Six Women Poets: A Cross-Cultural Study

The book examines, against the backdrop of their historical time and space, the works of six representative poets who nourish a faith in the possibility of poetry to offer practical, psychological and spiritual benefits. Their individual experiences have validity in the universal context of collective womanhood, so that localized identities o race, colour and nationality are ultimately subsumed in that collectivity. Straddling the two worlds of tradition and modernity, freedom and bondage, progress and regression, they have braved the perils of the tightrope walker to emerge as individuals in their own right. The desire for freedom from gender oppression is traced from its abstract underpinnings to its concrete manifestations in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Sarojini Naidu, Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das Surayya and Adrienne Rich and Mamta Kalia, whose narrative moves away from spectatorial detachment and is bound together by the framework of a common engagement with speaking for and interpreting the truths of their sex. The book makes a significant contribution to the fast-growing corpus of feminist studies.