Of Women and Poetry.

First entry of my first academic blog. Here we go. So Dr. Haslina has assigned us to find 5 female poets and I started doing my research on 5 of my favourite female poets of all time.

1. Maya Angelou or Marguerite Annie Johnson was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louise, Missouri and was known for ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ (1969), which dubbed as one of the earliest nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. When I first encountered the poem it becomes instantly one of my favourite poems. The poem was known to be written as a memoir of her childhood and young adult years. Maya had a difficult childhood since her parents divorced and she and her brother were sent to live with her grandmother in Arkansas. As a child, Maya suffered and experienced racial prejudices and discrimination while living there. She also happened to be a dancer, singer, activist, actress in Broadway at some point in her life.

 She had received several awards for her achievement in writing including NAACP Image Awards in the outstanding literary work (nonfiction) category. Some of her other autobiographies works are All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1986) and A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). Besides, one of her poetry collections Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die (1971) was even nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Some of her other famous works are Phenomenal Woman (1995), several books for children including Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993), multiple collections of essays including Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and many more. After a few years of battling health issues, Maya passed away on May 28, 2014 in North Carolina. Many people shared mourn in social network in the wake of her including President Barack Obama who stated that she was truly ‘a phenomenal woman’.

 Ref: "Maya Angelou." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

2. Next is none other than Emily Dickinson.

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. She led a quiet life in her home where she had only her brother and her sister as both family and intellectual companions. She, however, filled her youth with reading, schooling, studies of nature and even encountered with poetry. In 1860s, she lived in almost complete isolation for outside world but remained actively doing wide reading and had some few good correspondences. She was believed to compose almost 1800 throughout her life. A few attempts were made to publish her work since she chose to share them with her closest family members and acquaintances.

Her poetry was discovered by her family upon her death on May 15, 1886. Hope Is the Thing With Feathers, I Heard A Fly Buzz, and A Bird Came Down the Walk are among her famous works. She was said to be a keen observer in nature, religion, law, music, immortality in her poems by critics. She used images from these elements to portray universal themes in poetry: the wonders of nature, death, love and sometimes the identity of one’s self.

Ref: "Emily Dickinson's Biography | Emily Dickinson Museum." Emily Dickinson's Biography | Emily Dickinson Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Sept. 2014.

"Emily Dickinson." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

3. Third is Sylvia Plath.

Born in 1932 in Boston, Sylvia Plath was the daughter of Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober. She spent her early years near the seashore. She was said to be a gifted student since she won a number of awards and had herself published stories and poetry while studying at University of Boston. Plath began to suffer of severe depression in her undergraduate years. This later led to her death in her thirties.

In one of her journal entries, she wrote : "It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it." This indicates that she also happened to suffer from bipolar disorder which has no cure during her time. She also tried to take her own life a few times by swallowing sleeping pills but survived and this breakdown later inspired her to write her only published and most famous novel, The Bell Jar. After her troubled marriage to Ted Hughes which left her with two young children, and after an intense burst of creativity that produced the poems in Ariel, she managed to commit suicide by inhaling gas from the kitchen stove.

Her famous works in poetry are: Daddy, The Collossus, Million Dollar Month, Winter Trees, and a few more.Few critics believe her works are fuelled with “cynism, ego-absorption and a prurient fascination with suicide”. 

Ref : "Sylvia Plath." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.

4. Hilda Doolitle

1.     Hilda Doolitle was born on September 10, 1886 in Pennsylvania. She befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams while studying at University of Pennsylvania. She travelled to Europe and spent her life abroad. Through Ezra Pound, she developed interest in poetry. Her work is characterized by the intense strength of her images which explained why she was appointed as the leader of Imagist movement, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her works was not recognised during her lifetime. Only after her death critics found the beauty in her writing. She later died in 1961.

Her works are: Sea Garden (1916)
The God (1917)
Translations (1920)
Hymen (1921)
Heliodora and Other Poems (1924)
Hippolytus Temporizes (1927)
Red Roses From Bronze (1932)
The Walls Do Not Fall (1944)
Tribute to the Angels (1945)

Ref : Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2014.

last but not least....

5. Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf or Adeline Virginia Woolf, was born on January 25^th, 1882 in London, England. She was an essayist, novelist, publisher, critique and specifically famous for her feminist writings. Among her famous novels are To the Lighthouse (1927) which explores the everyday life of people in times of war and the unbalanced relationship between men and women, Mrs Dalloway (1925), Orlando(1928) and A Room of One’s Own (1929). She came from an educated family and she herself was educated by her father in her house’s library. She first had a nervous breakdown when her mother and half-sister died. Unknown to most people, she was sexually abused by her half-brother after her father died which later made her institutionalized due to her biggest collapse breakdown.

Her works had made big impressions towards fellow writers and most of her works examined feminist issues. For example, Mrs Dalloway, the novel works with themes of mental illness, in the figure of a shell-shocked war survivor that suffers with doctors that dismiss his condition and ultimately commits suicides. The book examines feminist issues, in the figure of Dalloway herself, as a personification of the female stereotype, sexually and economically repressed and in the figure of Sally Seton, who appears as her opposite, independent and care free.

Virginia Woolf died on the 28th of March 1941 in East Sussex, England, at the age of 59.

Ref : "Virginia Woolf - Biography." Virginia Woolf. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Sept. 2014