FOR THOSE OF US who are teachers and feminists, reading poetry is not only a private pleasure, but also a social action. We give poems to our students because we know the poems and the students, because in the public sorting out of a poem, we can participate in a communal, though often unacknowledged process of defining art while simultaneously sifting through our own lives. For the first meeting of my women's studies class, Poetry and the Female Consciousness, I selected Denise Levertov's poem The Pulse because I thought it a reasonable compromise with despair, one that urged us as women to stretch our human potential, but not to the breaking point, not absolutely to try for the sun.