Poet or Poetess?

English poetry has been greatly dominated by males for the last 400 years.  Although there were a few notable female poets in the 19^th century such as Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, only in the last 80 years or so have women really gained a strong representation as excellent poets.  Marianne Moore, Hilda Doolittle and Edna St. Vincent Millay were the leading female poets during the first half of the century.  Since then, poets such as Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Jennings and Anne Stevenson have become widely accepted and critically praised for their vital contribution to English poetry.  Should there be separate words for male and female writers of poetry, such as “poet” for males and “poetess” for females? 

Imagery

The first five lines of the poem present images of a construction site.  The focus is on the fine detail of an old medicine bottle that had been buried for a hundred years.  This is Rich’s technique to introduce her poetic biography of Marie Curie, who lived one hundred years ago.

The biographical details of Curie begin in line 7.  Most of the description is of her suffering and pain as a result of her work with radiation.  The details are strong and even repulsive (suppurating skin is the boiling pus that comes out of infected skin).  These details do not make a pretty, feminine poem.  Rather, these details are used to make a feminist statement.

Feminist Consciousness

Knowing Rich’s feminist consciousness helps us understand the poem, which celebrates the irony of Marie Curie (1867-1935), the Polish physicist who discovered radium in 1898. The irony begins in the title “Power,” which historically has always been denied to women.  As heroine in this “epic” poem, Curie died with full knowledge that her life’s work was proving also to cause her death.  This reveals an incredible human sacrifice, which is a powerful statement in itself.

Compare the choice of heroine in this poem to a typical hero in a male poem:  a king (as in Shakespeare) or a general (as in Tennyson).

In lines 14 and 15, Rich celebrates Curie’s sacrifice to further human knowledge.  This is a particularly important point, considering the lack of opportunity and education that was offered to females a hundred years ago.  Lines 16 and 17 repeat the essence of “denying her wounds” as the essence of the female struggle for power.  In the last two lines, you might sense more of an archetypal universal woman who all too typically dies, denying her wounds that she has suffered at the hands of a male society, denying the wounds of having her creativity silenced throughout her life (also see Virginia Woolf’s thoughtful essay, Shakespeare’s Sister).