Poetry, 1920–1945

Abstract

Revisionary anthologies were integral to the debates in conferences, books, and articles that considered women’s participation in the experimental avant-garde poetry associated with the 1920s, the left-wing public poetry that characterizes orthodox versions of the 1930s, and the still-evolving documentary literature about the Second World War. In the 1970s, editors retrieved forgotten poets through anthologies with a broad historical and national sweep.¹ Into the 1980s, editors began to evaluate poets’ contribution to literary periods and movements and feminist critics looked for the female-specific features that run within and across these periodizing categories. Fleur Adcock’s seminal The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Women’s Poetry (1987) brought to prominence poets who showed intellectual ‘wit’, such as Charlotte Mew (1869–1928), Anna Wickham (1884–1947), Frances Cornford (1886–1960), Elizabeth Daryush (1887–1975), Stevie Smith (1902–1971), E.J. Scovell (1886–1961), and the American-born H.D. (1886–1961). In 1984, Catherine Reilly uncovered a number of poets in Chaos of the Night: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the Second World War, a sequel to her equivalent collection of First World War poetry,² and Jane Dowson’s Women’s Poetry of the 1930s filled in the gap for that decade.³