Crazy Jane Talks with the Bog Queen: Performing Gender through Female Voices in Selected Poems by Yeats and Heaney Anonymous College

Western literature has long been dominated by an imposing patriarchal vision, privileging the voices of men in creating written records of their experiences, commonly centered around conventional heterosexual desire and affluent “artist” upbringings. Within the literary tradition of poetry, particularly among 20th century poets, male speakers observe their environments within a decidedly patriarchal context, using male speakers or masculine voices to express political frustration, lament over physical and emotional hardships, demonstrate general ennui or dissatisfaction over the state of the world, or dramatize the pain of unrequited love. Male speakers throughout the tradition of poetry often enforce conventional gender roles, relegating the women they admire or romance to a passive position of muse, existing solely as a source for the male speaker to extract traits conventionally associated with femininity, such as physical beauty, gentleness, and compassion. Through an attempt to expand scholarly recognition and awareness of marginalized voices in various literary traditions, it is important to examine prominent male poets who choose to adopt the female voice in their poetry and question when and why they assume a female...