Poetry Day I

[faustus]

Brisingamen drew my attention to a news story by asking us to name 10 women poets. Fortunately, I quickly came up with at least twelve.




I speedily realised that this was a link to the Poetry Day poll for Nation's Favourite Poet - T. S. Eliot coming top, John Donne second and Benjamin Zephaniah third; five women are fiven honourable mentions - Cope, Duffy, Plath, Rosetti and Smith.


The poll was held on a BBC poetry website, and wasn't an open vote but one based on a selection of thirty poets:


Eliot
Donne
Zephaniah
Owen
Larkin
Blake
Yeats
Betjemin
Keats
Dylan Thomas

Armitage
Auden
Robert Browning
Burns
Byron
Coleridge
Cope
Duffy
Hardy
Heaney
Hopkins
Hughes
Kipling
McGough
Milton
Plath
Rosetti
Smith
Tennyson
Wordsworth

So, the Director of the Poetry Society and the Director of the Arts Council - among others - can only argue for 5/30 women poets and 1/30 non-white poets.

I remind you of two earlier lists from here

Geoffrey Chaucer
William Shakespeare
John Donne
John Milton
Alexander Pope
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
John Keats
Robert Browning
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thomas Hardy

T.S. Eliot
W.H. Auden
Sylvia Plath
Philip Larkin
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney
Siegfried Sassoon


- the poets chosen by The Independent and The Guardian for booklets (the former turned out to be the main writers with a few others included for good measure; I don't think any of these were female from memory).


It also reminds me of FJM's recent post, on the Radio 4 interview programme whose name escapes me - Chain Reaction? - where given a free choice of guest, neither women nor straight men appear to choose a woman to interview. we still don't think of women as superlative.


Copies of How to Suppress Women's Writing all round.