore. After establishing the links between them in a comparative move which I worry was meant to lend Stein credibility and status by comparison with the already credentialed Modernist Moore, Stimpson pays final, exhortative lip service to Stein's contemporary Ma Rainey, whose “laughter” and “songs” on another continent “also engendered Modernism.” In fact, Stimpson's has been admittedly a “Tale of Three”—Stein, Moore, and the father whose gaze they both returned, Henry James. I worry similarly that the three panels organized by the 1986 Division of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature—“(En)Gendering Modernism: Gertrude Stein, H.D., Marianne Moore”; “Intertextual Modernism: H.D., Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein”; and “Disrupting Difference(s): Getrude Stein and Marianne Moore”—may inadvertently erect a complementary Modernist canon to the one already in place: retroactively gendered but inadequately flexible generically as to include Ma Rainey's exuberantly uncanonical blues rhythms and Mew's and Wickham's unexpectedly unconventional politics. My concern for the way an alternative canon might be positioned and co-opted does not displace my recognition of the difficulty feminist critics faced in getting Stein and H.D. into the canon in the first place.

   I do not mean here to establish a simple equation between left wing politics and less experimental formal stances. Although not all Modernist experiments in form are uniformly tied to right wing sentiments, most that are happen to be male. For Woolf and H.D., however, most notably, the notion of breaking sentence and sequence was a way of rupturing political assumptions of great pertinacity and of making a radical criticism of power and status. I do not mean to imply, by asking that we review the work of less experimental poets of the period, that such leftward critiques remain the exclusive province of non-experimenters, but rather to include within our feminist rewriting of periodization poets who were not compelled, stylistically speaking, to “make it new.” It is not that the sentence-breaking, female-authored works of that period necessarily collude with a reactionary politics, but that restriction of feminist critical interest to experimentalists may inadvertently work to reify Modernism as a term.

7. Woolf presumably met Mew at the bedside of Hardy's wife, Florence (Diary, 2:319 and n. 9; Letters, 2:140), and therefore we might conclude that the opinion of Mew's reputation, added parenthetically, might be that of Hardy, approved by Woolf herself. Earlier in the Letters, however, Woolf writes to R. C. Trevelyan that she has “got Charlotte Mews book” [The Farmer's Bride]. “I think her very good and interesting and unlike anyone else” (2:419).

8. I am grateful to Angela Ingram for sharing this insight.

I use the expression politics of exclusion to stand for a complex process by which women poets are exiled from canonical representation by both traditional critics and feminists. The term was first used, but differently, by Gayatri Spivak (276), to describe “moments on the edges or borders” of critical theories at which the “ideological trace” remains of their need to exclude the other to preserve identity or sameness. This essay was first presented at a 1986 MLA Division Meeting on Twentieth-Century English Literature, “Women Writers in Exile III: The Female Diaspora—(Dis)Placement and Difference.” I thank Jane Marcus for inviting me to write on this topic and for her scrupulous attention to an early draft, and Susan Stanford Friedman, Lisa Ruddick, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and the editors of this collection for valuable suggestions on subsequent versions. Shari Benstock and Susan Hastings generously shared personal copies of primary materials from European collections.

The three section heads are taken from a Michèle Murray poem, “Internal Emigrations,” a meditation on the various forms the experience of expatriation takes—racial, sexual, cultural, and geographical.

Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna. “From Fifth Avenue Up.” In A Book of Repulsive Women. Guido Bruno Chapbooks 2, 6, November 1915, pp. 1-2.

———. Ladies Almanack. 1928. Facs. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Benstock, Shari. “Beyond the Reaches of Feminist Criticism: A Letter from Paris.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (Spring-Fall 1984): 5-27.

———. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

Blankley, Elyse. “Return to Mytilène: Renée Vivien and the City of Women.” In Women Writers and the City, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, 45-67. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Bodenheim, Maxwell. “The Decorative Straight-Jacket: Rhymed Verse.” Little Review 1 (December 1914): 22-23.

Burke, Carolyn. “‘Accidental Aloofness’: Barnes, Loy and Modernism.” In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming.

———. “Becoming Mina Loy.” Women's Studies 7 (1980): 137-50.

———. “Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship.” In Writing and Sexual Difference, edited by Elizabeth Abel, 221-42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

———. “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy.” In Coming To Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, 37-57. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985.

———. “Without Commas: Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy.” Poetics Journal 4 (1984): 43-52.

Conover, Roger, ed. and Intro. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Highlands, N.C.: Jargon, 1982.

Costello, Bonnie. “The ‘Feminine’ Language of Marianne Moore.” In Women and Language in Literature and Society, edited by Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman, 222-38. New York: Praeger, 1980.

DeKoven, Marianne. A Different Language: Gertrude Stein's Experimental Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.

———. “Gertrude Stein and Modern Painting: Beyond Literary Cubism.” Contemporary Literature 22 (1981): 81-95.

DuPlessis, Rachel. “Romantic Thralldom and ‘Subtle Genealogies’ in H.D.” In Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: William Morris, 1981.

Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. New York: Putnam's, 1983.

Fifer, Elizabeth. “Is Flesh Advisable? The Interior Theater of Gertrude Stein.” Signs 4 (Spring 1979): 472-83.

Fitzgerald, Penelope. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. London: Collins, 1984.

Fried, Debra. “Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay's Sonnets.” Twentieth Century Literature 32 (Spring 1986): 1-22.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Forbidden Fruits of Lesbian Experimentation.” Paper presented at the Modern Language Association, Chicago, Illinois, December 1985.

———. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Gilbert, Sandra. “Soldier's Heart: Literary Men, Literary Women, and the Great War.” Signs 8 (Winter 1982): 422-50.

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

———. “Tradition and the Female Talent.” In The Poetics of Gender, edited by Nancy K. Miller, 183-207. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Glück, Louise. “Hyacinth.” In The Triumph of Achilles, 14-15. New York: Ecco, 1985.

Gubar, Susan. “Sapphistries.” Signs 10 (Autumn 1984): 43-62.

Hastings, Susan. “Two of the Weird Sisters: The Eccentricities of Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4 (Spring 1985): 101-22.

Jehlen, Myra. “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism.” In Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, edited by Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Rosaldo, and Barbara Gelpi, 189-216. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Kammer, Jeanne. “The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry.” In Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 153-64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979.

Kannenstine, Louis. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York University Press, 1977.

Kenner, Hugh. “The Making of the Modernist Canon.” Chicago Review 34 (1984): 49-61.

Kouidis, Virginia. Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Leithauser, Brad. “Small Wonder.” Review of Fitzgerald's Charlotte Mew and Her Friends. New York Review of Books, January 15, 1987, pp. 25-31.

Lukács, Georg. “The Ideology of Modernism.” The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. Translated by John Mander and Necke Mander. London: Merlin, 1963.

Marcus, Jane. “The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War and Madness: Is There a Feminist Fetishism?” In The Differences Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, edited by Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker, 49-81. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989.

Marks, Elaine. “Lesbian Intertextuality.” In Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, edited by George Stambolian and Elaine Marks, 353-77. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

Meynell, Alice. The Poems of Alice Meynell. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.

Mizejewski, Linda. “Charlotte Mew and the Unrepentant Magdalene: A Myth in Transition.” Tulsa Studies in Literature and Language 26 (Fall 1984): 282-302.

Monro, Alida. “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir.” In Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew. London: Duckworth, 1953.

Morse, Samuel French. “The Rediscovery of Mina Loy and the Avant-Garde.” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 2 (Spring-Summer 1961): 12-19.

Murray, Michèle. “Internal Emigrations.” Women's Studies 7 (1980): 210-11.

Perloff, Marjorie. “Poetry as Word-System: The Art of Gertrude Stein.” American Poetry Review 8 (1979): 33-43.

Pondrom, Cyrena. “H.D. and the Origins of Modernism.” Sagetrieb 4 (Spring 1985): 75-100.

Ransom, John Crowe. “The Poet as Woman.” In The World's Body. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1938.

Reilly, Catherine, ed. Scars upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago, 1981.

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979.

Riding, Laura. “Taking His Measure.” New York Review of Books, September 24, 1987, pp. 59-60.

———, and Robert Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.

Robinson, Lillian, and Lise Vogel. “Modernism and History.” New Literary History 3 (Autumn 1971): 177-99.

Roszak, Theodore. “The Hard and the Soft.” In Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women, edited by Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak, 87-104. New York: Harper, 1969.

Rovit, Earl. “Our Lady-Poets of the Twenties.” Southern Review 16 (January 1980): 65-85.

Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Wrestling Your Ally: Stein, Racism, and Feminist Critical Practice,” in this volume.

Salter, Elizabeth, and Allanah Harper. Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind. New York: Vanguard, 1976.

Schlack, Beverly Ann. “The ‘Poetess of Poets’: Alice Meynell Rediscovered.” Women's Studies 7 (1980): 111-26.

Sitwell, Edith. Collected Poems. London: Macmillan, 1957.

———. “Modernist Poets.” Echanges 2 (June 1930): 78.

———. “Some Observations on Women's Poetry: A Defense of the Theory That Male Technique Is Entirely Unsuitable to the Poetry of Women.” Vogue (London) 65 (March 1925): 59.

———. “To Maurice Bowra, January 24, 1944.” In Selected Letters, edited by John Lehmann and Derek Parker, 116-17. London: Macmillan, 1970.

Smith, R. D. Introduction. The Writings of Anna Wickham. London: Virago, 1984.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Politics of Interpretations.” Critical Inquiry 9 (September 1982): 259-78.

Stimpson, Catharine. “Gertrice/Altrude: Stein, Toklas, and the Paradox of the Happy Marriage.” In Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners, edited by Ruth Perry and Martine Brownley, 123-39. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1984.

———. “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein.” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 491-506.

———. “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein.” Poetics Today 6 (1985): 67-80.

———. “Women Writers and the Avant-Garde.” Paper presented at the Modern Language Association, New York, New York, December 1986.

Warner, Val. Introduction. Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose. Manchester: Carcanet (Virago), 1981.

Wickham, Anna. The Writings of Anna Wickham. Edited and Introduction by R. D. Smith. London: Virago, 1984.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 2. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

———. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Hogarth, 1976, 1977.