Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Bleak outlook ...

... Verse and worse: choosing poems for readers' gender | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Wordsworth is considered girly enough to have three poems in the female-friendly edition, and none in the book for boys. The dreamy lines of Christina Rossetti are again only for girls, although there are so few women in the boys' book that this is hardly surprising. The four women considered boisterous enough for boys are Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazurus, Laura Richards and Julia Ward Howe, who snuck in with the warlike "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" alongside the good, solid, masculine fare of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.

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