SOURCE: "The Sexual Swamp: Female Erotics and the Masculine Art," in The Southern Review, Vol. 28, No. 2, April, 1992, pp. 333-52.

In the following essay, McMahon investigates the origins and implications of female sexuality and a female aesthetic in the poetry of Louise Glück, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.

For some time now feminist and Marxist and psychoanalytic critics have been exploring the language of patriarchy, trying to unearth a female aesthetic from phallogocentric digs. The lexicon is often funny ("phallocrat" is one of my favorites; another is "phallogocentric," Jacques Derrida's neologism linking phallus, logos, and center, all three of which deconstruction attempts to undo). More often the language is clunky (how many of us doze off at the first assault of Signifier and Signified, or grind our teeth at the torturous infinitive "to privilege"?), or simply and drily obscure. But whatever the failures of the language, the idea...