Poetic Authority in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

Abstract

For centuries, women poets had to suffer due to the inherited Western literary tradition which offers creative women no defined place, or even no place at all. The literary canon is male-dominated and hence women poets had to find a way to challenge this tradition and to create their own distinctive place. Hence Writing is the most powerful way to challenge male domination and create a place in the literary tradition.

                Being a woman and a poet, Carol Ann Duffy faced the same challenges when she starts to write and, more importantly, to acquire the poetic authority long taken from or renounced by her male counterparts, and to make this possible, she uses her persona. Her writing is deemed to be a rebellion against patriarchal authority, as well as the prescribed gender roles of women, their misrepresentation of art and literature as a passive object.

The research will shed light on the poetic voice of Duffy in her poetry, which emanates through the use of various vivid and colourful female personas as the poet’s own voice. The poet claims the authority to present herself as a poet as well as a persona, to challenge the patriarchal authority and male-dominated literary tradition.