Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton Adrienne Rich free essay sample

Examines three American women poets works, styles, techniques, language, artistic development, themes (focusing on love sex). Women poets of the last half century have developed a poetic voice which is, in the most positive way, distinctively female. Stevie Smith, Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich are three of these poets. Though they write on a variety of subjects, death for example, or on subjects that are uniquely female, such as motherhood, one of the areas in which women poets pose the strongest challenge to the patriarchal tradition is the subject of love. After centuries in which the conventions and approaches and vocabulary of love poetry were primarily the creations of men, poets such as Smith, Sexton and Rich were among those who offered a new, specifically female view of love. Though the three poets are very different writers in terms of style, form and the specifics of subject matter, taken together they provide strong examples of how the uniquely female view is transforming