scholarly journals Modernist Women Writers and Whimsy: Marianne Moore and Dorothy Parker

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Will May
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
American Women ◽  
Dorothy Parker ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article assesses the work of Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) and Marianne Moore (1887–1972) in relation to the aesthetic category of whimsy. It considers how whimsy has been used as a term of dismissal for American women poets, outlines ways both writers’ receptions have been informed by this context, and explores questions of cost, worth, and value raised by their work. It situates whimsy in relation to Sianne Ngai’s account of diminutive modes in Our Aesthetic Categories (2015) and suggests why American women’s modernist poetry can be a useful context for exploring the aesthetic and cultural associations of whimsy.

‘Ping Ping Ping / I break things’: Productive Disruption in the WorkingClass Poetry of Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Carrie Conners
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sexual Pleasure ◽  
Sandra Cisneros ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
American Women ◽  
Working Class Women

This essay explores how working-class lives are represented in the poetry of three American women poets, Jan Beatty, Sandra Cisneros, and Wanda Coleman. It discusses how the poets’ working-class backgrounds affect their poetics and their perceptions of poetic craft. Through analysis, I show how their poetry shares a sense of defiant resistance, communicated through imagery of violence, labor, and sexual pleasure, responding to societal and institutional limitations placed on working-class women and working-class women writers.

scholarly journals Echoes of Sapphic Gods and Goddesses, Immortality, Eros and Thanatos in the Work of Modernist Women Poets

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-109
Author(s):  
Iris Rusu
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Women's Poetry ◽  
Constant Return ◽  
The Past ◽  
Amy Lowell ◽  
Self Knowledge

Abstract In the context of Modernism’s constant return to the past that results in self-knowledge and innovation, certain women writers found Sappho’s writings relevant for their own poetic endeavours. My article will mainly focus on the mythological aspects of both Sappho’s and the modernist women’s poetry. Invocations of and allusions to gods and goddesses and other mythical figures, which involve introspection and expressing certain erotic concerns in stylised ways, will be discussed in order to show how all these women poets innovated. and, in many different ways, significantly enriched the literature of their times. Critics have mainly focused on H.-D.’s poetry in relation to Sappho’s, most likely because the modernist poet had also translated (or adapted, according to most scholars) a number of Sappho’s poems. As regards other modernist women poets, such as, for instance, Amy Lowell or Marianne Moore, critics have refrained, for various reasons, from analysing their work in relation to Sappho’s. There are very few critical accounts of Sappho’s influence on their (and even H.-D.’s) poetry, and this article will, perforce, draw on these, but aims, all the while, to provide new and relevant insights.

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