ABSTRACT
Somewhat surprisingly, the twentieth century has ended with its British women poets in much the same state as Miss Pauncefort in Stevie Smith’s ‘The Songster’: ‘nobody knew what [they] sang about.’ With the exception of Jane Dowson’s recent and very fine Women, Modernism and British Poetry, 1910-1939 (2001), feminist scholarship has done little to recover the works of twentieth-century British women poets.2 British feminist criticism on modem poetry has remained determinedly internationalist, if still western focused, most likely in reaction to the masculinist slant of the national canon. For example, classic texts such as Jan Montefiore’s Feminism and Poetry (1987) and Liz Yorke’s Impertinent Voices (1991) have largely taken North American women poets as their subjects.3 This transatlantic tradition continues even in recent works such as Kicking Daffodils: Twentieth-Century Women Poets (1997) and Contemporary Women's Poetry (2000), despite their coverage of a large and varied selection of British women poets.4 While the breadth of these works is admirable, they nevertheless leave the twentieth-century British poetic canon relatively undisturbed. Moreover, internationalist perspectives prevent the examination of poetry within its cultural contexts, an approach that has been essential to recovering women’s literature.
