Title: Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse
Abstract: The poet is in labor. She has been told that it will not hurt but it has hurt so much that pain and struggle seem, just now, the only reality. But at the very moment when she feels she will die, or that she is already in hell, she hears the doctor saying, Those are the shoulders you are feeling now-and she knows the head is out then, and the child is pushing and sliding out of her, insistent, a poem. Denise Levertov (1967)