In the 20th century women made significant contributions to the genre of poetry and began to win major prizes, take up prominent positions in academia, and write criticism and scholarly work in their field. While patriarchal prejudices still lingered and women were often ignored, condescended to, or marginalized, progress was certainly made.
In the first couple decades of the new century, female poets began to challenge their subordinate status in the literary world, contribute their work more prolifically to publications, explore and experiment with form and content, and engage with the modernist movement. Amy Lowell distinguished herself as an Imagist poet and also for her increasingly open and erotic evocations of lesbian love. She was attacked by Ezra Pound for her attempts to infuse Imagist elements into modernism, and that disapprobation, combined with other, more personal attacks on her looks and sexual orientation led to diminished popularity. She did, however, win the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, a year after her death.
Hilda Doolittle, or H.D. as she preferred to be called, traveled to Europe as a young woman and never returned. She wrote spare, lucid, and vivid poems and was supported by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. She was also close friends with Marianne Moore and promoted her career.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was known for her political radicalism and feminism, and was associated with leftists in Greenwich Village, where she settled in 1917 after college. Her poems often dealt with issues of female sexuality and identity, as well as current events such as the 1927 criminal case against Sacco and Vanzetti, a rallying point for radicals.
Dorothy Parker was born in humble circumstances but later joined an elite literary circle, the Algonquin Round Table. Her witty, incisive verse and short stories had a realist bent; they skewered the pretensions of all manner of people and represented her keen observational eye. She also wrote frankly of the discrimination women faced.
Elizabeth Bishop was a friend, correspondent, and fervent admirer of Marianne Moore’s, and Moore had a large influence on the younger poet. Bishop primarily published in the 1940s-1960s, and she won numerous awards. Robert Lowell said of her, “Elizabeth Bishop is the contemporary poet that I admire most...There's a beautiful completeness to all of Bishop's poetry. I don't think anyone alive has a better eye than she had: The eye that sees things and the mind behind the eye that remembers."
During mid-century Sylvia Plath distinguished herself as a poet of incredible ingenuity. Her luminous and sharp verses were full of abstruse and illusionistic meanings. She married another poet, Ted Hughes, and found her domestic life deadening and difficult. She wrote copious amounts of poetry, though, as well as the revered novel The Bell Jar (1963); her poems and the novel address issues of depression, gender, identity, and the creative and aesthetic impulses.
Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, which she earned in 1950. She lived almost her whole adult life in Chicago and was a keen observer of her community. In the 1960s she began to embrace a more radical perspective and entitled a work of poetry from this era In the Mecca. In the late 1960s and 1970s Nikki Giovanni also articulated the reality of being a black woman in America, calling attention to the history of her race and issues of revolution, love, and violence.
This and the entry on 18th/19th century poets (see entry in “A Grave” ClassicNote) are certainly not comprehensive accounts, and only begin to give an account of these women’s lives and works, but can act as an entry point into the history American women poets.
