Of all the many ways in which literature can be delineated and categorized, distinctions along gender lines are perhaps the most complex. Debate around this label, and its implied hierarchy of writerly worth, remains divisive and unresolved in both literary and academic discourse. What do we mean by ‘a woman poet’? How does this definition influence our understanding and interpretation of their work? At its simplest, a woman poet is a woman who breaks through patriarchal structures to write, be published and read. This in itself can be read in two ways: as both an assertion of female empowerment and an acceptance of gendered hierarchy. If, as the Persian poet Sīmīn Bihbahānī describes it, there is a “curtain (pardah)… drawn between men and women writers,”1 then it is essential to examine the role this “curtain” plays in valuing and then canonizing women poets and their work.