The Faber Book of 20th Century Women's Poetry

by Fleur Adcock

Gathers poems by Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Edna St Vincent Millay, Lou Bogan, Stevie Smith, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and Margaret Atwood.

Genres: Poetry, Anthologies

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet and editor. Of English and Northern Irish ancestry, Adcock lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.

Reviews

[Ruby · Rating 5 out of 5]

thanks polly!! i love women

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating anthology of 20th century poetry up to 1987 written by women.

The anthology includes poems by 64 writers born between 1869 (Charlotte Mew) and 1945 (Selima Hill). Twenty seven of the poets were born in Britain, twenty three in the USA, four each in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and two in Ireland. No poets from Africa, India, Pakistan or the Caribbean are included. Only two of the poets are identified as “Black” and both are from the USA (Gwendolyn Brooks and June Jordan). They are arranged chronologically by date of birth.

In my opinion, the best known writers included in this anthology of poetry are Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Bartlett, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, H. D., Elizabeth Jennings, Denise Levertov, Edna St Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich. Edith Sitwell, and Stevie Smith. A quick check reveals notable absences from the same time frame as the poets in anthology which include Gertrude Stein (Adcock states that she “...has been omitted, on the grounds that her true medium was prose, not poetry” -a very debatable proposition), Maya Angelou, Amy Lowell, Anne Sexton (“...in the past”, Adcock says “I read her work with sympathy, but now it strikes me as excessively derivative...”), Rae Armantrout (although in this case Armantrout was born in 1947, two years after Adcock's admittedly arbitrary cutoff year of 1945), and Alice Notley from the USA, Una Marson and Olive Senior from Jamaica, and Sarojini Naidu from India.

Of course, selection criteria can always be criticized, nitpicked or faulted and all sorts of questions can be raised as to why a particular author or poem was included or excluded from any anthology as general as this one is. Fleur Adcock clearly states in her careful and well-written introduction that:

My aim in this book has been not to illustrate a thesis or propound a view but to show how many good and interesting women poets have been writing in English during the course of [the twentieth century...W]omen have been involved in the currents and movements as little or as much as men, and have been as various[...] I have set out to present here a healthy sample of poets whose work is capable of being appreciated on its own merits.

Adcock goes on to spell out what this means and, for instance, why she includes much more poems by Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Stevie Smith than other authors. She also warns that:

I have glanced at a few of the more prominent figures in a richly crowded field. This century has produced many hundreds of women poets writing in English (let alone in other languages which are not my province here). I have therefore had to be cruelly selective. As my intention is to some extent historical I have concentrated on not leaving too many gaps in the earlier parts of the century rather than on filling in its most recent decades.

One of the best things about the anthology is the irony, wit and surprises that sparkle in many of the poems. Take for example Muriel Rukeyser's Myth:

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelt a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?” “You gave the 
wrong answer,” said the Sphinx. “But that was what 
made everything possible,” said Oedipus. “No,” she said.
“When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include women
too. Everyone knows that.” She said, “That's what 
you think.

Elma Mitchell's sardonic Thoughts after Ruskin, U. A. Fanthorpe's Not my best side, Wendy Cope's hilarious A policeman's lot, her ingenious satire Waste Land Limericks, or Jane Cooper's a poem with capital letters:

john berryman asked me to write a poem about roosters.
elizabeth bishop, he said, once wrote a poem about roosters.
do your poems use capital letters? he asked. like god?
i said. god, no, he said, like princeton, and i thought,
o john berryman, what has brought me into this company of poets
where the masculine thing to do is use capital letters
and even princeton struts like one of god's betters?

or Carol Rumens' piercing Geography Lesson:

Here we have the sea of children; here
A tiny piece of Europe with dark hair.
She's crying. I am sitting next to her.

Thirty yellow suns blobbed on cheap paper,
Thirty skies blue as Smith's salt-wrapper
Are fading in the darkness of this weeper.

She's Czechoslovakia. And all the desks
Are shaking now. The classroom windows cracks
And melts. I've caught her sobs like chicken-pox.

Czechoslovakia, though I've never seen
Your cities, I have somehow touched your skin.
You're all the hurt geography I own.

Reading this historical and important anthology was, for me, a rich voyage of discovery (Charlotte Mew, Anna Wickham, Frances Cornford, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, Josephine Miles, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Avison, Elma Mitchell, May Swenson, Gwen Harwood, Jane Cooper, Anne Szumigalski, Freda Downie, U. A. Fanthorpe, Jenny Joseph, June Jordan, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Wendy Cope, Selima Hill) and rediscovery (H.D., Elizabeth Bartlett, Elizabeth Jennings, Sylva Plath, Margaret Atwood, Louise Glück). I strongly urge any reader interested in poetry in delving into this wonderful volume.

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing wrong with this book, poetry just isn't for me. Sylvia Plath's were my favourite

[Hakon Soreide · Rating 3 out of 5]

Apart from the accidentally sexist title – and the irony of biggest section in the book being poems by someone who was against gender-based categories in art and specifically against inclusion in a collection such as this – there are many good pieces, even great ones, but also surprisingly many far less so. It is a surprise when an anthology gets to pick and choose, often just including a single poem from many of the authors.

I also wonder if Elizabeth Bishop wasn't the only poet or estate objecting to the concept, thus leading to the omission of many better poets from the selection.

Whatever the case might be, the quality is too variable, and I don't feel the anthology fulfils whatever intention its concept might have been. It certainly feels like a man's idea of bandwagon jumping on to second-wave feminism without understanding what it was and almost a decade too late.

Of course, when this book was published, and still today, the publishing industry is dominated by white men, whose main concern has become almost entirely to make as much money as possible. Some pandering and bandwagon jumping is to be expected.

We still don't have to like it.

[Mollz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was gifted this anthology by my Grandma from England... a lovely selection of women's poetry.

[Karolina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a passionately collated anthology, carefully organised to include sixty-four writers born between 1869 and 1945, and comprises of 225 complete poems. it is a fascinating anthology chronologically showcasing women's poetic evolution in the 20th century.

In the introduction, Adcock argues that there is "no particular tradition" to distinguish women's poetry from that of men. She writes, "What is different about poetry by women, of course, is not its nature but the fact that until recently it has been undervalued and to some extent neglected."

My personal favourite find was Anne Szumigalski, her poetry was by far the most contemporary and so ahead of her time.

[Snufkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent selection that lead to many more purchases!