“Once in awhile we stopped dead in our tracks, mesmerized by what we saw coming toward us on our rocky solitary paths: older women, more experienced than we were, with weathered faces and ironic laughter, like H.D.’s Lady, newly written books shining in their outstretched hands. We wanted what they had. We didn’t want to be like them. We didn’t like to see the lines in their cheeks and foreheads: we didn’t want to hear about the blood price paid to get them there.

We were ambivalent about them; they were ambivalent about us. We, their eagerly awaited protégées, were plotting to overthrow, betray them: they, whom we had envisioned as mentors, ushering us into gracious carpeted rooms for high tea, were instead craggy warriors, fierce with fight, keepers of small cluttered dusty studies, sharp eyed, weary, mistrustful, satiric, alone. They already knew what was ahead of us on the path. They were all evasion and red lights and warning.

We were busy with our complicated lives, our lovers, our children, our student loads, our grade transcripts, our curriculum vitae. We were ungrateful, angry on their behalf and ours. We were arrogant, daring, experimental, in the confident way young people are, in the way they themselves had been and still were. We didn’t want their advice: we wanted to do it, everything, our own way, on our own.

They loved us. We loved them. They plucked us from our youthful distractions and illusions; they harnessed our libidinous energies, away from wispy, Cinderella fantasies to astonishing, eye-opening, gut-ripping, flesh and blood womanly realities. They invited us for coffee. They inscribed their books to us with fond admonishments. They challenged us with their vaster experience, frank admissions, startling attention to detail, grand overviews, daring leaps between disparate realities, dazzling wordcraft.

Local/international, urban/green, primitivist/technological, progressivist/conservationist, objectivist/introspective, materialist/metaphysical, political/aesthetic, domestic/public, familial/collegial, utopian/dystopia, pared down/extravagant, passionate/ironic, heterosexual/homoerotic – these were the fiercely debated stakes of early modernism, inherited problematically from the industrial era and its romantic opponents, who decried its cultural fragmentations and environmental ravages. These oppositional pairs came to be regarded, among modernists, as culturally imperative, and were often negotiated, particularly by male poets and critics, as either/or antimonies.

Women have always lived in dual, in multiple, realities. We never accepted masculinist views on the separation of nature and culture, self and other, progress and tradition, perhaps, as some of us have argued, because of our more extensive role in the labour of reproduction, which gives us the opportunity to mediate actively and creatively between these realities. In the hands of modernist women poets, newly released from traditional domesticities through education and travel, uneasily inheriting the privileges of colonialism, and more deeply inflected by a recently displaced and exploited gynocratic realm than has often been acknowledged, these oppositions melded creatively to become strange and wonderful new hybrids of experimentalism and conservationism. The vision of these adventurous women rated the playing field that became the postmodern, and anticipated the millennial, ecopoetic post-postmodern. It is our rich inheritance.”