Introduction

Poetry used to be taught and studied in schoolrooms in the nineteenth-century, but it is not valued in the same way in contemporary society. Despite poetry’s lack of attention, it holds meaning and value and deserves to be studied, even beyond the English and writing classrooms. In establishing poetry as a literary genre with great value, examining it through a feminist lens further displays its importance and shows how it can be taught, read, and analyzed as something that women have traditionally used to escape the confines of patriarchy. This project focuses on the concept of female identity and the “self” in women’s poetry.

While this project seeks to discuss the poetry of established and well-known female poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath (in expanding upon a previous project I completed titled “‘Out of the Ash”: Feminist Rhetoric, Women Poets, and the Portrayal of the “Self”), it will also analyze and discuss the writings of “amateur” women poets. In a time when the Internet and social media have made connecting with others and creating visibility for creative work easy and accessible, women are making their writing available for others to read through outlets like Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram. In this way, this poetry is working toward the same goal that much of the work of earlier female poets was working to establish; to express a fully identified self that is free from the negative impacts of patriarchal ideology.

While our society has made progress with gender equality, work still needs to be done. Bishop, Sexton, and Plath were published poets whose work expressed a feminist agenda, but women don’t necessarily need to be published in today’s world to have their feminist work seen and read. While patriarchal society has oppressed and threatened the freedom and abilities of women over time, women’s poetry has worked to break through the barriers of oppression in order to show women that they have the freedom to develop their own sense of self. Where patriarchy blinds a woman to her full potential, poetry provides a lens for which to see oneself as a whole being outside of the limitations of this ideology. Tradition has shown time and time again that women are synonymous with weakness and inferiority and are defined by their roles as wife and mother; the poetry discussed here provide a representation of the feminine self that is outside these constraints and is free to be wholly understood and able to achieve and develop other areas of the self; as Kant suggests, “self-knowledge is the beginning of all wisdom.”

In an effort to stay true to the digital format many women are writing in today, this project is a multimodal composition. In an attempt to represent the queering taking place in discussing feminism and its goals to break away from the “norm” and the traditional roles that women have been assigned throughout history, this project is non-traditional in its digital form (as opposed to being completed as a traditional, alphabetic text).