Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Hacker’s line is a scalpel aimed at the cultural casting couch of “serious” literature: the way women poets are granted legitimacy only if they agree to be flattened into one of two palatable myths. Either they’re sanitized into a “sexless, reclusive eccentric” (the safe genius: no body, no anger, no inconvenient specificity) or they’re eroticized and punished into the “brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide” (the spectacle: talent authenticated by suffering). It’s not just critique; it’s an indictment of an audience and a gatekeeping apparatus that demands women pay an entrance fee in either invisibility or self-destruction.

The sentence works because it’s built like a trap. “Must be” mimics the rigid, institutional voice that hands out permissions, while the “either/or” structure exposes how narrow the permissions are. The phrase “nothing to say specifically to women” is the tell: “universal” often means “male-default,” and women are pressured to write as honorary men or be dismissed as niche. Meanwhile, the “tortured suicide” archetype turns a woman’s pain into proof of authenticity, a narrative that can be consumed, anthologized, and mourned without changing the conditions that produced it.

Context matters: Hacker comes out of post-1960s feminist literary battles and queer poetics, worlds acutely aware of how biography gets weaponized against craft. The subtext is a demand for a third option: a woman poet allowed to be embodied, political, ordinary, erotic, angry, alive - and still taken seriously.