SOURCE: Schenck, Celeste M. “Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity, and the Politics of Exclusion.” In Women's Writing in Exile, edited by Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, pp. 225-50. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Schenck discusses the poetry of female modernists in terms of their state of being exiled from the political, cultural, and social mainstream.

When I first mapped out an essay on what I'd like to call modernist women's exiles, I envisioned an article on the exchanges between gender and genre, raised exponentially to include geography in the case of those triply exiled expatriate women poets. The task has been more difficult than I imagined for two reasons: first, my perfectly sonorous third—gender, genre, geography—collapsed under pressure of a less concordant trio—race, class, and sexual preference; second, because Gilbert and Gubar's observation that “verse genres have been...