Imagining the Woman Poet: Creative Female Bodies

As women poets grew in numbers during the years 1660–1750, the web of writing discussing the woman poet grew too, a necessary accompaniment, offering ways of imagining her existence. The poet had always been generally understood to be male, his muse or inspiration female. The Renaissance had emphasized the poet’s masculinity through his writing on the female beloved and the implicit femininity of the text he produced. 1 The idea that poetic authorship was grounded in a hierarchical heterosexual relation remained strong in later periods, and made the notion of the woman writer problematic. One solution was to think of the muse as writer instead of inspiration. In 1700, when a group of women wrote poems to commemorate the death of Dryden, thus claiming for female poets a place in the national literary culture, they did so as ‘the Nine Muses’. Such attempts aroused some opposition. ‘Chagrin’, a fictional critic in a 1702 pamphlet, may have the Nine Muses’ poems in mind when he complains about women writing for the stage: What a Pox have the Women to do with the Muses? I grant you the Poets call the Nine Muses by the Name of Women, but why so? not because the Sex had anything to do with Poetry, but because in that Sex they’re much fitter for prostitution. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.