Senior American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been investigating how the history of English-language modernist poetry came to be mapped, and its poets identified, ranked or excluded, since at least 1985, when she published Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Her most recent publication in this historiographic project is Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2012).
DuPlessis suggests that she could have focused in this book on other or additional male modernist poets without her findings being “significantly changed” (195). Her choices appear to have been not so much assertions of poetic importance as namings of writers who benefited most visibly from the patriarchal assumptions of both our literary and general culture. They’re also namings without blaming. DuPlessis recognizes the enormous advantages that patriarchal position-taking has offered/offers to male poets – the unquestioned right to ‘speak’ for all gender roles and material situations, to pronounce ‘authoritatively’ on all topics, and to be praised for doing so. She notes also how male poets have been not only reluctant to share such advantages with women poets whom they recognized as able – such as Pound with Mina Loy – but have also quarrelled and maneuvered among themselves for the (most) patriarchal mantle. She both regrets the resultant exclusions and envies the male ability – because of the greater social power the general culture still accords to men – to make “imperial” pronouncements. She begins her book’s final paragraph “I wanted (imperially?) to declare the end of the patriarchal era of poetry by the sheer force of these sometimes negative examples and by the temperate if also suspicious empathy that characterizes most of my analysis” (196). That is, as a willing
DuPlessis suggests that she could have focused in this book on other or additional male modernist poets without her findings being “significantly changed” (195). Her choices appear to have been not so much assertions of poetic importance as namings of writers who benefited most visibly from the patriarchal assumptions of both our literary and general culture. They’re also namings without blaming. DuPlessis recognizes the enormous advantages that patriarchal position-taking has offered/offers to male poets – the unquestioned right to ‘speak’ for all gender roles and material situations, to pronounce ‘authoritatively’ on all topics, and to be praised for doing so. She notes also how male poets have been not only reluctant to share such advantages with women poets whom they recognized as able – such as Pound with Mina Loy – but have also quarrelled and maneuvered among themselves for the (most) patriarchal mantle. She both regrets the resultant exclusions and envies the male ability – because of the greater social power the general culture still accords to men – to make “imperial” pronouncements. She begins her book’s final paragraph “I wanted (imperially?) to declare the end of the patriarchal era of poetry by the sheer force of these sometimes negative examples and by the temperate if also suspicious empathy that characterizes most of my analysis” (196). That is, as a willing
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