SOURCE: "May Swenson and the Shapes of Speculation," in The American Poetry Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, March-April, 1978, pp. 35-8.

A feminist critic and poet, Ostriker has published numerous studies on the relationship between gender and literature. In the following excerpt, she discusses the feminist power of Swenson's poetry, particularly the poems in Iconographs.

Most humanists show very little curiosity about the physical world outside the self, and usually a positive antipathy to the mental processes we call scientific. This was not always the case. Although Western literature has only one De Rerum Naturam, persons of letters were once expected to take all knowledge as their province, and to interpret scientific understanding as part of a unified vision of the world. Despite the expanding post-Renaissance hostility between science and art, even as late as the nineteenth century, Blake was defining the implications of Newtonian mechanics for the human imagination, and...