This study seeks to cut across the conventional boundaries between critical and creative writing by featuring the work of both women poets and feminist critics as they explore and exemplifiy the relationship between gender and poetic genres. The contributors suggest ways of thinking and writing about poetry in light of contemporary questions about history and identity. The book covers a range in terms of time, geography and genre, considering poets from antiquity to the present and drawing on a variety of critical approaches. The topics include the transformation of classical lyric through the figure of Sappho and the transformative use of biblical material in women's verse. The poets whose work is represented (in prose as well as poetry) include: Eavan Boland; Olga Broumas and T. Begley; Anne Carson; Rachel Blau DuPlessis; Rita Dove; Marilyn Hacker; Joy Harjo; bell hooks; Susan Howe; Alicia Ostriker; M. Nourbese Philip; and Eleanor Wilner. Also included are critical essays on such poets as: Emily Dickinson; Adrienne Rich; Lucille Clifton; Stevie Smith; and other Modernist writers, as well as poets from the Irish oral tradition, the Hellenistic period, the Renaissance and the 18th century. The contributors to the volume are: T. Begley; Eavan Boland; Angela Bourke; Olga Broumas; Anne Carson; Rita Dove; Rachel Blau DuPlessis; Susan Stanford Friedman; Kathryn Gutzwiller; Marilyn Hacker; Joy Jarjo; Diana Henderson; bell hooks; Susan Howe; Romana Huk; Akasha Hull; Virginia Jackson; Jayne Elizabeth Lewis; Alicia Ostriker; M. Nourbese Philip; Yopie Prins; Maeera Shreiber; Karen Swann; and Eleanor Wilner.