Ruth D. Weston (Essay Date Spring-Summer 1992)

SOURCE: Weston, Ruth D. "Who Touches This Touches a Woman: The Naked Self in Alice Walker." Weber Studies 9, no. 2 (spring-summer 1992): 49-62.

In the following essay, Weston contrasts Walker's verse with that of Walt Whitman, finding that Walker presents a uniquely feminist perspective on love, sexuality, and self-worth.

In The New York Times Book Review for March 9, 1986, Alicia Ostriker celebrates American women poets who refuse to be limited by the masculine ideal of "universal," meaning nonfemale, poetry. Ostriker believes that the writing of these women poets during the last twenty-five years constitutes a shaping force in American poetry. Their passionate, intimate poems "defy divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader," reminding us, she says, of the frank sexuality of Walt Whitman's poems, so aptly characterized by his own words: "Camerado, this is no book...