This chapter is intended as a contribution to the history of American women's literature, which is to say, it is intended as a history. But readers will quickly see in it a polemical purpose as well. For the history that I am offering here – one that insists on the coterminous centrality of lyric as a genre and subjective expression as a value (both in their celebration and their critique) – should require us to reconsider, if not abandon, our justifications for studying (or producing) women's poetry as such, that is, as women's poetry.

In the first two sections of this chapter, I attempt to show how, even in the face of the most acute critiques of lyric and its conjunction with subjective expression, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, the commitment to poetry as a vehicle for individual expression persists – indeed, it could hardly become any stronger. As I show in the second section, the effort by poets, critics, and scholars to think about the difference women make to poetic production, precisely because it raises the specter of an apparently irreducible and dispositive difference at the level of the body, yields an occasion to think about the relationship between subject position and literary form, with the inevitable effect, I argue, of making form appear to be the indexical trace of particular subject positions.