SOURCE: Higonnet, Margaret R. “Not So Quiet in No-Woman's Land.” In Gendering War Talk, edited by Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott, pp. 205-26. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Higonnet identifies and discusses several of “the misogynist barriers women had to overcome when they translated the war into words.”

Patriarchal Poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is the same as                                         patriarchal poetry is the same as Patriotic poetry is                                                                                 the same as patriarchal poetry is the same. 

(Gertrude Stein)

World War I seemed to many contemporaries to defy linguistic formulation. Authentic speech, it has often been repeated, could come only from the trenches in the disabused words of a man who had “seen” combat. The very concept of a soldier-poet, which gained critical currency during World War I, privileges the lived experience of violence.¹ Because of mass mobilization, the Great War indeed produced...