It is sometimes claimed, usually by male critics, that contemporary women poets are only interested in exploring issues related to gender. Does your own detailed reading of the work of Carol Ann Duffy incline you to support or reject that view? Refer clos
It is sometimes claimed, usually by male critics, that contemporary women poets are only interested in exploring issues related to gender. Does your own detailed reading of the work of Carol Ann Duffy incline you to support or reject that view? Refer closely to at least two poems.
From a superficial reading, it seems apparent that Duffy is portraying a grudge she holds towards men in her poetry and that gender issues are the main issue being explored in her poems. Examples like the wolf in Little Red Cap, (her first male lover), taking her virginity and then her taking her “axe to a wolf” present violent imagery and a very unsympathetic view to men. However her respect for his lore of poetry which is recurrent in Anna Hathaway offers the opposite viewpoint. Also the very name of the book presents a possible theme Duffy is trying to make clear. The World’s Wife suggests an inequality in sex, the world being a man and the wife its possession. This theme has a solid backbone, throughout most of her poems the wife is simply the onlooker to a man who has resonated through history without the accompaniment of his wife, in terms fame. But who in fact got to where he was, because of her. Though it is true gender is the strongest theme in the collection, it isn’t the only one. Throughout many of her poems it appears, though not very clearly, as if she is hinting towards her own homosexuality and its development. Also the theme of love, and its frequent changes is a theme illustrated by the very order of the poems themselves. Though it can be said that gender issues are the most prevalent theme, it would be untruthful to say that Duffy is only interested in exploring this issue.