{"id":67,"date":"2019-09-25T19:22:40","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T17:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publiconsulting.com\/wordpress\/introtopoetry\/chapter\/chapter-11-woman-and-power-and-poetry\/"},"modified":"2019-10-18T20:31:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T18:31:30","slug":"chapter-11-woman-and-power-and-poetry","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/www.publiconsulting.com\/wordpress\/introtopoetry\/chapter\/chapter-11-woman-and-power-and-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Woman (and Power) and Poetry"},"content":{"raw":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

An Historical Overview\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/h1>\nSo far this term we have been mainly discussing the most basic, formal elements of poetry: line, meter, stanza, form. We\u2019ve also discussed a number of poems on a variety of subjects. But we haven\u2019t delved into any subject\u2014except of course the subject of poetic\u2014in detail.\n\nSome people find the mathematics of poetry endless fascinating\u2014that the beauty of poetry can be discussed in the sterile language of numbers makes them say \u201cwow!\u201d These are the same sorts of people who like to talk about grammar and math. Others find this sort of thing endlessly boring. Fascinating or boring, at some point in your poetic education, it is necessary to deal with poems in that laboratory fashion. But it would be a shame if that were all we did in our study of poetry. So today we turn the corner and begin to look at poetry in a more focused way in terms of what it says<\/em> and what it does<\/em>. Poetry we\u2019ll see is not just an idle entertainment. It is an actor in history. The things it does are sometimes progressive and liberal and sometimes conservative and sometimes reactionary. (We\u2019ll see that all these possibilities exist in this week\u2019s poems.)\n\nTo review much of what we\u2019ve said already at least once: most English-language poetry is written in standard English sentences. The grammar may sometimes be complex, but it is the same grammar we all have learned in school, or tried to learn. Being written this way, most poetry includes what is known as \u201cparaphrasable content.\u201d (We\u2019ve seen this over and over again as we\u2019ve tried to read the poems on our syllabus.) In other words, it\u2019s possible to look at what the sentences and the poem are actually saying and put that \u201ccontent\u201d into other words.\n\nIf this were all we did in reading poetry, if we thought that once we could report what a poem was saying we were through with the poem, we would do a great injustice to poetry. Moreover any number of poems defy, deliberately or not, our ability to paraphrase them. At the same time, it is nearly impossible to feel comfortable with any poem if you don\u2019t have any idea of what it says or what it does. (As Marianne Moore says in her poem \u201cPoetry\u201d \u201cwe do not admire what we cannot understand.\u201d) In the rare cases when a poem cannot be paraphrased, knowing that that is so and why that is so will be of a great help in learning to feel comfortable with the poem. If a poem can be paraphrased, doing so will, again, help greatly in reading the poem.\n\nPoems have something to say. Poems also have work to do. <\/strong>\n\nWe have already begun to look at the ongoing conversations among poets and poems. Poets are always talking to each other and to the history of poetry. They are also talking to and responding to the society or culture in which they are written. Like newspaper editorials, movies, novels and political speeches, they attempt to affect the course of their contemporary world and therefore also the course of history. Poetry is an actor in history. (The Romantic poet Percy Shelley called poets \u201cthe unacknowledged legislators of the world.\u201d) This remains true even today, despite the waning public awareness of the art.\n\nPutting these two aspects of reading together\u2014looking at poems in terms of what they say and do\u2014we will be investigating a series of poems through a particular theme. In future weeks, that theme will be how poetry responds to and helps shape the time in which it was written. This week the subject will trace the representation of women in the history of poetry, including the representation of women by men and the response by women to that representation as well as the opposite: the representation of men by women and the self-representation of women by women\u2014from the medieval time to our time.\n\nIn other words: what men see when they look at women. What women see when men look at them. What women see when they look back at men. And what women see when they look at themselves.\n\nIndividual poems on this week\u2019s syllabus make a certain sense read in isolation. But a more comprehensive story emerges when these poems are put into the context of the overarching story they tell. It turns out to be a story about woman and men and power.<\/em>\n\nWe\u2019ll start with some observations that will help you enter this centuries-long conversation.\n\nThe poetry written by women is most often (but not always) progressive, while the poetry by men is most often (but again not always) reactionary. We will see first of all what happens when men have the opportunity to define their \u201cother\u201d while that \u201cother\u201d has no means to respond. This was the case in Medieval poetry and remained more or less true up until the Enlightenment (starting in the late 1600s), with some fascinating exceptions.\n\nThe overarching story. <\/strong>If we think of these poems as telling a single story, the way a novel tells a story with characters the develop over time, it is a story of a struggle for power. Women have it but can\u2019t keep it. Men desire it but can\u2019t take it. There are really two struggles: first to possess achieve and hold power, second to define the terms of the story itself.\n\nThe story for us starts in the later Medieval times<\/strong> (a very long period of English history from which we will take only the smallest sample) because that is when English poetry started taking women seriously as a subject. In the Medieval world few men and even fewer women learned how to read or write. The poetry from this time and place is almost exclusively written by men. We will not be treating this era of English history as fully as the eras that follow\u2014choosing only three poems in fact[1]<\/a>\u2014partly because of the difficulty of the language, and also because of the limited time we have.\n\nBut it\u2019s useful to look at the beginnings of the objectification of women in poetry written by men: men looking at women as they would look at any object and conveying in their poems what the object means. It starts with men defining women as the holders of power.\n\nThe story starts to change in the Renaissance, <\/strong>the age of Shakespeare. This is the time in which what has come to be known as love poetry first comes to be widely written. Love poetry is, however, rarely, if ever, innocent. Love (or, better \u201cdesire\u201d) is power. And in the poems, it\u2019s still women who have the power over men. <\/em>With the poetry of this era, we will be outlining the relationships that emerge between men and women and power. We will be asking the following questions:\n