Essay Questions

Wallace pursued a thematic interest best described as a celebration of the sisterhood of fellow creative artists. She wrote a poem about Virginia Woolf, but which of her sisters inspired an entire volume of verse?

There is little question that early 20th century Modernist pioneer Woolf is the guiding spirt of the sisterhood. Her text “A Room of One’s Own” contains ideas and concepts that permeate throughout the poetry of Wallace. Woolf’s conceit of carving out a spot where a woman could pursue a dream in isolation from the crushing effects of patriarchal domination is the very foundation of Wallace’s thematic pursuit of the significance of the sisterhood. Her collection Keep That Candle Burning Bright transfers the focus of the sisterhood from past to the present and from the dead to living in a series of poems either directly about country/western star Emmylou Harris or which were inspired by the lyrics composed by the singer/songwriter. Collectively, the poems situate the success of Harris to survive in the male-dominated milieu of country music with that of Woolf’s ultimately less successful struggle to survive herself in the age of Edwardian post-Victorian, anti-suffrage male dominance of English literature.

Is Bronwen Wallace considered a “confessional poet” and if so, why would there be debate about it?

When one thing of confessional poets, typical names that burst forth immediately include Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Setting aside the fact that both committed suicide, what actually unifies the confessional school is an intensity of personal reflection and autobiography. The confessional poets are appropriately named because their best work seems to be an aesthetic confession of their darkest thoughts and fears steeped in the truth of their past. By contrast, Wallace’s poems are stories about characters that often bear no immediately obvious resemblance to her. Yet, she is still considered—controversially to a point—to be a confessional poet because her narratives are said to represent a collective universalized truth about women. They are the confessions of the sisterhood.

What is the symbolic significance of the home in the poetry of Wallace?

References to the home in all its various and myriad connotations abound in the author’s verse. Many scenes in her narrative poems take place in kitchens, gardens, and living rooms as well as on porches and neighborhood streets. The home itself is a symbol of the prison of patriarchal expectations of domesticity. The kitchen—the one room in the house that was often absent any masculine presence at the time—becomes a kind of subversive coffeehouse in the belly of the beast where ideas are stoked and rebellion begins. Gardens become communal meeting places for sharing with other women in the neighborhood those seditious thoughts borne within the kitchens. And so it goes, as the exterior world becomes a place not to escape to, but to revel in as the opportunity for release from the isolation of the patriarchy. The farther from home one gets, the more freedom is accorded women to become expressive members of an imaginative species.