A Room of Their Own

By Patricia Blake

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.

In spite of Bradstreet's achievements, she scarcely rates a sentence in Louis Untermeyer's 757-page Lives of the Poets: The Story of One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry. The magisterial Norton Anthology of Poetry carries 19 women out of the 200 poets represented by name and The New Oxford Book of American Verse, twelve out of 77. This anthology redresses the balance. Say the editors: "The one art in which women have always excelled is poetry." The question of whether there exists a common female culture and sensibility, as postulated by Poet Adrienne Rich and other feminists, awaits just such a display of talents and ideas provided by the Barnstones.

The anthology is a father and daughter enterprise. Poet Willis Barnstone translated, alone or in collaboration, 276 of the 788 poems. Aliki Barnstone, also a poet and a contributor to the book, joined with her father in selecting the 311 poets represented. In scope and quality of translation, their work surpasses such previous efforts as the Penguin Book of Women Poets and The Other Voice: Twentieth-Century Women's Poetry in Translation. The editors have devoted several pages to such major figures as Enheduanna (c. 2300 B.C.), the first writer in history, male or female, whose work has been preserved. A Sumerian moon priestess, she composed incantations that still resonate in the present. Considerable space has also been given to the dazzling Mexican poet of the Spanish Golden Age, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, as well as to America's incomparable Emily Dickinson. Willis Barnstone's rendering of all 24 of the 16th century love sonnets of the French poet Louise Labe is one of the glories of the collection.

There are scores of surprising talents such as the French Canadian Anne Hebert, 64, and the American Ruth Stone, 65, who are among the most personal, powerful and sensuous of the contemporary poets represented. There are also some regrettable omissions, for example, Jean Valentine, Jane Cooper, Jean Garrigue and Elizabeth Bishop. Yet it should be noted that before her death in 1979, Bishop declined to be included in this anthology. Her reason: it is confined to women. Certainly, as Bishop's demurral suggests, it is no easy matter to designate a writer, a woman and a member of the human race as a single species. Seeking an identity, the Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) provided these haunting lines:

What shall I be called when all that remains

Is my memory of myself on the rock of the deserted island?

A carnation wedged between my shadow and the wind,

Death's child and mine: My name will be poet.

Patricia Blake

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