Love Poetry, Women's Bonding and Feminist Consciousness

Artemis Michailidou

This article examines Adrienne Rich's in relation to Edna St Vincent Millay's . 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 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.

Mots clés: feminist consciousness; literary influence; love poetry; Millay; Rich; women's bonding

Artemis Michailidou. Love Poetry, Women's Bonding and Feminist Consciousness. European Journal of Women's Studies, 2006, 13 (1), pp.39-57. ⟨10.1177/1350506806060005⟩. ⟨hal-00571268⟩