This sketchy essay aims at little beyond description. Perhaps other readers will be intrigued with these poets, or the phenomenon of their appearing when they did. Further, these authors provide data for testing whether women’s writing differs in general from men’s.
Upon being told of a female Quaker preacher, Dr. Johnson reacted, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." His attitude was, like most of Johnson’s opinions, as reactionary as it was witty, but his asperity was doubtless due in part to the fact that in his own time that the issue of female speakers, writers, and intellectuals became contested. By the eighteenth century not only did female preachers appear; women writers were proliferating. Women made up a good percentage of both the authors and consumers of fiction, and they were just making their way into the list of the period’s poets.
Yet, surveying the globe through all the centuries of literacy, in the written records of our species the voices of half the species are all but absent. Were there no other evidence of human culture, the record of literature would itself be sufficient to trace the patriarchal bias of civilization since the Bronze Age. Apart from the sporadic appearance of extraordinary individuals, there have been as well as some fascinating efflorescences of groups of female poets, blossoming out of societies that seem otherwise as male chauvinist as their geographical and chronological neighbors.
In the Western tradition, doubtless the most celebrated female poet is Sappho whose reputation, though not much of her poetry, has survived the centuries. A towering figure very close to the beginning of European literature, she was called “the poetess” just as Homer was “the poet” (or, in more modern times, “the bard” means Shakespeare“). She was celebrated with statues and coins and called by at least three ancient poets “the tenth muse.” One of her most celebrated poems describes the physical manifestations of passion.
The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --
listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.
My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.
Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,
without you . .
Her once substantial collected works have dwindled over time to a few scattered fragments with one single whole poem, standing almost miraculous amid the ruins. Indeed, the greater part of ancient Greek lyrical poetry as a whole has been lost, but nonetheless, Sappho was hardly a unique figure in her own day. Other female poets from the time are known, though some by little more than name and a few hints of reputation.
Kleobulina (6th century BCE) is associated in legend with philosophers. She enjoyed sufficient celebrity that two comedies, one by Kratinos and one by Alexis, featured choruses of “Kleobulinas.” All that survives of her work are portions of three riddles. She seems to have specialized in these gnomic formulations which lie at the foundation of metaphor and poetry as a whole. Whether hers were profound or trivial or simply mysterious must be judged by a few examples. The solution to “a dead ass boxed my ear with his horned shin-bone” is a Phrygian flute. More ambitious and universal , though perhaps little more profound is a version of the year riddle, familiar from many sources including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata: “There is one father and twelve children; of these each Has twice thirty daughters of different appearance: Some are white to look at and the others black in turn; They are immortal and yet they all fade away.” [1]
Even in D. L. Page’s prose translation the reader hears an eloquent and natural voice in Erinna’s sixth century “Distaff,” written in memory of her childhood friend Baucis.
These traces of you, dear maid, lie still glowing in my heart : all that we once enjoyed, is embers now. We clung to our dolls in our chambers when we were girls, playing Young Wives, without a care. And towards dawn your Mother, who allotted wool to her attendant workwomen, came and called you to help with the salted meat. Oh, what a trembling the Bogy brought us then, when we were little ones! - On its head were huge ears, and it walked on all fours, and changed from one face to another!
Among the others female poets who flourished in archaic and early Classical Greek times were Korinna, who according to Aelian and Suidas defeated Pindar five times in competitions. Her choral lyrics were performed by troupes of girls in partheneia; Megalostrata from the 7th century BCE, whom Alkman called a "golden-haired maiden enjoying the gift of the Muses", and Myrtis of the 6th century, first of a line of female Boeotian poets.
These writers flourished and were not only accepted but celebrated by coinage and statuary as well as by critics. Though their culture was highly patriarchal, goddess-worship provided some occasion for female poetic agency. Thus Sappho’s lines are in a ritual as well as a psychological sense an offering to Aphrodite. Yet it would be a millennium and a half before Europe would see another such flowering of female poets.
Among the written records of the remarkably luxuriant poetic growth of the south of France in the later Middle Ages are the names of twenty female troubadours or trobairitz. [2] The development of fin’ amors -- what came to be called courtly love in English – doubtless was influenced by Arabic poetry [3], Mariolatry, and the absence of men during the Crusades. Eventually romantic and artistic skills came to be included among the accomplishments required of a courtier.
Five poems are extant attributed to the Comtessa de Dia, four cansos and a tenson. For one canso, “A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria,” music has survived as well. The poem is a complaint of an unsatisfied lover who feels that her beloved behaves toward her in a “proud,” standoffish manner (“orguoill”) while being “open-hearted“ (“franc”) with everyone else. Still, she remains steadfast in her own dedicated love, preserving her nobility and virtue while he betrays his own “great worth” (“rics pretz”) by failing to return her affection.
I must sing of that which I would rather not:
I am so aggrieved by him of whom I am the friend.
For I love him more than anything that be,
But pity and courtliness do not avail me with him,
Nor my beauty, nor my worth, nor my wits:
For I am thus tricked and betrayed
As I should be if I were ugly.
The canso by Bieiris de Romans "Na Maria, pretz e fina valors" provides a dramatic example of the complex hermeneutic challenges these texts can present. The poem, clearly attributed to Bieiris de Romans, contains a suite of recognizable courtly love conventions, yet is addressed to a woman named Maria. Her peerless excellences, the poet says, elicit true love and a “pure heart” (“cor truan”). She begs for some sign that her love-service will be accepted. In the beloved the poet finds “gaiety and happiness” (“gajess’ e alegranssa”). [4] Scholars, puzzling over what to make of this poem, have sometimes attributed it to a male author or at any rate to a male persona. Some regard the poem as a straightforward expression of lesbianism, while others prefer to view it as an expression of intense but non-sexual friendship. Inevitably, the beloved has also been identified with the Virgin Mary. [5] To some the words of the poem seem a sincere heart’s overflowing, while to others they are ironic or a purely aesthetic game with little relation to lived experience.
In Heian Japan (794-1185) two of the greatest writers were women. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the lyric-filled Tale of Genji of which Kenneth Rexroth says “most people who have read it agree that it is probably the world’s greatest novel.” [6] This masterful work combines the most intensely self-conscious aestheticism with a highly wrought eroticism and a mystical Buddhism, all from an almost painfully sensitive point of view, as refined as any page of Proust. The lovers, indeed most of the characters, exchange subtly significant verses, often heavily allusive; indeed, the entire book, long as it is, has a lyric sensibility.
Murasaki:
The troubled waters
are frozen fast.
Under clear heaven
moonlight and shadow
ebb and flow.
Answered by Prince Genji:
The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep. [7]
Genji was so successful that it became itself the source of countless later references and works of visual art. Murasaki (the name is both the author’s pseudonym and the name of the heroine in the novel) also wrote a journal and a book of waka.
In her diary, Murasaki says waspishly of one of her contemporaries: "Sei Shonagon is very arrogant. She thinks herself so clever and litters her writings with Chinese characters, but when you look at them carefully you will find many errors. Those who want to behave as if they were superior to others will lower their reputation. Will their future be brighter?" [8]
Though Shonagon’s lyrics are included in contemporary anthologies, her Pillow Book, a sort of informal journal belonging to the Japanese genre zuhitsu, is her most well-known work. Her super-cultivated sensibility and the extraordinary refinement of the Heian court, are evident on every page. She compiles lists of “things that should be large” “Nothing annoys me so much,” she says as “someone who arrives at a ceremony in a shabby, poorly decorated carriage.” After including “rice starch that has become mixed with water” in a list of “things without merit,” she apologizes at length for mentioning such a vulgar item, saying “I never thought these notes would be read by anyone else.”
Though she also wrote waka, the prose of the Pillow Book is highly poetic. The books opens with this passage.
In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on the dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is. [9]
In an example of a curious dialectic potential within sexist custom, women were not considered appropriate for the study of Chinese and the composition of prestigious Chinese poetry or kanshi, (though some acquired Chinese anyway). One result was that women writers concentrated on waka, in Japanese, and were thus likely to write more apparently natural and sincere verses than the practitioners of a learned and artificial tradition. The breadth of participation by women in the literary life of the time may be suggested by the title of Akazome Emon’s volume Thirty-Six Female Poetic Sages. Among the many other poets writing during the Heian era were Lady Ise who became concubine to Emperor Uda, the Princess Shikisi, and Izumi Shikibu considered by many the greatest poet of the time. [10]
Though I claim no professional expertise in any of the three cultures in which these poets lived, I will nonetheless venture a few suggestions toward an explanation of their popularity. Ancient Greek, Heian Japan, and the Languedoc during the high Renaissance were all societies which placed an unusual value on the aesthetic. The refined cultivation of the pursuit of beauty is evident in such phenomena as the well-organized program of pleasures at ancient Greek symposia, the courts of love under Eleanor of Acquitaine, the Countess of Champagne, and others during the High Middle Ages, and the moon-viewing and poetry parties that originated in Heian era. These practices all imply a certain space for hedonism, though all include intellectual or artistic as well as corporeal pleasures.
Undeniably each culture also has individual characteristics that may have been influential in making space for female poets: tolerance for homosexuality in archaic Greece, Buddhist aesthetics in Japan, Mariolatry and chivalry in the Western European Middle Ages. Critics have argued is whether certain of these texts represent authentic women’s voices or merely women who have gained acceptance by learning to compose patriarchal poetry. What cannot be disputed is that, in spite of their comparative silence through much of history, women have figured conspicuously in certain great eras of poetry. The phenomenon of these efflorescences of female poets and their individual works themselves deserve greater attention.
1. Both may be found on p. 165 Greek Elegy and Iambus I, J. M. Edmonds (Loeb Library).
2. The accessible text is Meg Bogin’s The Women Troubadours (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1980). I acknowledge the substantial service she provided in assembling this volume, though I find her unreliable both as to facts and interpretations. She relied for texts on Oscar Schultz’s Die Provenzalischer Dichterinnen (Leipzig : G. Fock, 1888).
3. See Alois Nykl ‘s convincing Hispano-Arabic Poetry And Its Relations With The Old Provencal Troubadours.
4. The Consistori del Gay Saber "Consistory of the Gay Science") was a poetic institution founded at Toulouse in 1323 to foster the revival of Old Occitan verse.
5. Proponents of male authorship include François Zufferey, Oskar Schultz-Gora, Gianfranco Folena, Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye and Elizabeth W. Poe. Those who consider the work lesbian include Pierre Bec, Magda Bogin, Renat Nelli, and John Boswell, which an advocate of affection is Angelica Rieger.
6. “Tale of Genji” in Classics Revisited.
7. Kenneth Rexroth, Translations from the Japanese.
8. The Diary of Lady Murasaki, translated by Richard Bowring, 1996, Penguin, p. 54.
9. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris (Penguin), p. 201, 159, and 21.
10. Asian poetry was highly influential for European and American Imagism in the early twentieth century. Amy Lowell introduced a collection titled Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.
