Why Women Can't Write Poetry

 

Not the usual image, but thought to be perhaps a photo of Emily Dickenson.

I once belonged to a small poetry group. It is far from a valid sample, but… 

The only qualification for membership was interest in reading your poetry publicly. 

The group consisted loosely of four men, and four women. All four of the men were pretty good poets; and all of the women were dreadful.

Was that purely coincidental? 

There are indeed far more great male poets, than female poets in the canons of world literature.

Feminists will of course say this is because women’s voices were silenced. Only men’s voices counted.

Yet against this, in most or all societies, women have had more leisure time for the arts than men. It has been up to the man to earn sustenance for the family. Women, at least among the classes that could afford any leisure for anyone, were encouraged to pursue the arts. Book clubs were always primarily women; and still are. Magazines were mostly marketed to women. TV was mostly viewed by women. Why would they not have used this time to write?

Is it that female poets were discriminated against by publishers? A female poet of my acquaintance, who has done the research, insists this is not so; and any check of the Internet Archive or old newspapers appears to confirm this. At least by the 19th century, poetry by women seems actually to have been published more often than poetry by men. They did have the leisure time, and they did use it, and they did get it into print.

And yet, with few exceptions, it is the men’s poetry that is still read today, that has survived the test of time. The women’s poetry seems to have lacked any abiding message to mankind.

In her day, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a bigger literary star than her husband, Robert. But since, her reputation has faded, while his has grown.

 Other than Emily Dickenson, how many first-rank women poets can you think of from the 19th century? 

Of course, you can list many from more recent years. But you could have drawn up a similar list in 1850. How many will endure?

Could it simply be that men are deeper thinkers than women? Women can make words pretty, but men are better fit to plumb the depths of human experience?

Pauline Johnson was wildly popular in Canada in the 19th century. She was half-aboriginal, and would recite wearing buckskin. But her popularity faded. It has been revived recently, to some extent, for political reasons. But it is striking to me that there is really no content to her poems; they never really say anything.

If ever a literary career was built on superficial show, it was hers.

A feminist heresy, of course, to suggest that men are deeper thinkers than women. But surely plausible; we know women’s and men’s brains, after all, are physically different. Such a difference in deep thinking is implied in the Bible, if you take it seriously, when St. Paul advises wives to obey their husbands, and women to remain silent in church. 

But it is not even clear to me that women are better at the mechanics of verse, at making words pretty. Even though, if we are still talking about sex differences, tests show that women on average have better linguistic skills than men. Even though craftsmanship in verse would seem to follow.

In my local group, it is not just that the women lacked any message. They also seemed to have no sense of craftsmanship either. What they declaimed were not poems or verse at all in the technical sense. More expressions of emotion without grammar. It is the men who played with the sounds of words, with rhythm, assonance, repetition, and sometimes rhyme.

Even in the case of Emily Dickenson: the odd exception of a great female poet. She absolutely has depth. But she is not great technically. Her rhymes are loose; there is little rhythm. Her style is epigrammatic. Britannica cites a “lack of high polish.”

What then can explain this? Why aren’t women better at poetry?

I think it is precisely because women are more verbal than men. It was certainly obvious in my poetry group. In between readings, all conversation was dominated by the women, who expressed their opinions on religion, politics, and human relationships freely and forcefully. The men all stayed mostly silent, but perhaps for occasional muttered assent.

Dickenson perhps explains it, when she says of poetry: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Poetry is for saying things you cannot say directly. It is the voice of the silenced. Contrary to the claims of feminism, women have always been freer to speak their minds publicly. They are accustomed to being listened to, as well. A woman can usually get what she wants by making her demands clearly known. 

Men, by contrast, learn to choose their words carefully. They must not make demands, emotional or otherwise. They must think before they speak, or risk a fight, or force of law. 

Consider the famous feminist complaint that men will never ask for directions. A women will do so immediately, even without consulting the map. 

Isn’t this actually an example of female privilege?

If Emily Dickenson is an exception to the rule, it interestingly corresponds with an unusual life experience. She lived her life in seclusion, with few to talk to; if only due to her own congenital shyness.

It is the pressure to shut up, or having something to say that nobody wants to listen to, that forces poetry.