Poetics of the Feminine

This book examines the early work of William Carlos Williams in relationship to a woman's tradition of American poetry, as represented by Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Fraser - three generations of women poets working in or directly from a modernist tradition. Joining revisionary studies of literary history, Professor Kinnahan sees Williams's work as both developing from the poetics of modernist women and as influencing subsequent generations of American women poets.

Williams's poetry and prose of the 1910s and 1920s is read as a struggle with issues of gender authority in relationship to poetic tradition and voice. Linda Kinnahan traces notions of the feminine and the maternal that develop as Williams seeks to create a modern poetics. The impact of first-wave American feminism is examined through an extended analysis of Mina Loy's poetry as a source of a feminist modernism for Williams. Levertov and Fraser are discussed as poetic daughters of Williams who strive to define their voices as women and to reclaim an enabling poetic tradition.

In the process, each woman's negotiations with poetic authority and tradition call into question the relationship of poetic father and daughter.

Positioning Williams in relationship to these three generations of Anglo-American women writing within or descending from the modernist movement, the book pursues two questions: What can women poets, writing with an informed awareness of Williams, teach us about his modernist poetics of contact, and just as importantly, what can they teach us about the process, for women, of constructing a writing self within a male-dominated tradition?