The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet

Book excerpt: In The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet, Elizabeth Dodd explores the lives and work of four women poets of the twentieth century - H. D., Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gluck. Dodd argues that sexist and male-dominated cultural forces in their personal and professional lives challenged these women to find a unique mode of expression in their poetry, a practice Dodd defines as personal classicism. Dodd uses the term personal classicism to examine modern and contemporary poetry that appears torn between two major modes of poetic sensibility, the Romantic and the Classical. While the four poets she addresses exhibit a poetic sensibility that is primarily Romantic - valuing Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"; adopting a natural, spoken tone; and relying on personal subject matter - they have nonetheless employed masking and controlling strategies that are more nearly Classical. Combining feminist theory and biographical studies with close readings of individual poems, Dodd moves historically from H. D., one of the best-known Imagists, through the Confessional movement, to the major contemporary poet Louise Gluck. In the final chapter Dodd brings us to the present, where she finds women writers still struggling with the recent Confessional legacy of such highly anthologized poets as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet combines thoughtful consideration of both formal and theoretical issues in a graceful prose that reaffirms poetry as an art vitally connected to life. It will be of significant interest to students of modern and contemporary poetry, as well as to those concerned with women's studies.