Lines of Life: 101 Poems by 101 Women

"Within the covers of this small book every reader will find something to deplore ... 

Poetry is strange stuff and over the centuries it has got stranger. Five hundred or so years ago any gentleman was expected to be able to pen on demand a respectable sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century poetry had been transformed from an elegant accomplishment to a savage destiny, a sacred and sublime vocation, not to be attempted by anyone who shrank at the prospect of madness, destitution and death. Women had struggled to be poets when what was needed was the education that they had not got, and they continued to struggle to be poets when what was demanded was egomania of delusional proportions. Post-modernism has taken some of the pressure off; irony is a medium that women have always understood."

from Germaine Greer's introduction to Lines of Life: 101 Poems by 101 Women, edited by Germain Greer, published by Faber and Faber, 2001

https://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/germaine+greer/lines+of+life/5302359/