When Women Blew Up American Poetry

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“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Muriel Rukeyser asked in her 1968 poem “Käthe Kollwitz,” about the German painter of the same name. “The world would split open,” she answered. For many American women, the world had split open with the U.S. publication of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous volume, Ariel, in which the poet, an American living in England, and a recent suicide ripped the veil from the decorous solemnity ordinarily expected of women.

The year was 1966. Betty Friedan had published The Feminine Mystique three years earlier, just eight days after Plath’s suicide. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was in its fledgling days. Less acknowledged than the women's movement Friedan's book ignited was the extraordinary explosion of poetry by American women that followed Ariel’s publication. It is a bounty that continues into the present, when more women are writing poetry of literary distinction than at any other time in history. Poems have been integral to the women’s movement from the beginning—no surprise given that feminism has always understood language to be instrumental in maintaining oppressive power relations.

At a recent reading to celebrate Poems from the Women’s Movement, an anthology I edited for the Library of America, Jean Valentine, a poet of Plath’s generation, remembered the shock of encountering her: “I had a manuscript, and after I read Ariel, I rewrote it.” Younger women like myself began to look to poetry as a way to articulate our own suppressed feelings, finding in Plath’s tragedy a mirror for our own pain, and in her provocation and wit, dramatization of a discomfort we could not quite identify.

“First, are you our sort of person?” asks Plath’s poem “The Applicant”:

Do you wear
a glass eye, false teeth, a crutch
a brace or a hook,
rubber breasts or a rubber crotch?