Love Poetry, Women’s Bonding and Feminist Consciousness

Journal article | Zeitschriftenartikel

This article examines Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems in relation to Edna St Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview. Discussing notions such as lyric voice and innovation within traditional genres, the author analyses how Millay’s attempts to challenge commonplace definitions of female sexuality impacted on Rich’s articulation of sexual desire. The intertextual dialogue between the above works reveals that Millay and Rich produced two remarkably similar erotic narratives, which resist masculinist conceptions of literary history and comment on the self-referentiality of poetic composition. Finally, the author approaches Fatal Interview as a work that foregrounds the significance of women’s bonding, and argues that it was precisely this aspect that caught Rich’s attention and helped the younger poet develop her feminist consciousness.

Show object

• Extent: Seite(n): 39-57
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Status: Postprint; begutachtet (peer reviewed)

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(1)

Classification and Topics

• Subject: feminist consciousness; literary influence; love poetry; Millay; Rich; women’s bonding;

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Michailidou, Artemis
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (when): 2006

Further information

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506806060005
• URN: urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-225055
• Rights: GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften. Bibliothek Köln