This module aims to introduce you to a range of twentieth-century and contemporary poetry by women. It will focus on selected key themes and will examine how different poets explore those themes, using distinct techniques, forms, images, and voices. The module will help you to read poetry sensitively and attentively, staying alive to the nuances of its language and images. It will also enhance your ability to understand how the social, political and cultural contexts that shape our lives also have a profound effect on literary creation and production. Feminist approaches will be central to the module but not in any dogmatic or unquestioning way. We will look at the relationship between women’s poetry and mainstream literary traditions, at the processes of canon formation, and at the ways in which women’s poetry has been critically analysed, evaluated, championed or ignored. We will ask whether a separate women’s poetic tradition can be said to exist, why some poets don’t like to be labelled as ‘women’, and whether it still makes sense to discuss women’s poetry separately from that of their male contemporaries.

demonstrate an informed understanding of a range of modern and contemporary women’s poetry and to discuss some of the theoretical, critical, historical, political, and aesthetic issues pertinent to the field.

One-hour lecture and a two-hour seminar weekly. Powerpoint and audio recordings will be used and handouts provided. Students will be expected to read and prepare poems in advance of the seminars and be prepared to analyse and discuss the poems in small groups.

The seminars will be used to hone your skills of textual analysis and to afford opportunities to practise oral discussion skills, which are invaluable for future employability. You will also be given the opportunity to write formative, unassessed essays and close readings of poems. This, together with the work done for the assessed essays, will enhance your subject-specific knowledge of poetry, literary history, the strategic use of rhetoric, and the deployment of critical discourse. The written and oral practice will enhance your awareness of register and will help to improve skills in building an argument. The close study of poetry is particularly good for helping you improve your appreciation of nuances in language, which can be built into employability skills involving oral and written articulacy and precision of expression.

A midterm close-reading exercise of 1,200 words and a longer essay of 2,000 words, to be submitted at the end of the module.

Type of assessment

Short essay
30%
Close reading of set poems
1,200 words

Long essay
70%
2,000 words

THE POTENTIAL FOR REASSESSMENT IN THIS MODULE:

In common with University regulations, students are allowed two attempts at retrieval of any failed essay, with the cap of the individual essay set at 40.

Set text:

Rees-Jones, Deryn (ed.) Modern Women Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005)

A selection of works by poets including the following will be studied:

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)
Edith Sitwell (1887-1964)
Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
Lynette Roberts (1909-1995)
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Gillian Clarke (1937-    )
Eavan Boland (1944-    )
Carol Rumens (1944-    )
Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-1975)
Grace Nichols (1950-    )
Carol Ann Duffy (1955-     )
Jackie Kay (1961-    )
Kathleen Jamie (1962-    )
Sinéad Morrissey (1972-    )

Lecture and Seminar Programme

Week 1 Lecture: Introduction to women’s poetry: theory and critical history
Week 1 Seminar: Poems by Charlotte Mew and Edith Sitwell

Week 2 Lecture: Challenging the Tradition
Week 2 Seminar: Poems by Stevie Smith and Eavan Boland

Week 3 Lecture: Femininity and The Body
Week 3 Seminar: Poems by Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy

Week 4 Lecture: Myth and Fairy Tale
Week 4 Seminar: Poems by Anne Sexton and Carol Ann Duffy

Week 5 Lecture: Love and Loss
Week 5 Seminar: Poems by Gillian Clarke and Carol Rumens

Week 6                                   Reading Week

Week 7 Lecture: Identity and belonging
Week 7 Seminar: Poems by Grace Nichols and Kathleen Jamie

Week 8 Lecture: Nature and ecology
Week 8 Seminar: Poems by Charlotte Mew and Kathleen Jamie

Week 9 Lecture: Experimentation
Week 9 Seminar: Poems by Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Lynette Roberts

Week 10 Lecture: Is the personal political?
Week 10 Seminar: Poems by Sinéad Morrissey and Jackie Kay

Week 11 Lecture: Conclusions: Judith Shakespeare Resurrected?
Week 11 Seminar: Essay surgery – individual meetings

Set text:

Rees-Jones, Deryn (ed.) Modern Women Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2005) ISBN 1852246782

Indicative Reading:

Boland, Eavan, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006)

Dowson, Jane and Alice Entwistle, A History of Twentieth-century British Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Galvin, Mary, Queer Poetics: Five modernist women writers (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999)

Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar, eds., Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)

Gill, Jo, Women’s Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)

Homans, Margaret, Women Writers and Poetic Identity  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)

Jacobus, Mary, ed., Women Writing and Writing about Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979)

Kennedy, David and Christine Kennedy, Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool University Press, 2013)

Montefiore, Jan, Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing,  3^rd ed. (London: Pandora, 2004)

Rees-Jones, Deryn, Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2005)

Rich, Adrienne, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-78 (New York: Norton, 1995)

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1929)

Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1943)

Yorke, Liz, Impertinent Voices: Subversive strategies in contemporary women’s poetry (London, Routledge, 1991)