Choose the option that best captures the essence of the passage.
There are many and good reasons why women have left little in the way of literary monuments,
especially poetry. The main reason is education, or more specifically the lack of it in most women‘s
lives until well into the twentieth century. In the light of this, what is surprising is not that so few
women wrote poetry, but that any women wrote poetry at all. When a woman who had never been to
grammar school, never learnt Latin and did not know the rules of syntax, let alone of prosody, set
herself to writing lines that rhymed, she was imitating an art that, admire it though she might, she did
not understand — a male art, a male tradition. This meant she generally produced poetry that was at
best imperfect, at worst, frankly bad.
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