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Contemporary women poets offer a serious, engaged, and formally satisfying encounter with classical myth. This chapter explores how the story of Daphne and Apollo provides an insight into women's experience as subjects and makers of poems. It traces a body of women's writing that keeps faith with its original inspiration while discovering women's physical, emotional, and intellectual experience at the heart of myth: in the ambiguous relationships of female figure and natural landscape, movement and stasis, aversion and desire. In the work of poets Jorie Graham and Eavan Boland, classical myth, as allusion or persona, enables an individual lyric voice to be heard even as it mutes the sense of an intrusively autobiographical speaker. This chapter explores the role of individual subjectivity in the confrontation between the poet and the female subjects of the mythic tradition, and considers closely the relationship between formal experimentation and the articulation of feminist ideals.

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