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Women Who Shaped Poetry: 20 Female Poets Who Made History

Women have been at the frontline when it comes to the use of poetry to express themselves, evoke emotions and highlight societal norms. Throughout history, several women have used poetry for self-expression, to offer awareness of important issues and fearlessly offer insight into the general human condition.

From the likes of Maya Angelou to Sappho and Rupi Kaur, these women have used poetry to express the full range of human emotions from love to loss and joy to pain. Their poems have been a source to help us understand ourselves and the world around us. They have also inspired us to live our lives more fully. Let’s delve into the list of 20 women who shaped poetry.

1. Sappho

Sappho was a Greek lyric poet. She was admired for the beauty of her writing style. Her poems were composed to be accompanied by music. She received acclaim for being one of the greatest poets of the ancient era. Her only known surviving complete poem is Ode to Aphrodite since most of her work is now lost.

Sappho is also considered a symbol of relations between woman and woman as she was rumoured to be a homosexual. Legend has it that she suffered a tragic death after leaping off the Leucadian cliffs due to her love for the ferryman Phaon.  

2. Maya Angelou

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Maya Angelou was an American poet. Her life as a memoirist, poet and civil rights activist spanned over five decades with seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry under her sleeve.

Angelou was a great composer of poetry with captivating and uplifting works such as And Still I Rise. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. The recording of the poem also won a Grammy Award. Read more on the Top 10 Fascinating Facts about Maya Angelou. 

3. Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was an American poet. While she was barely known during her life, she has since risen to be one of the most important figures in American poetry. Emily wrote nearly 1,800 poems but only 10 were published during her lifetime. 

Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature, and spirituality. Her family and close friends published more edited collections posthumously upon discovery. Her works can be found in the collection titled The Poems of Emily Dickinson  published in 1955.

4. Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks as an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She was the first African American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize and was appointed the Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. Some of her greatest poetic contributions include Winnie, Aloneness and In The Mecca. In 1976, she became the first African American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

5. Carol Ann Duffy

Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position. 

Duffy’s poems address issues such as oppression, gender, and violence. Her collections include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award; and Rapture, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. 

6. Rupi Kaur 

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Rupi Kaur is a Canadian poet. She began performing poetry in 2009 and rose to fame on Instagram, eventually becoming a popular poet through her three collections of poetry.

Considered to be at the forefront of the “Instapoetry” style, Kaur’s work is simplistic in language and explores South Asian identity, immigration, and femininity. Her three collections include Milk and Honey, The Sun and Her Flowers and Home Body.  

7. Rita Dove

Rita Dove is an American poet and essayist. Her poetic style captures complex emotions while defying easy categorization. Her most famous work to date is Thomas and Beulah. 

Dove served as a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986.

8. Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel, as well as The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. 

The Collected Poems was published in 1981 and included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously. Read more on 15 Most Influential Female Poets. 

9. Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich was an American Poet, essayist and devoted feminist. She was described as one of the most widely read and influential poets of the half of the second century.

Her poetry is straightforward and addresses the oppression of women and was an anti-war individual who advocated for peace and equality. Some of her notable works are, A mark of resistance, What kind of time are these and Planetarium.

10. Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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Elizabeth Barret Browning was an English poet of the Victorian era, popular in Britain and the United States during her lifetime. Barrett wrote poetry from the age of eleven.

Barret’s first adult collection of poems was published in 1838, and she wrote prolifically between 1841 and 1844, producing poetry, translation, and prose. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery, and her work helped influence reform in child labor legislation.  

11. Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American lyrical poet and Playwright. She was a prominent social figure during the roaring twenties and wrote most of her poems under the pseudonym Nacy Boyd.

Edna was the first woman and the second person to win the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was also the second woman to be awarded the Frost Medal for her lifetime contribution to American poetry. Some of her famous works are Ballad of the Harp–Weaver, Departure and the Penitent.

12. Phillis Wheatley

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Phillis Wheatley was the first African-American author of a published book of poetry. She gained fame in England and the American colonies after her publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in 1773 in London.

Wheatley employed religious, classical and abstract themes in her works. A famous piece is On Being Brought from Africa to America which touches on slavery. Her poetry was used as evidence that black people were intelligent and creative subsequently calling for the abolition of slavery altogether.

 13. Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver was an American poet whose works were inspired by observing nature and in 2007 she has declared the best-selling poet of the country. Mary was known to enjoy solitary walks and listened for inspiration to ignite her spring of words and in it sprung poetry that is still read in awe today. 

She has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Award. Some of her famous poems are Wild, The Journey and The Summer. Read more on 20 Famous Female Authors who Changed the World. 

14. Sarojini Naidu

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Sarojini Naidu was a poet, political activist and feminist. Naidu’s literary work as a poet earned her the nickname the Nightingale of India by Gandhi because of the color, imagery and lyrical quality of her poetry.

Naidu wrote lyric poetry in the fashion of traditional British Romanticism. Published in 1912, In the Bazaars of Hyderabad remains one of her most popular poems.

15. Christina Rosetti

Christina Rosetti was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children’s poems. Rosetti romanticized death and loss in her works. Her first two published pieces were Death’s Chill Between and Heart’s Chill Between in a magazine. She used a pseudonym, Ellen Alleyne.

Her first commercial publication was Goblin Market and Other Poems which appeared in 1862. It was widely acclaimed and she was considered the foremost female poet of the day.

16. Audre Lorde

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Audrey Lorde was an American writer feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a passionate poet who became a voice against oppression and social injustices that she witnessed during her time. Lorde dedicated her life to confronting injustices of racism, homophobia and classism through her poetry.

Her poetry is intriguing and is appreciated for its technical mastery of emotional expression as she brings to the world the injustices she observed in the world around her without fear. Audrey was also a spoken word artist who powerfully and intensely expressed her work. Some of her famous works are, A Woman Speaks, Recreation and Who said it was simple.

17. Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy is an American progressive activist, feminist, and writer. Her work includes Woman on the Edge of Time, He, She and It, which won the 1993 Arthur C. Clarke Award; and Gone to Soldiers, a New York Times Best Seller and a sweeping historical novel set during World War II. 

Piercy’s work is rooted in her Jewish heritage, Communist social and political activism, and feminist ideals. Read more on 25 Legendary Poets Everyone Should Read. 

18. Marianne Moore

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Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit. Moore’s first professionally published poems appeared in The Egoist and Poetry in the spring of 1915. In 2012, she was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

19. Anne Bradstreet 

Anne Bradstreet was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and the first writer in England’s North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and is notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously. Her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, was widely read in America and England.

20. Lang Leav

Lang Leav is a New Zealand novelist and poet. Leav’s interest in literature started at a young age. She would transcribe her poetry into books she made by hand, which she then passed around to her peers at school.

Leav began posting her poetry on Tumblr and her work amassed a large following. In 2013 she self-published her first collection of poetry and prose titled Love and Misadventure. Leav released Lullabies the following year. Leav subsequently published another five poetry titles: Memories (2015) The Universe of Us, (2017) Sea of Strangers (2018) and Love Looks Pretty on You (2018). 

In Conclusion, we can see that these female poets gave a voice to the voiceless and brought to the surface, major issues through their creative expression and in this way they made significant differences in the society. They also encourage other upcoming female poets to make use of their expressiveness to be vocal about the change they want to see around them, and not only highlight the vices in society but also the good things happening around them.