Genevieve Taggard, born in 1894, belonged to a generation of women writers who were testing new freedoms while still living under old romantic scripts. She published in radical magazines such as The Liberator and New Masses, and her poems often examine what love demands from women, especially the pressure to make suffering look beautiful. In “Angular,” a five-line lyric, Taggard isolates a single moment of judgment after heartbreak: a lover’s eyes find the speaker’s grief ungraceful because her body does not perform sorrow prettily.
The poem opens with a comparison that is really an accusation: “Other hearts have broken gracefully, for your sake.” The addressee, it seems, has been loved and left by others who managed their pain with poise. Their broken hearts were acceptable, even flattering, because they remained lovely in ruin. But this speaker refuses, or cannot manage, that kind of aestheticized sorrow. The word “reproach” gives the beloved the power of a critic; that gaze finds her “ache” wanting because it is “awkward.” What follows is a startlingly physical image: her arms “Are angular across my breast / Where emptiness is pressed.” Instead of a soft, curved pose of grief—a bowed head, a hand melting over the heart—her body forms sharp lines. The gesture that might console becomes a rigid cage. The phrase “emptiness is pressed” is an oxymoron that captures loss precisely: she is holding an absence, pressing against something that has no shape yet fills the space where love used to be.
The poem’s structure enacts the friction it describes. The first two lines form a tidy rhyming couplet, “sake” and “ache,” lending a false sense of grace and containment. Then the sentence breaks across the line “Is awkward, and my arms,” leaving that comfort behind. From there the lines shrink and become more irregular, as though the body itself has refused a conventional metrical pattern. The final rhyme between “breast” and “pressed” closes the poem with pressure, but the earlier smoothness is gone. The repeated vowel sounds in “ache,” “awkward,” “arms,” and “angular” create a jagged, open-mouthed movement, as if the speaker’s voice is catching on the edges of her pain. Even the title word, “angular,” does double work: it describes both a physical posture and an emotional stance—unsoftened, unyielding, difficult to hold.
Taggard’s significance lies in her refusal to make female suffering ornamental. In a literary tradition that often turned the suffering woman into a beautiful object, “Angular” insists that grief can be awkward, sharp, and unpleasing. The beloved’s reproach exposes the impossible standard placed on women’s emotions: even after being hurt, a woman is expected to arrange her pain for someone else’s comfort. By giving voice to the one who fails that standard, Taggard turns awkwardness into a form of truth. The poem endures because it is small enough to feel like a held breath, yet its implications are wide. Not all heartbreak is graceful; some sorrow cannot be smoothed into poetry. A body pressing emptiness to itself may be the most honest image of love’s aftermath. In five lines, Taggard makes a quiet, angular space for the unlovely shape of grief.