Two Sides of the Same Coin: How Gender Is Depicted in Poetry Anonymous College

Sir Thomas Wyatt, according to Peter Hühn, is not only recognized as one of the most important poets in the revival of the sixteenth-century English lyric, but he is also remembered for establishing the conventions of Petrarchan love in the English lyric both with his translations from the Italian and poems of his own. In his poem, as a matter of fact, he follows “the basic situation with which the Petrarchan conventions operate, that is that of a man wooing a socially superior lady in a courtly context where, for social and moral reasons, his desire cannot be fulfilled” (16). However, Wyatt poem “They Flee from Me” could not be more different from the description provided by De Gruyter. Indeed, even though this poem was intended to be a love poem, it reveals and subverts the stereotypical gender dynamics of the 16th century since it is the woman the one who gets slowly in control of the situation. On the other hand, Adrienne Rich is a feminist poet who focused both on “women’s history and movement” as well as on women’s oppression (Riley 1), and, as a consequence, it is not surprising that she wrote her poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” with the purpose to serve as a feminist poem. Indeed, the poem was written in 1951, a time in...