I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

The greatest women writers of the past (at least in the English language, which is the only language I know well enough to survey), with the possible exception of the Brontës, and of Emily more than Charlotte, are always constrained by some pinching corset of timidity, some obscuring veil of inhibition, absent in their male peers. Why did George Eliot punish or kill those heroines who were most restlessly and intelligently like herself? Why does Virginia Woolf explain that she did not write about the experiences of the body because to do so would have incurred censure, where D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce wrote and let censure and censors be damned? Why-this one pains me the most-if there are two poetic geniuses of equal immensity in mid-nineteenth century America, does one of them say "I celebrate myself" and "What I assume you shall assume," while the other one says, "I'm nobody?" Not because the women were more moral or less egotistical than the men, nor because they were obeying their natures, but because they were afraid. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," writes Emily Dickinson, not because evasion is intrinsically poetic, but because she is afraid.

Witch, scholar, poet, dreamer, and the rest...

She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …

For most of history, anonymous was a woman.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist; but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

You know C. S. Lewis, whom I greatly admire, said there’s no such thing as creative writing. I’ve always agreed with that and always refuse to teach it when given the opportunity. He said there is, in fact, only one Creator and we mix. That’s our function, to mix the elements He has given us. See how wonderfully anonymous that leaves us? You can’t say, “I did this; this gross matrix of flesh and blood and sinews and nerves did this.” What nonsense! I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me. I’ve always loved the idea of the craftsman, the anonymous man. For instance, I’ve always wanted my books to be called the work of Anon, because Anon is my favorite literary character. If you look through an anthology of poems that go from the far past into the present time, you’ll see that all the poems signed “Anon” have a very specific flavor that is one flavor all the way through the centuries. I think, perhaps arrogantly, of myself as “Anon.” I would like to think that Mary Poppins and the other books could be called back to make that change. But I suppose it’s too late for that.

She lives in the poetry she cannot write.

… nearly all Emily Brontë’s biographers and scholars over the past century have been women. If you do spot a man in the mix, chances are that he has been shuffled off to the side, rather like , though hopefully without the urge to get drunk and set fire to himself. The only other author who has become the object of such an intense female pash in the last 200 years is Sylvia Plath, who happens to be buried less than 10 miles away from at . The parallels are uncanny. Separated by a century, both Brontë and Plath were poets who remain most famous for writing a single intensely autobiographical novel. There’s even a pleasing bit of intertextuality in the way that in 1956 Sylvia Plath actually managed to marry in the form of her own glowering man-of-the-moors, . Together the newlyweds tramped up to and wrote poems about it, an event that Hughes was still mulling over 40 years later in his valedictory . Both Plath and Brontë died at the age of 30 and then only gradually started to attract the cult-like devotion of female fans, who responded rapturously to their heroines’ status as exiles from the twin kingdoms of heteronormative happiness and literary fame.

She's a writer. The kind of writer who wouldn't be published outside. She believes that when one deals with words, one deals with the mind.

Great works of literature have frequently been produced by authors writing under assumed names. Despite readers' curiosity and the public's interest in identifying the creator of a work of art, an author generally is free to decide whether or not to disclose her true identity. The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one's privacy as possible. Whatever the motivation may be, at least in the field of literary endeavor, the interest in having anonymous works enter the marketplace of ideas unquestionably outweighs any public interest in requiring disclosure as a condition of entry.

She lives the poetry she cannot write.

You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed,