Introduction: Gender, creativity, and the woman poet / Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar -- 1. "A lonesome glee" -poets before 1800: Jane Lead: mysticism and the woman cloathed with the sun / Catherine F. Smith -- Anne Bradstreet's poetry: a study of subversive piety / Wendy Martin -- Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: an Augustan woman poet / Katharine Rogers -- 2. "Titanic opera" -nineteenth-century poets: This changeful life: Emily Brontë's anti-romance / Nina Auerbach -- Working into light: Elizabeth Barrett Browning / Helen Cooper -- Christina Rossetti: the inward pose / Dolores Rosenblum -- Vesuvius at home: the power of Emily Dickinson / Adrienne Rich -- Emily Dickinson and the deerslayer: the dilemma of the woman poet in America / Albert Gelpi -- Armored women, naked men: Dickinson, Whitman, and their successors / Terence Diggory -- 3. "The silver reticence" -modernists: The art of silence and the forms of women's poetry / Jeanne Kammer -- Afro-American women poets: a bio-critical survey / Gloria T. Hull -- Edna St. Vincent Millay and the language of vulnerability / Jane Stanbrough -- The echoing spell of H.D.'s Trilogy / Susan Gubar -- 4. "The difference -made me bold" -contemporary poets: May Swenson and the shapes of speculation / Alicia Ostriker -- Gwendolyn the terrible: propositions on eleven poems / Hortense J. Spillers -- A fine, white flying myth: the life/work of Sylvia Plath / Sandra M. Gilbert -- Seeking the exit or the home: poetry and salvation in the career of Anne Sexton / Suzanne Juhasz -- A common language: the American woman poet / Barbara Charelesworth Gelpi -- The critique of consciousness and myth in Levertov, Rich, and Rukeyser / Rachel Blau Duplessis.