Conclusion

Why has it taken over fifty years for literary critics to move beyond conventional analysis of reading these three women poets? Perhaps because Gabriela Mistral, Cecília Meireles, and Rosario Castellanos refused to be typecast as an ‘easy read’. Certainly, throughout the years, they have been defined as obscure, strange, and difficult. The very nature of lyric poetry makes it incompatible with what we are used to reading in the straightforward structure of the narrative. Yet I hope this study has helped to shed some light on the challenges that these women faced when writing poetry. All three literary women chose a genre that was both sensitive to the demands of their gender and to the socially marginalized. While initially appearing a contradiction of sorts, being ‘woman poets’ in fact afforded them a new way to forge alternate points of view without sacrificing their female otherness.