Books: A Room of Their Own

A BOOK OF WOMEN POETS FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW Edited by Aliki Barnstone & Willis Barnstone; Schocken; 612 pages; $29.95

In the 6th century B.C. Sappho foretold it all:

Someone, I tell you,

will remember us.

We are oppressed by fears of oblivion

yet are always saved

by judgment of good men.

The poem was chosen as the epigraph for this splendid, pioneering collection of verse by women. Sadly, Sappho's fears of oblivion have proved valid. For each poet represented in this anthology there are uncounted others whose work has been diminished, dispersed or utterly lost. In A.D. 1073, virtually all existing copies of Sappho's work were burned in Rome and Constantinople, because the church perceived her lesbian love lyrics as a threat to Christian morality. In 12th century China the parents of Chu Shu-chen incinerated the body of the poet's work after her death, for reasons unknown. A few poems rescued by Chu's friends, and published in this book, are of luminous beauty.

Far greater losses than these occurred through indifference and neglect. In ancient Rome, which abounded in male poets from Livius to Virgil, an entire poetic culture was wiped out because the writings of women were not esteemed enough to be copied and preserved. The lone female survivor of the Latin classical period is Sulpicia (1st century B.C.) whose known corpus consists of six poems.

Still, patriarchal societies have weighed unevenly upon creative women in different times and places. In China and Japan, women poets have usually been highly regarded and their work is wonderfully well represented in this volume. The authors spring from all classes and conditions of life: an empress, an imperial courtesan, a Taoist priestess. In the 9th century, a legendary Japanese beauty, Ono no Komachi, voiced this complaint about her lover:

Doesn 't he realize

that I am not

like the swaying kelp

in the surf,

where the seaweed gatherer

can come as often as he wants.

In England and America women poets have often fared poorly. Bemoaning the inequalities that have dogged their sex, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own, "When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet or some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to."

The first important American poet was a woman: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), who produced remarkable poems in addition to eight children. Her publisher billed her as "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America," but she herself made clear the cost of attaining that exalted title:

l am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better fits,

A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

For such despite the case on female wits:

If what I do prove well, it won't advance,

They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.