Conclusion

Abstract

Contemporary concerns with the body reverberate within a long tradition, and this scrutiny crosses the boundaries of scientific inquiry, historical documentation, and humanistic theorization. In addition, several critical modes of thought, study, and discourse foreground the body’s importance in relation to gender, sexuality, and race. Feminism; New Historicism; and gay, lesbian, and queer theories; along with postcolonialism and race theory, all raise and answer questions regarding the body’s construction by and function within often competing systems of power. Most contemporary scholars seem to take the body-power connection for granted, and explicitly or not, when one raises questions about the body, one raises questions about power. Certainly, Foucault’s influence tinges our acknowledgment that “bodies matter” just as feminism has convinced us that the “personal is political.” Because we do generally concede the forgoing (power, bodies, and personal or political), we may lose sight of the significance regarding how bodies, power, the personal, and the political intersect.¹ Therefore, I end this study of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s, Elizabeth Bishop’s, Marilyn Chin’s, and Marilyn Hacker’s poetics of the body with a look at how female poets past and present find ways to negotiate the complexities of representing the female body within this intersection.