SOURCE: Keller, Lynn. “Measured Feet ‘in Gender-Bender Shoes’: The Politics of Poetic Form in Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons.” In Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, edited by Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller, pp. 260-86. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Keller examines Hacker's use of formalist verse in a way that resists the stereotypical patriarchal gender politics generally associated with formalism.

Poetry in set verse forms has recently enjoyed a revival.¹ Given the highly politicized history of poetic form in this century—especially the battles in the 1960s over the ideological implications of free verse and “open” forms—it is hardly surprising that the advent of the “new formalism” has renewed disputes about the politics of poetic form. To counter the essentialist understandings of poetic form on which such disputes are often based, this essay will examine...