One of the interesting aspects of this debate has been the amnesia about the
marked way in which our culture often has seen poetry as an 'unmanly'
occupation: male poets are associated with 'nancy boys', 'stuff for women',
with the exhibition of sensitivity and feeling, those 'feminine' qualities,
rather than sports-field prowess, as well 'bookishness' which is not again
a macho activity. Right through the culture, although undeniably male poets
predominate, those males are associated with a female constituency, from the
picture of Chaucer reading to an overwhelmingly female to Philip Larkin
stealing his 'conversion moment' copy of Hardy from a 'girls' school'.
There is too Wendy Cope's bizarre and padded-shoulder-suit attack on male
poets who can't drive, where you have a female poet denigrating male poets
for not conforming to male stereotypes of behaviour.
Best
Dave
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