Ostriker, Alicia

Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a prolific major American feminist critic and poet who reframed the stereotypes of women in poetry, classical mythology, and the Bible by highlighting their familial roles as mothers, sisters, wives, and lovers. Beginning as a conventional academic, in the days when women had to make hard choices between careers and families, she chose to combine both, and eventually wrote landmark books describing experiential, political, and theological feminist frontiers.

Electing William Blake to be her early muse and the subject of her 1964 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Wisconsin and the first of a series of critical works, Ostriker considered him a courageous rebel. She taught literature and writing at Rutgers University where she rose quickly to full professor in 1972. After looking to male poets like Keats, Whitman, and Auden as models, she adopted Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) as her spiritual mother, devouring the work of feminist contemporary poets. Her fourth poetry book, The Mother/Child Papers (1980), demonstrated how the personal is political by juxtaposing poetry about the experiential light and dark side of mothering, the Vietnam War, and the Kent State shooting deaths of four students. Writing Like a Woman (1983) demonstrates how Sylvia Path, Anne Sexton, H.D., May Swenson, and Adrienne Rich use the immediacy of their motherhood experience to touch the sources of all aspects of life in their poetry.