Ishmael Reed, and Haki Madhubuti, among
many others. The literature of the movement
was often written in black vernacular and
addressed issues such as interracial tension, the
African diaspora, and politics. Clifton was well
acquainted with many of these writers, and she
and her husband were also deeply involved in
issues concerning African Americans. Written
between 1969 and 1980, poems such as ‘‘homage
to my hips’’ and others ofTwo-Headed Woman
demonstrate many of the aesthetic qualities
called for by the movement.
Literary historians and critics vary in their
assessment of the importance of the black arts
movement. An increasing number of studies,
however, suggest that the movement not only
was revolutionary for African American artists
but also shifted the course of American literature.
The Feminist Movement
At the same time that African American citizens
were growing increasingly vocal about their civil
rights, women of the United States also began to
reexamine their roles in American society.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex(1948;
translated 1953), Betty Friedan’sThe Feminist
Mystique(1963), and Kate Millet’sSexual Poli-
tics(1970) were all important texts that led to
women asserting civil, political, and social equal-
ity. Like the writers of the black arts movement,
feminist writers called for women artists to write
their experiences as women rather than imitate
the genres and styles of male writers. Indeed, one
of the central tensions of the feminist movement
was one of similarity or difference: Should
women be judged against the same criteria as
men, since as people they should be inherently
equal? Or, on the other hand, should women be
judged as women, determining for themselves
what criteria constitute success?
During this period, feminists called for
equal pay for equal work and fought against
the unspoken assumptions about women that
kept women from achieving success in their
careers. For Clifton, a wife and mother of six
children, the demands of running a house while
attempting a full-time career as a professor and
writer illustrated the very issues feminists were
attempting to highlight. Many of Clifton’s
poems from the 1960s and 1970s illustrate her
growing need to value her womanhood in addi-
tion to valuing her blackness.
Critical Overview.
Clifton’s 1980 poetry collectionTwo-Headed
Womanwon the Juniper Prize, sponsored by
the University of Massachusetts Press, and was
nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Poems from
this collection such as ‘‘homage to my hips’’
received special mention. The poet Marilyn Nel-
son Waniek (who is mostly known as Marilyn
Nelson), for example, writing a 1983 review of
Two-Headed WomaninCallaloo, calls Clifton ‘‘a
visionary poet. Her vision, however,is one of
sanity, connectedness, light. She can write
poems which are bright little gems of perceptive
observation.’’ Likewise, Haki Madhubuti, writ-
ing an early critical evaluation of Clifton’s work
inBlack Women Writers (1950–1980): A Crit-
ical Evaluation, comments on the poems ofTwo-
Headed Woman. Madhubuti states that Clifton
‘‘understands that precise communication is not
an easy undertaking; language, at its root, seeks
to express emotion, thought, action.’’
By the mid-1990s, critics were noting Clif-
ton’s particular ability to write about the body.
Jean Anaporte-Easton, for example, writing in
theMid-American Review, comments, ‘‘The dis-
tinctive quality of Clifton’s voice comes from her
ability to ground her art in an imagery of the
body and physical reality.’’ Likewise, a few years
later, in a chapter fromRecovering the Black
Female Body: Self Representations by African
American Women, Ajuan Maria Mance com-
ments, ‘‘In many ways Clifton’sTwo-Headed
Woman...marks the beginning of her interest
in depicting the transgressive black body.’’
Other critics, such as Mary Jane Lupton in
Lucille Clifton: Her Life and Letters, began to
compare Clifton to a variety of writers such as
Gwendolyn Brooks, Ann Sexton, and Sylvia
Plath. Hilary Holladay, writing about Clifton
in the essay collection titledThe Furious Flower-
ing of African American Poetry, argues that Clif-
ton’s ‘‘mastery of the lyric recalls the stylistic
pleasures of imagism and the visceral emotion
of confessional poetry. Like William Carlos Wil-
liams, Ezra Pound, H.D., and Wallace Stevens,
Clifton is capable of the stunning miniature.’’
That Holladay connects Clifton with such highly
regarded modernist poets suggests that by the
mid-1990s, Clifton’s work was transcending nar-
row categorization as work by a woman of color.
A few years later, in one of the first book-length
studies of Clifton’s oeuvre,Wild Blessings: Thehomage to my hips