Spaces of origin: Figures of the archetypal feminine in Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Crane, and Bishop

Despite the fact that the lives of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Hart Crane, and Elizabeth Bishop are separated by about a century, their poems resonate with strikingly similar images of the feminine archetype and the nature of poetic writing. It is seemingly through encounters with the feminine, troped as maternal figures and womb-like spaces of protean shapes, that the poet-speakers in selected poems find their creativity and poetic voices. For Wordsworth, these encounters with the feminine, like the mutually creative relationships we have as infants with our mothers, are benign. But they aren't always experienced that way. The male-poet speakers in Shelley's, Keat's, and Crane's writing consider themselves physically or psychologically threatened by such encounters, and Bishop's female poet-speaker at least recognizes the danger inherent in them. The feminine space that nurtures their poetic voices also has the potential to destroy them. Poetry seems to emerge from, or be the product of, a paradoxical space where meaning and images vacillate. At the same time, it becomes precisely that--a space where the meaning of words and images continually move. Thus, when we read a poem, it would seem that we enter a feminine space, as it were, much as its author did. And what we find there is, in part, the result of our creative engagement with the linguistic landscape before us just as the very poem we read is the result of the poet's creative engagement with the mental landscape before him or her.