I come up against this again and again. Critical literature focuses on defining a genre, and women end up just outside that definition. So it always looks like they just miss the boat because they're not quite good enough. Really, though, if you look at the moments when the genre is being defined, the boundaries are arbitrary. Other genres could be declared.
I need to read more widely...
So check this out.
With respect to her poetry in particular, critics have often failed to recognize the modernity of its lyric voice on account of its traditional verse patterns. Reflecting a dual attitude of competition and cooperation with her cultural world, Noailles held a similarly double-voiced discourse toward conventional interpretations of woman. Her classification in literary history as a belated French Romantic further obfuscates the significance of her work. While recognizing her predecessors, Noailles was frequently unable to find adequate models in their works for a distinct poetic identity. In seeking new versions of the feminine self, she acknowledged women who were unable to write and, more broadly, she attempted to provide a formerly silent Muse with voice and presence. (Catherine Perry)
She's not quite a romantic... or she's a "late" romantic... but she's not quite a modernista either - like de Ibarbourou, Bernal, Vaz Ferreira, Elisa Monge, Mercedes Matamoros, and so many women poets of the 1890s to the 1920s.
I'll be looking for Perry's book. She has more to say on her brief website on de Noailles:
A discrepancy between form and content, reflecting Noailles' situation at the cusp of the antithetical world views of nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth-century Modernism, characterizes her poetry, where dynamic concepts and images strive to dissolve a largely classical structure. By actively engaging with her French literary heritage while finding a source of inspiration in Greek paganism and in Nietzsche's radical thought, Noailles constructed an original poetic world view. Her work is best described as Dionysian--ecstatic, sensual, erotic, playful, sometimes violent, and always marked by a tragic undercurrent which becomes more apparent in her later poetry.
"Dionysian" describes Agustini, de Ibarbourou, Bernal, and Matamoros very well. I would prefer a different name if we are going to declare a new genre... Imagine the articles as we define Maenidic poetics and make brief offhand mention of Ruben Darío - and how he doesn't quite fit the Genre. A pity, really, as his work contained echos of Maenidism, traces which can't help but reflect the prevailing spirit of the time.
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It occurs to me that I have had a giant epiphany about this, but I'm reinventing the wheel. I did a little poking around and found this excellent bibliography: Gender and Genre. My god! right up top we have "Benstock, S. (1991). Textualizing the feminine. On the limits of genre. University of Okla. Press." Looks perfect! I'm still 15 years behind in academic literary theory. Though I think it might be more like "feminizing the textual" than "textualizing the feminine" - that's what's going on in a lot of the criticism I'm reading. The poets are textualizing the feminine. The critics feminize in order to denigrate and marginalize. *sigh*
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