Alison
I'll take your word for it, on the basis of a few stanzas:
>Hope's not so easily taped as misogynist: I'm thinking of Advice to
>Young Ladies, about Postumia, a Vestal Virgin deemed too lively and
>prosecuted for sexual misdemeanour:
>
>How many the black maw has swallowed in its time!
>Spirited girls who would not know their place;
>Talented girls who found that the disgrace
>Of being a woman made genius a crime;
>
>How many others, who would not kiss the rod
>Domestic bullying broke or public shame?
>Pagan or Christian, it was much the same:
>Husbands, St Paul declared, rank next to God.
>
>And ranks this next to Galileo's and Bruno's persecution by the
>Inquisition.
but have to confess that my fairly cursory reading of his Collected, and
more often reading the anthology pieces, leads me to remember some of the
harsher vision of the female body etc. Maybe it's his strong anti-modernism
I tend to dislike, even as I admrie his Swiftian humour, he is after all
Oz'a 'greatest 18th century poet'...
I agree that Wright wrote some lovely poems in trad forms, it's just that I
also think she did some wonderful stuff in other manners as well,as you
agreed...
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta Canada T6G 2E5
(h) [780] 436 3320 (b) [780] 492 0521
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
People, people -
ten dead ducks' feathers
on beer can litter . . .
Winter
will change all that
Lorine Niedecker
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