21st Century Indian Women Poets: An Introduction

Recovering Memory: In search of an Indian Feminine poetics with reference to the 21st century poetry

The comparative study of women’s poetry reveals many patterns of similarity in thought, themes, metaphors, and diction. It also reveals profound contradictions between the image of the poet as the “transcendent speaker of a unified culture” (Kaplan 70) and the image of Woman as silenced, dependent, and marginal. Women poets must also imitate or revise the tropes of the male tradition, as the feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noted, “Female poets both participated in and diverged from the literary conventions and genres established for them by their male contemporaries.” Furthermore, internal differences between women of nationality, class and race preclude a single poetic matri-lineage.

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