poet shamans

I am a longtime advocate and ardent fan of the female authors and poets the Brontë Sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson. I truly believe they were women of substance, feminists, and shamans.

Tuvan Shamaness

Jung has written that "the psychological inference that may be drawn from shamanistic symbolism [is] that it is a projection of the individuation process" (Alchemical Studies  341).

The shaman-poet who lives in both the natural world and the supernatural world and experiences both genders is thus able to know each of these pairs of opposites intimately. (Clifton Snider, "A Druidic Difference": Emily Dickinson and Shamanism)

These women challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. They experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints, creating a new type of persona for the first person. 

A basic tenet in shamanic practice is to speak as though it were so and so it is. 

The speakers in the works of these powerful and accomplished women are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes.

Making abstract tangible, defining meaning without confining it, inhabiting a house as home not prison, keeping true as liberated women in quite restrictive society.

These women created in their writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.

Like the Concord Transcendentalists whose works were so popular at the time, they saw poetry as a double-edged sword - while liberating the individual, it ungrounded and left one questing and questioning. 

The individual who could say what is was the individual for whom words were power. 

These women definitely had and continue to have their say throughout passing time and trends.