SOURCE: “Poetry and Gender,” in The Kenyon Review, Vol. 9, Summer, 1987, pp. 127-40.

In the following essay, Voigt addresses various implications of the female poetic aesthetic outlined in Stealing the Language, suggesting that differences in women's poetry, rather than similarities, would better illuminate female experience.

The belief that true poetry is genderless—which is a disguised form of believing that true poetry is masculine—means that we have not learned to see women poets generically, to recognize the tradition they belong to, or discuss either the limitations or the strengths of that tradition. … ¹

Undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the making of any art, but art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art.²

As to the poetical Character itself, … it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing...