The following is my feminist theory of poetry. To all who think this is a masculinist argument, I will cross intellectual swords with you until death: Poetry is womb-envy. The most masculine poets are driven by the most feminine impulsion of them all: to create and care for children; to produce progeny. Note that I did not say FEMALE impulsion, but FEMININE impulsion. Feminine impulsions occur in both men and women alike. Poetry occurs in both men and women alike. Strong women can have womb-envy and strong men can have penis-envy. It is a tired topic to talk of lesbians with penis-envy. The greatest lesbian of all time, Sappho of Lesbos herself, had a really bad case of womb-envy: she pretty much invented the Western lyric. Scholars may find examples of Western lyricism that predate Sappho, but Sappho remains the paragon of all Western lyricism, end of story. It does not trouble my argument that Sappho may also have entertained male consorts. Sappho's greatest love was neither for women nor for men: it was for poetry. More often than not, those who are most possessed by poetry have no children. Poets who follow Aristotle's doctrine of the mean, and Rexroth's insight that "too much poetry is bad for the organism," may elect one day to have children. Kenneth Rexroth, a supremely masculine and uniformly heterosexual poet, was so comfortable inhabiting the feminine that he wrote an entire collection of poems from the perspective of a Japanese heterosexual woman. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the most perfect act of femininity collapses into its opposite, and the masculine and feminine are reconciled within the person of the poet, in spite of the poet's gender.