With the exceptions of Marianne Moore and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), women poets of the modernist era have not fared especially well in accounts of American literary history. Not only has the importance of women modernists often been overlooked by male poets and critics, but it was at times deliberately suppressed by male writers who were threatened by the entry of women into the world of literary high culture. When women poets made a concerted attempt to compete in the literary marketplace, they risked being dismissed as “poetesses” or “sweet singers” rather than treated as serious artists. As feminist critics have argued, the invention of modernist form by male authors was in part an attempt to “rescue” literary writing from what they saw as the “effeminacy” of late-nineteenth-century literature. The effort to distance modernism from the “feminizing” influence of women writers can be seen in Pound's dismissal of Amy Lowell's Imagist poetry as “Amygism” and in Eliot's 1922 claim that “there are only a half dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing.”

In recent years, however, women poets of the 1910s and 1920s have begun to receive a more appropriate share of critical attention. Both Moore and H. D. have been canonized as major poetic modernists, and each has been the subject of numerous critical studies. Gertrude Stein's writing has been recognized as a crucial contribution to experimental modernism as well as an important influence on the postmodern writing of the Language poets and others.