Abstract
In describing women’s art as ‘traditionally biodegradable’, Germaine Greer is recycling a particularly post-Romantic view of the poet, in which posterity is his pre-eminent goal. While her distinction is plausible enough, given the general lack of women’s art preserved in museums, anthologies and encyclopaedias, it is dangerous to accept women’s short-lived reputations as ‘traditional’. Greer’s argument that female poets merely pander to the whims of fashion, while men loom self-consciously forward into the future, is conceptually flawed in its failure to acknowledge that tradition is invented and re-invented — a cultural construct shaped by particular politics and investments of power.2
Women’s poetry does not demand the right to build monuments that will loom in the minds of people as yet unborn. Women’s art is traditionally biodegradable, and women’s poetry may be no exception. In the women’s aesthetic, ‘life’ is a higher value than ‘art’; in thinking otherwise Elizabeth Bishop should probably be classed as one of the boys.1
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Notes
Germaine Greer, ‘Changing Fashions in Anthologies of Women’s Poetry’, Times Literary Supplement June 30 1995, pp. 7–8.
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 ).
Roger Lonsdale, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. xxxvi.
Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Towards a Poetics of Culture’, The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser ( London: Routledge, 1989 ), pp. 20–37.
Jerome McGann, ‘History, Herstory, Theirstory, Ourstory’, Theoretical Issues in Literary History, ed. David Perkins ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 ), pp. 196–206.
Robert Andersen, The Works of the British Poets, with Prefaces Biographical and Critical (Edinburgh, 1795), pp. 6–7.
Andrew Ashfield (ed.), Romantic Women Poets, 1770–1838: An Anthology ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995 ).
Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989 ).
Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 ).
John Dryden, To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young LADY Mrs Anne Kiligrew (1686).
Germaine Greer (ed.), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-century Women’s Verse ( London: Virago, 1988 ), p. 206.
Ruth Perry, ‘George Ballard’s Biographies of Learned Ladies’, Biography in the Eighteenth Century, ed. J. D. Browning ( New York: Garland, 1980 ), pp. 85–111.
Jane Williams, Literary Women of England (London, 1861).
Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women: Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations ( London: J. Johnson, 1810 ).
Isobel Armstrong, ‘The Gush of the Feminine’, Re-imagining Romantic Canons, ed. Theresa Kelly and Paula Feldman ( Hanover, NH: University of Press of New England, 1995 ).
Robert Southey (ed.), Specimens of the Later English Poets, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1807 ), Preface, p. iv.
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Eger, E. (1999). Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology. In: Armstrong, I., Blain, V. (eds) Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27024-8_12
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