Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a comprehensive review, published in 1986, of women's poetry which shaped the feminist movement after the 1960s. The critical work illustrates a struggle that women poets faced in their road to self-expression. Ostriker, who received her literary education in the 1950s and 1960s, seldom encountered women poets. Poetry was dominated by male writers and critics. Males claimed universality in the literary language, recognizing the woman writer as the "other." The gender bias is evident even in the criticism of women poets. Ostriker says that "the language used to express literary admiration in general presumes the masculinity of the author, the work, and the act of creation – but not if the author is a woman." Gender defined the criticism that a poem would receive, rather than the actual work itself. The new wave of poetry, starting in the 1960s, featured women poets who chose to "explore experiences central to their sex and to find forms and styles appropriate to their exploration." The multitude of styles and subjects that these women poets use constitutes a new movement, one that is "comparable to romanticism or modernism in our literary past."
Synopsis
The subject of Stealing the Language is that of “the extraordinary tide of poetry by American women” stemming from 1960 and the literary movement that this work engenders. For Ostriker, these women poets are “challenging and transforming the history of poetry.” The introduction raises key themes woven throughout the book of the systematic and oppressive gendering of customary literary language, the critical and social dismissal of a poet's exploration of female experience, and the difficulty of acknowledging difference and originality of women poets.