Tuesday, April 26, 2011

News at Eleven (Back Page): The four women considered boisterous enough for boys

are Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazurus, Laura Richards and Julia Ward Howe, who snuck in with the warlike "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside the good, solid, masculine fare of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. Girls are given great poems--Frost, Manley Hopkins, Shelley--but in terms of subject matter there's a preponderance of flowers and feelings, garrets and staying inside watching the rain. Why Bunyan for girls, not boys? Because girls are naturally more devout? It's depressing to consider the thought processes that went into these selections.

from The Guardian: Verse and worse: choosing poems for readers' gender

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