"Yona Wallach, beyond immersing herself in the immediate and palpable, evokes a near-hallucinatory world of the inner self. She rejects any suggestion of influence from the Hebrew tradition. "I hated Hebrew poetry and literature. It seemed like one big deception. I loved Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. It seems to me that Hebrew poetry misses the point...it conceals everything from us. They didn't speak to us about suffering. They spoke about Bialik, that fat self-satisfied man adored by the entire nation, but they didn't speak to us about madness. Everything was fat, everything was national...I hated Shlonsky and Alterman and all the poetry. I hated Amichai..." And although Dahlia Ravikovich, one of Israel's leading confessional poets and Wallach's contemporary, has used Biblical echoes of spoken Hebrew to dramatize personal struggles, even distorting the sacred to mythologize the self, much of her early lyrical poetry is characterized by classical restraint, Biblical conciseness, and female stereotypes. Wallach dismissed her, saying: "Dahlia isn't involved enough with sex. She's not revolutionary enough...She isn't a feminist.""