Poetry Is Not A Luxury, By Audre Lorde : Critical Analysis

To begin with, the author’s implementation of short sentence fragments throughout the poem illustrates the exasperation and frustration bottled up in women in response to

Audre Lorde was a writer, poet, mother, feminist, civil rights advocate, and more. According to the Poetry Foundation, Lorde dedicated a large part of her life and creative talents to confront the issues of sexisum, homophobia, racism, and more. She was concerned with modern society’s excessive need to sort individuals into different groups of people. She believed in power and change within the world. Her poems and writings can relate not only to those who are in search for change, but crave love, fulfillment, and revolution. Throughout her poem, “Movement Song”, Audre Lorde captures the raw emotions one possesses while slowly letting go of a loved individual whie using poetic devices including complex methaphors, repition,

Audre Lorde also uses situations that the reader can relate to making the poem more meaningful to the reader. An example of this is in her poem “Hanging Fire”, This is a poem about a girl who has a hard time being a teenager, who worries about acne, boys, grades, clothes, and what others think of her. In this poem, the teen also worries about dying and starts to think that death could prevent her from doing things in life, through all of her struggles the young woman also lacks support from her mother, shown in the poem when the girl says “And momma’s in the bedroom with the door closed”.But the part of this poem that most people can relate to is the character discovering the difficulties of being a teen. In stanza 3 line 31 the poem

Audre Lorde, a well-known poet, utilized her poetry to call attention over the political issues of class, feminism, sexism and racism for decades. These political issues are the symbols that transformed her into someone who is not just a woman, but a person whom clarifies these issues using poetry as a voice to define herself as a Black lesbian woman and an individual. The poem “Coal” is a poem that represents her ideals and her feelings towards being a voice among other feminists. It also shows her struggle as an individual that is caught between the issues of feminism coinciding with race, class, and sexism, which is also known as Intersectionality. Because of the attention being called from Lorde’s poetry, people should continue to recognize this political issue and utilize it to spread awareness of the prejudice and marginalization of today’s society.

With her lesbian and feminist persona, Audre Lorde’s career as a poet broke through during the bloody and turbulent period of the late 1960’s. Debuting her first collection of poems in 1968, Lorde began her career by expressing herself, a black lesbian feminist and her thoughts on different political issues of that time. Along with other black feminists, such as Lucille Clifton and Alice Walker, Lorde provided a voice for black women who she believed were sexually oppressed and deserved as much respect and appreciation as black men. Lorde is different from the other Black Art Era authors because she believed in intersectionality. She did not want to focus primarily on blackness, but wanted to acknowledge that black people were not only black, but had individual identities. As many authors wanted to keep their attention on blackness, Lorde wanted to focus on their complex personalities. What makes Lorde slightly different from other poets of the Black Arts Era, is that she sometimes spoke for all people. However when she spoke for all people, she usually spoke for black women first. In Lorde’s selected works “Coal” and “Now That I Am Forever with Child”, she demonstrates her view on the importance of self-expression, which she struggled with in her life along with the birthing of a new person and generation.

For women poets there is a constant feeling of being second best to male poets and often their work is judged based on their gender rather than its literary quality. In this essay I will discuss the ways in which women poets have dealt with the constant comparisons to men, arguing that being a woman poet requires the determination to constantly stand up for your own work whilst also speaking for women in general and the prejudices that they face. Eavan Boland’s quote highlights the fact that for a long time it was believed that women didn’t possess the ability to write poetry, through the use of poets such as Margaret Atwood, Christina Rosetti and Carol Ann Duffy, I will present the ways in which women poets fought against this belief in order

Early women writers received a lot of pushback for sharing their creativity with the world. Men feared these revolutionary women because they were doing the very thing that traditional roles impeded; these women were creating a space in society for themselves and others alike. Writing gave them the power to communicate, whether it be about their daily hardships, societal grievances, or aspirations. The platform women established through their writing allowed them to preserve a record of the mistakes they made and turn them into stories that would inspire other women to make better choices. With their writing, authors, Elizabeth Cary and Isabella Whitney motivate women to put themselves first so that they are not remembered as simply someone’s sister or someone who conforms to the desires of others.

Feminists argued that women’s roles of reproduction and social attachments in the domestic sphere constituted an economy and class of its own. This was based on the role of motherhood and unpaid work at home. Millett (1969) contended in Sexual Politics for the existence of women’s sexuality that was detached from the motherhood and marriage obligations. Conversely, other lesbian authors such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich utilized writing, speeches, and poetry in linking women’s oppression and heterosexuality. These rhetoricians asserted that heterosexuality is an unavoidable institution that is aimed at perpetuating men’s power across race and class. In Lorde’s (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches and Rich’s (1980) On Lies,

It will take me a long time to get to those ambitions because I first have to clarify plausible ways of using the concept of poetry's relations to a public world, and then I have to use that discussion in order to dramatize the problems of mediated culture that demand those new strategies. Criticism now seems divided between two basic understandings of how poets can evade romantic lyricism and directly address public worlds. The first is fundamentally agenda-based. Here poetry's relation to the public world consists in its efforts to offer timely statement or testimony responding to pressing social issues, usually as an effort to represent the interests of a specific community. The second option forgoes this emphasis on specific thematic concerns in order to stress instead the overall stances that poets develop. From this perspective it matters less what you say than how you manage to cultivate an ethos that is perceived as representing the

Once there was a movement for women to grow and expand what they wanted to do there were many poets and writers that wanted to write about the actions that were occurring in that time period. Once poet was Gertrude Stein, in Food and Objects, there is a feminist approach of seeming weak and unstable. Her use of word choice with at first thinking that nothing is making sense about her writing, along with her talking about domestic spaces and always looking outside. Her having multiple pieces of work that is talking about looking out a window and being not in the house shows the woman wants more than what she is used to. One of her pieces is called A Brown, in this I believe that she is discussing the change that is going on with women during the 20th century. She wrote, “A brown which is not liquid not more so is relaxed and yet there is a change, a news is pressing” (Stein, 1914). I believe that she is talking about the changes that women are fighting for. Another writing that was very popular in the 20th century was the Freewoman Magazine, this was for the public to “ponder on the profounder aspects of Feminism” and was considered “open” due to the risqué topics that were discussed, along with the invitation of readers to respond to the journals that were written by the editors. Motherhood was discussed in there points of view moral, mystic, and domestic. The Freewoman thought differently than the woman from the 19th century. The Freewoman’s perspective is that mothers are

Audre Lorde was a famous African American essayist and poet. From reading Poetry Make Something Happen, it is evident that she had a powerful voice and was passionate about the work she published. Her work is stylistically refreshing and motivational, making it relevant for years to come.

As a woman living in a very patriarchal society, Anne Bradstreet uses reverse psychology to present her beliefs and opinions. Bradstreet’s poems show her reality, and possibly the coping mechanisms of living in a world where men were favored above women. Bradstreet’s poems are full of female strength and presence, it is almost held back by her puritan roots and roles as a woman in the 1800s. I can see the conflict within her, between being a good puritan women but still knowing her worth and standing up for women. It’s very ironic that tone of the first authors published on American soil was a woman.

Adrienne Rich was a literary pioneer for American women during the contemporary era. Rich’s career spanned 60 years and she is most famous for her inspirational poetry that advocated for women. As an author, wife, mother, and Jew, Rich’s work encompassed the many prejudices that women face. Wendy Martin wrote, “Her work explores the experience of women who reject patriarchal definitions of femininity” (Martin 550). Adrienne Rich’s feminist upbringing inspired her poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law,” which explored identity, sexuality, and politics to prove that women do not have to satisfy social customs to be worthy of love during the contemporary literary era that took place in the 1960s.

In her essay stated that , “Writing Poetry” changes people, it is a means of self-discovery, we don’t create great art but at least we create ourselves’.( Raine 138) In ‘Self”, the voice asks ‘ Who am I?’ and searches for the supreme ‘other’: ‘ Who out of nothingness has gazed/ On the beloved face?” Similarly, there is unfulfilled longing in “The Unloved”: “I am pure loneliness/I am empty air” (Raine 43). Raines mysticism was not out of kilter with her neo-Romantic and apocalyptic contemporaries. As A. T. Tolley states in The Poetry of the Forties: “Kathleen Raine is the most eloquent exponent of her generation of the conception of poetry as a form of knowledge beyond the empirical and rational” (Tolley 136). Her poetry is often gender neutral in its pronouns and seemingly supports a lyric universality rooted in the Romantic tradition which established the genius of a male poet. Rita Felski in her essay Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change concludes: “Frequently the narrative of self-discovery may take the form on an inward

On the contrary to gynocentrism, Elaine Showalter an American critic, feminist and writer quibbles for the realignment of the conceptual standpoints of literary studies by seeing writings of women as primary rather than marginal. She also flicks to identify the aberration in women’s penning and investigates how psychodynamics of female creativity shapes the literary productions and readings differently from those of men. Having coined a new appellation, ‘Gynocritics’ in her cameo, Towards A Feminist Poetics, she contends that the programme of gynocritics is to evolve a female frame work for the analysis of women’s literature and to develop new methods based on the study of female experience rather than to adopt male’s models and theories. In order to diagnose the female difference, the gynocritical approach is sought to study the history, styles, themes, genres and structure of penmanship by women. The writers like, Adrienne Rich and Susan Griffin have also manifested the gynocritical writing.