Marilyn Hacker fits into the contemporary poetry scene because of her unusual critical perspective, which bridges the traditional and the feminist. In a literary era in which women are purportedly confronting the patriarchal tradition and showing how singularly distinctive women's writing is, Hacker has insisted and shown that the traditional poetic forms are as much women's as they are men's--even if men were acclaimed and published more frequently in the past. As a feminist in her own terms, she is simply following in the footsteps of Marie de France and Christine de Pisan, reclaiming the language. "The language that we use," she said in her interview with Karla Hammond, "was as much created and invented by women as by men." In extending the tradition, Hacker has achieved distinction for following her apprenticeship through to mastery of form and especially for wedding contemporary diction to traditional forms.

Hacker's life...