Feminist critique has altered – or at least challenged – many things: laws and policy, cultural products, fields of study, subjectivities, ethics, historical knowledge, what is looked for and what is seen. Feminist critique offers analytic anatomies of and passionate resistance to customs and assumptions concerning gender, including those enshrined in literature. Such critique intervened in the interpretation of poetry, constructing a reading category, poetry by women, and integrating social and aesthetic analyses of works and careers. Existing practices of poetry have offered various traditional positions for female figures; among these are idealized beauty and goodness, powerful muse behaviors to inspire others, spirits of nature and bounty, and passive droopiness, even unto poetic death. This array creates particular problems for actual women in literary production (the writing of work) and in reception (the reading of work). Like all women, women poets have had a historically shifting relationship to cultural institutions – to their professions in terms of publication, distribution, and evaluation, to reward systems and authority – access, that is, to meaningful memory of their achievements, both for themselves and on the behalf of culture at large. No matter the social gains for women over time, women as writers – often quite against their wills, hopes, and goals – have a differential relationship to culture, a relationship that can be startlingly divergent from men's.

Where women and other minoritized writers are concerned, many assumptions about their work – viewed as inadequate, lacking, immature, unnecessary, imitative, hesitant, without authority, devoid of cultural or literary capital, or conversely too brassy, outspoken, unsubtle, emotional – make their structural relation to such literary traditions discussable as a separate critical category. Such differentials make them prime candidates for the “feminism of reception” – a rectification strategy for reading that gives an empathetic hearing to the disparaged or semi-lost, while alert for the norms and ideologies constructing historical gender – and their literary manifestations.

The reception category “poetry by women” offers a cultural context for reading this work and reclaiming its vitality with nuanced studies of poets (individually or in groups) who were once present, productive, palpable, and yet forgotten, or undercut by sexism or by themselves; or active and then erased; or thought of as exceptionalist tokens, representative of no necessary cultural meanings.

‘The sex-gender system … is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation’; it is also historical, imbedded in personal subjectivity and general ideology, and the site of multiple contradictions. Yet throughout significant decades of modernist literary criticism, no one examined sex-gender materials in particular, although sexuality often incurred comment. This was despite fervent debates and social politics about war, suffrage, the new woman, professions opening to women, and many socio-political manifestations of change around gender and sexuality in modernity: sexology, the criminalisation of homosexuality, transgressive feminine masculinities, lesbianism, homoeroticism, eugenicist schemes and fears about virility. Further, no ‘gendered’ reading exists in isolation from other social materials – in the case of T. S. Eliot, consideration of nationality (twofold), religious culture, sexuality, class and ethnic materials intersect with gender; each inflects the other.

Eliot's biography provides one zone for gender/sexuality readings. Lyndall Gordon points to maternal influence, noting Charlotte Eliot's upstanding late Victorian poems of religious and moral conviction and Eliot's admiration for her work. The singular, strained and even ‘possum-like’ treatments of women in Eliot's life are striking: from the creatively vibrant but unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood, his first wife, to the woman he admired from afar, Emily Hale, who wanted more than Eliot could give, to Mary Trevelyan, his pal in later life, up until the safe harbour of the marriage of his last seven years with Valerie Fletcher, a figure of love, care, comfort, posthumous editing and executorship.

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle [Aldington], 1886-1961), with these initials as her authorial signet, had a literary career as an author of lyric poetry, long poems, essay/memoirs and novels and, briefly, as a film-maker and actress. Born in the United States from a well-to-do, intellectual family, adherents of Moravian Protestantism, H.D. became an expatriate writer and British citizen, living in London and later in Switzerland. She had a complex relational life as a bisexual woman, was married with one daughter (from an affair), enjoyed a number of erotic relationships with men and women, and lived in a companionate, lesbian relationship with Bryher (Winifred Ellerman, 1894-1983) for the majority of her life. She was theoretically and personally invested in psychoanalysis, archaeological discoveries, classical culture, cinema, the occult and comparative religious study; she also meditated the array and meanings of her erotic and relational ties in richly layered prose and poetry, including memoirs of her brief but important analysis with Freud. Both world wars profoundly affected her writing. Indeed, many of modernism's most distinctive long poems were written in large measure to confront these wars, to give accounts of their damage and to construct alternative meanings.

H.D.'s critical reputation, like that of many other modernist women, was quite uneven until the advent of feminist scholarship. Despite her full writing career and panoply of fascinating texts, she was seen as Imagist (or short-poem writer) only, localised to some work in the 1910s as fully representative, with her total oeuvre sometimes marginalised and discredited. Some poets and fewer academics (like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and L. S. Dembo) always insisted on her pertinence; H.D.'s own careful archive at Beinecke Library, Yale University, set up by H.D. and Norman Holmes Pearson, assisted the recovery of her importance by a growing number of scholars.

Speaking in the 1950s of his 1916 poem “To a Young Housewife,” William Carlos Williams states “Whenever a man sees a beautiful woman it's an occasion for poetry – compensating beauty with beauty” (Williams 1986, 479). The genre “poetry” activates notable ideologies, myths and implicit narratives around sexuality and gender (Barthes 1972). Certainly poetry is always to be beautiful, and in these beauties linked to the beauties of Woman. Love, also, will be poetic. One of the key narratives that constructs traditional lyrics is “masculine, heterosexual desire,” with its interests in a silent, beautiful, distant female object of longing (Homans, 1985, 570). Inside the enounced, there is often a triangulated situation in the lyric: an overtly male “I,” speaking as if overheard in front of an unseen but postulated, loosely male “us” about a (Beloved) “she” (Grossman 1992, 227), articulating a homosocial triangle (Sedgwick 1985). This foundational cluster concerns voice (and the silent), power (of appropriation, envelopment, transcendence), pure beauty (not formation and culture), gaze (framing, specularity, fragmentation), and the sources of poetic matter – narratives of romance, of the sublime, scenes of inspiration, the muse as conduit (Vickers 1981). And as lyric poetry positions female figures in the feminine, it resists the possibility of effeminacy. While other aspects of lyric exist, this cluster contributes to the “political unconscious” of poetry in general, and of the romantic lyric in particular (Jameson 1981).

This chapter undertakes an analysis of “Hoo”: a phonemic bit apparently decorative, unpurposeful, and wayward, resounding in poems of Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, and T. S. Eliot. Despite looking like a meaningless sound or inarticulate syllable, the phoneme presents a cornucopia of racialized materials in order to create a powerful position for [male] whiteness; it makes a vibrant, aggressive sound of threat and promise that thrills and jolts its users. This reading of a poetic phoneme by social philology proceeds “by fully semanticizing / the so-called nonsemantic features of language” (Bernstein 1992, 16). An alternative and important reading of “hoo” in Eliot only, one that helped incite this chapter, occurs in Michael North's work. He takes the syllable as an indicator of nullity, a “purely phatic sound” “associated with cultures outside of Europe” that Eliot uses to indicate that “language has become null” as Sweeney crosses the line, confessing the savagery of murder (North 1992, 69–70; 1994, 89, 96). In contrast, but helped considerably by North's focus, I see the sound as having content and intertextualities. Briefly to sketch some of its effects, “hoo” draws on black agency and autonomy, which, because mysterious, inexplicable, and frightening to Euro-American writers, is therefore paradoxically affirmed and denied in the syllable “hoo.”

In the teens and twenties of the twentieth century, New Negroes and some politically sympathetic Euro-Americans struggled to counter the staggering oppressions of blacks in the post-Reconstruction United States – “economic disinheritance,” rigid educational and professional limits, murderous terrorism, imposition of segregation, and the compromise of African-American citizenship (C. Johnson 1954, 207). Tales of Darkest America, Fenton Johnson's blistering prose title from 1920, puns precisely on the site of the uncivilized and primitive, given the ethical and political scandals resisting racial equality. African-Americans claimed cultural authority in the Negro Renaissance. The New Black subjectivity was a culmination of cultural and political struggles of respect for blackness, desire for social striving and affirmation, self-determination, debates about the uses to which African-American “folkstuff” (Sterling Brown's term) could be put, and self-conscious focus on the decolonization of a serf population interior to the United States by an emergent educated elite (Brown 1996, 190).

Work by African-American poets had a mix of cultural and political tasks. For example, allusions to the strains of decolonization and the question of the “maturity” of a people occur in Langston Hughes' often-anthologized poem “I, Too, Sing America” (1925) whose simple diction and declarations seem superficially to concede the childishness of the “darker brother” even as the poem remarks how this brother grows strong (Hughes 1994, 46).

This book situates itself within modernist studies, trying one way of relating modernism to modernities. Propelled by the scintillating critical practices from feminist, ethnic, and other materialist critics and poetic communities, my reading of poetry within modernist studies probes works of art by people struggling with formations entitled new – New Woman, New Black, New Jew. Part of the “newness” of modernity lies in its representation of the urgencies and contradictions of these modern subjectivities. By a method I call social philology, I propose a reactivation of close reading to examine in poetry the textual traces and discursive manifestations of a variety of ideological assumptions, subject positions, and social concepts concerning gender, race, and religious culture. It is the purpose of this book to offer reading strategies that can mediate between the historical terrain and the intimate poetic textures of a work.

Certainly the materials and themes of poems involve discursive elements (allusions, diction, tropes) and depict issues traceable to particular social subjects.