A Master of Perspective
Who do you think of when you read the word “poet”?
Probably, most picture Wordsworth, Owen, or other such touchstones of modern verse - the iconic but curriculum-heavy staples of those foggy days at GCSE.
This very masculine, somewhat acerbic and cynical archetype is a traditional symbol of male intellect but seems to be strongly constrained by a rigidly patriarchal framework - surely enough, perspective in poetry is frequently male dominated.
In Petrarch for instance (who popularised the sonnet form in the fourteenth century), one sees the burgeoning male gaze, such as his 129th Canzone ‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’, which relates a personification of the natural environment to an image of female beauty:
“I see her so often, more beautiful than before,
…
Many times (who will believe me?) I have seen her
in the clear blue water and on the green grass”
Here one sees the conflation of adulation of the sublime with a voyeuristic objectification, where women’s bodies become the nexus between intense symbols of desire and purity - the perfect male fantasy of unreciprocated infatuation, when considering the role of hegemonic masculinity.
“More attractive I would paint her in those sites
…
up to the highest, freest peak of the chain,
an intense desire draws me, which I’ve felt before.”
One can make substantial parallels to the role of women in the media today, pandering primarily to male demographics and experiences.
However, in the contemporary there are many examples of modern poets turning the tables on this reinforcement of male bias; one such poet is Kim Moore, who makes a point of objectifying men to drily expostulate cultural biases towards promiscuous men:
“The men inside my room do not like leaving.
They think they know my name
but one of us is lying.”
Through this technique, women poets like Moore can shake up the status quo, whilst also satirising both conventions of romantic poetry to oversexualise women and the archetypal chauvinist through the first-person singular perspective.
Both of these poems explore desire via the perception of an objectified subject through this lens, and the result appears both intensely unilateral and demeaning to the object; the poetic material is scrutinised and debased in its reduction to the “Muse” character, an egotistical creation of the speaker.
A third form of poetic perspective might be found in Emily Dickinson's “bisexual perspective” - ironically challenging verse as a male-dominated field, by using ambiguous gendered pronouns to explore romantic relationships and the erotic, such as in “Wild Nights - Wild Nights!”:
“Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!”
By utilising the second and first plural pronouns, a sense of harmony and unity in a mutually respectful and reciprocal relationship is formed, still burning with desire, but enamoured in the connection of the subject and object - they meet in the middle, without breaking through the glass floor or ceiling.
Furthermore, Dickinson reclaims poetic ambiguity through an arguably queer lens, so that the idealised couple as a unit is stressed as more important than the gendered dynamics of the speaker and the subject; readers can imagine for themselves any number of possible relationships within the same structure, providing a framework for inclusivity.
This sentiment is also explored through John Donne’s illustrious “The Ecstasy”; from the exposition he brings to mind a traditional voluptuous symbol of female beauty:
“Where, like a pillow on a bed
A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest”
and then subverts it later:
“...(though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same)”.
In his merging of the speaker and object’s souls, Donne powerfully conjures a new poetic character outside of the milieu of poetic tradition; a multi-gendered (or genderless) amalgam that experiences collective emotions of the diegesis.
This can be compared to Keats’ “Chameleon Poet”, which assimilates identity and poetic meaning from the setting and characters of the poem; the speaker is defined through its choice to depict the subjects of the poem.
Keats himself uses the apostrophic lens (addressing the inanimate), such as in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” - this fantastic love-letter to classical storytelling and pottery painting, using second person to evoke an artistic, aestheticist gaze.
A more modern usurpation of the traditional male bias in poetry might be Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus”:
“The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot ——
The big strip tease.”
By mocking the “peanut munching crowd” of the historic male audience to poetry (as established in the history of patronage), Plath satirises the essentialist conventions of verse to become oversexualising of women’s bodies, whether through the guise of romance or worship of form, and provides new perspective on the role of the speaker to perform for an audience.
This metapoetical device provides the infrastructure for a new generation of feminist and queer poetry to innovate in a new individualist format of poetry, as both a storytelling and descriptive medium, breaking down the patriarchal male bias in poetry.
This imaginative transformation of traditional point of view hopefully sets the bar to allow for greater self-identification with the emotions in verse, and putting inclusivity at the forefront of contemporary poetry.
Simon Cockling
Picture: The Rehearsal Onstage, Degas, from the Met collection
Henneburg on Bisexual perspective
