Poetry Collection: The World's Wife

Overview
The World's Wife (1999) by Carol Ann Duffy recasts famous male figures through the eyes of the women who orbit them, giving those overlooked or silenced partners a sharp, witty, and often fiercely human voice. Each poem adopts a persona tied to a well-known myth, legend, or historical name and uses that vantage point to expose the private costs of public deeds, to subvert received narratives, and to examine how gender, power, and language shape identity. The collection balances humor and bitterness, lyric tenderness and satirical edge, making bold feminist interventions that remain accessible and resonant.

Structure and Style
Poems are short, dramatic monologues and lyrical fragments that slip between colloquial speech and concise poetic craft; many read like confessions, angry speeches, or comic monologues. Duffy's diction is economical but richly imagistic, often employing irony, wordplay, and domestic detail to deflate grand myths and reveal intimate consequences. The varied tones, ranging from outraged and mordant to wry and elegiac, create a chorus of voices that together map a modern, plural view of feminine experience across time and culture.

Themes
A central theme is voice and agency: the poems reclaim speech for characters traditionally sidelined, illuminating how histories are written by winners and how private lives bear the aftermath of public ambition. Gender and power recur through examinations of marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and the domestic economies that sustain heroic narratives. The poems also interrogate identity and language itself, questioning how names, roles, and stories constrain or free a speaker. Underlying these themes is a persistent mixture of humor and moral seriousness that reframes myth as contemporary, lived reality.

Voice and Persona
Duffy's mastery of persona enables deep empathy without abandoning critique. The narrators often speak with startling immediacy, practical, sardonic, or wounded, and the result is a collapsing of distance between modern reader and ancient tale. There is a recurrent refusal of archetypal silence: wives, daughters, and lovers become witty historians of their own hurt and resilience. The voices are not uniform; some are intimate and raw, others gleefully performative, but all foreground subjectivity and the cost of being cast as an accessory to a greater story.

Notable Moments
A standout poem like "Mrs Midas" uses the domestic aftermath of a mythic wish to highlight the erosion of intimacy and the surreal banality of loss, blending dark humor with heartbreak. Elsewhere, the poems turn mythic events into scenes of everyday consequence, bedrooms, kitchens, and car journeys, so that the grand gestures of men translate into tangible, often mundane suffering or survival for the women around them. These shifts from epic to domestic effect an emotional recalibration, forcing readers to re-examine familiar tales through a more humane lens.

Impact and Reception
The World's Wife broadened contemporary poetry's engagement with feminism, myth, and popular culture, making Duffy's voice widely influential and the collection a staple in teaching and performance. Critics praised its inventiveness, accessibility, and moral nuance; readers responded to its wit and compassion. The poems continue to be anthologized and performed, valued for their capacity to summon the personal within the universal and to transform canonical stories into spaces for reconsidering who gets to speak and how history remembers them.