Innovative Women Poets Reclaiming an Erasure History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2023
Florence Howe’s 1993 revised and expanded poetry anthology No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets continues the work of the first edition, with poet Muriel Rukeyser’s The Poem as Mask providing the “vision” for the collection, as Howe notes the “fragments and the invisibility that control women’s lives [to], at last, come to wholeness and vision” (F. Howe xxix). Howe’s new edition responded to “new differences [that] now divide women’s poetic consciousness” and considered that “to be a woman poet is to encompass,” after Adrienne Rich, “the difficult world” (xxix, xxxi). The volume illustrates the collection’s purpose with Rukeyser’s starting poem where she identifies a mask worn by women that once concealed the individual, the self “unable to speak, in exile from myself” (xxvii). The Poem as Mask – focusing on the mythology of Orpheus – calls for “No more masks! No more mythologies!” to put an end to the masking through myths imposed on women writers and to signal a move toward new mythologies that emerge from the women’s self, an identity once split that finds its oneness.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.