" ... the best collection of feminist essays on women poets now available." oSpokeswoman Review "[The essays] form a satisfying whole, stunningly enlightening, important for literature and women's studies... " oLibrary Journal

• AcknowledgmentsSandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Introduction: Gender, Creativity, and the Woman PoetI. "A Lonesome Glee"—Poets before 18001. Catherine F. Smith, Jane Lead: Mysticism and the Woman Cloathed with the Sun2. Wendy Martin, Anne Bradstreet's Poetry: A Study of Subversive Piety3. Katharine Rogers, Anne Finch, Countess of Winshilsea: An Augustan Woman PoetII. "Titanic Opera"—Nineteenth-Century Poets4. Nina Auerbach, This Changeful Life: Emily Bronte's Anti-Romance5. Helen Cooper, Working into Light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning6. Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Inward Pose7. Adrienne Rich, Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson8. Albert Gelpi, Emily Dickinson and the Deerslayer: The Dilemma of the Woman Poet in America9. Terence Diggory, Armored Women, Naked Men: Dickinson, Whitman and Their SuccessorsIII. "The Silver Reticence"—Modernists10. Jeanne Kammer, The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry11. Gloria T. Hull, Afro-American Women Poets: A Bio-Critical Survey12. Jane Stanbrough, Edna St. Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability13. Susan Gubar, The Echoing Spell of H.D.'s TrilogyIV. "The Difference—Made Me Bold"—Contemporary Poets14. Alicia Ostriker, May Swenson and the Shapes of Speculation15. Hortense J. Spillers, Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems16. Sandra M. Gilbert, A Fine, White Flying Myth: The Life/Work of Sylvia Plath17. Suzanne Juhasz, Seeking the Exit of the Home: Poetry and Salvation in the Career of Anne Sexton18. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, A Common Language: The American Woman Poet19. Rachel Blau Duplessis, The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich, and RukeyserSelected BibliographyNotesAbout the Authors