This chapter traces the modernist short poem’s hauntings by the lyric, most particularly in thinking through what came to be regarded as problems of emotion and expressive subjectivity within the discursive strains defining the modernist lyric, especially as clustered around a poetics of impersonality. The “lyric discontent” of modernism marks multiple modalities energizing modern American poetry’s varied points of emergence in the 1910s and 1920s – particularly associated with women and African American poets – among which the distrust of emotion and embrace of impersonality endured contested influence in defining the modernist lyric. Locating this discontent in the years concurrent with early articulations of modern poetry’s extinction of personal emotion and expressive subjectivity – roughly the mid-1910s to early 1920s and before New Criticism takes hold – invites consideration of poetry’s exploration of affective constructions of subjectivity that grapple with elements of emotion, expressivity, and the lyric gaze.

The twentieth century in America spans a period tumultuous in its changes, multiplicitous in its populations, and effusive in its poetic and critical voices. How women have absorbed, commented upon, engaged with, defied, celebrated, and contributed to the varied cultures of poetry emergent alongside American modernity offers rich material and raises many questions in A History of Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Women. Indeed, questions motivate much of the literary history told here, beginning with fundamental questions of who, when, why, and how – questions of visibility and record are inseparable from questions of analysis and interpretation. Taken together, these chapters map ways of thinking about and through a particular, central set of questions compelled by the project itself and its defining terms: what does the category of “American women poets” mean, and how might it be understood (and justified) through the telling of many necessary, but necessarily incomplete, histories? How is history told, to what purpose, by whom and for whom? How can histories remain open to multiple narratives, voices, or critical engagements? What do we mean by “woman”? What do we mean by “American”? What do we mean by “history”? The chapters that follow address these questions from many directions and through myriad lenses, and uncover a rich panoply of responses.

As a starting point, it is accurate to say that the category of “women poets” has relentlessly coursed through discussions of poetry since well before the twentieth century, often for the purpose or with the effect of defining the woman poet as separate, different, and usually inferior to her male counterparts. Through much of the century and prior, she is most often presumed white and heterosexual. Value-laden language consistently places women poets into a lower sphere, endowed with lower faculties of feeling and fancy, and capable only of a limited scope and craft. Within the cultural binaries that hold through much of the century, women poets are associated with popular mass culture rather than art, with expressions of emotion rather than higher thinking. Historically, women are positioned in poetry as either objects (not makers) of culture or, if the rare maker, far less capable than men, or not really “womanly.” The idea of “woman” and the idea of “poet” have, through much of Western poetry's history, seemed utterly incompatible, even, at times, to women poets themselves.

The women poets who have graced our last century with work of nervy, graceful, ragged, lyrical, stunning, and word-ful wonder are no conforming group, nor can they be easily pegged or pinned down or silenced or ignored. The poetical means through which twentieth-century American women have explored relationships to language, society, history, aesthetics, and the material conditions of life constitute an aesthetic bounty and a cultural labor remarkable in its diversity. And, until the advent of contemporary feminist scholarship's interventions and recoveries, these poetical means have often been met, across the century, with diminishment, indifference, obfuscation, or tokenism within standard literary and critical histories. This collection of essays joins ongoing projects bringing poetry by women into greater visibility to not only situate this work within the century's poetical histories but to reconsider how those histories are revised or altered when women – and their often gender-conscious poetics – are more fully a part of the picture. Adopting the critical stance that maintains a separate attention upon women poets, their poetic connections to one another, and their poetical developments, these essays further insist upon the significance of moving beyond and unsettling “the picture” by reading outside the frames of literary histories we have inherited, most often constructed around (and by) the work of men. Resituating our critical vision to focus on women allows us to strategically explore the poetic histories their work creates and to enrich broader understandings of twentieth-century American poetry.

A History of Twentieth-Century American Women's Poetry embraces the concept of history as multiple and layered, maintaining a keen awareness of the impossibility of a singular, comprehensive history of such poetic activity on the part of women writing between 1900 and 2000. Collectively, the twenty-four scholars contributing to this volume cover a wide swath of ground in charting the century's poetry by women, and each chapter's slice of history helps make visible the integral and vital importance of women's poetic activity to the development of American poetry in the modern and contemporary eras. New material, new readings, new connections, and new frameworks are brought together in an astonishing range of critical investigations in each chapter. Gaps remain, in part for the reasons that affect any such collection: choices must be made, space must be limited, contributors must be gathered, and the scholarship must materialize.

Women’s voices vex literary histories of recent British poetry, whether cast as ‘mainstream’ or as ‘postmodern’, categories routinely invoked and questioned and invoked again, but nonetheless defined primarily in terms of male poets. Familiar narratives paint a picture of poetry retreating after World War II into an insular and provincial Englishness, a rejection of modernist experimentation that really begins before the war but finds its fullest popularity in the everyman poetry of the Movement. That an active continuation of modernist poetics persisted alongside the more dominant Movement – under the various labels of neo-modernism, postmodernism, innovative, experimental and/or alternative poetics – has remained relatively overlooked by critics, ignored by publishing powers and unsupported by arts funding through the later decades of the twentieth century. If the British experimental scene is a ‘stretched and resolutely unnamed map of divergent factions, mostly held together by the poets themselves and a few critics’, what mappings exist focus, by and large, on men, too often ignoring not only the creative work of women but the political, theoretical and activist feminisms mediating their gender-aware constructs of the ‘experimental’.

Writing from an analogous position to the one taken in this study, Rachel Blau DuPlessis confronts Paterson in the essay “Pater-Daughter.” She asks:

How the daughter reads this text is intimately bound up with the positions of father, daughter, and son in the poem. These positions, in turn, are inextricably linked to matters of authority and tradition that we have investigated within Williams's early works and in his relationship to women poets. How does Williams's “magnum opus,” as he called it, translate the issues of authority embedded within gender scripts from his earlier experimental works to his late epic (SL 163)? In the move from a defamiliarizing language of contact to a symbolic mythic structure asserting a familiar epic authority, “what is missing” and what remains?

Despite the criticism of a “father to son” modernism leveled by Williams against Joyce and Pound in the 1946 “Letter to an Australian Editor,” he had incorporated just such a scheme in the first book of Paterson, published contemporaneously.