GradeSaver has ClassicNotes on several of Adrienne Rich's most important poems, including Diving into the Wreck, In Those Years, and Power (Adrienne Rich poem). Below is a general overview of Rich's poetry.
Rich’s first several volumes of poetry featured formally regular verse; however, even this earlier work touched on some of the themes that would define her later years. In 1951, her first poetry collection, A Change of World, was selected by W. H. Auden to receive the Yale Younger Poets Award. The poems in this volume have regular meter and rhyme schemes reminiscent of Auden’s own work. Moreover, Auden praised Rich for her objectivity and lack of attachment to selfhood. However, poems like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” begin to address specific concerns about women's experience, depicting women who are unhappy and constrained in their lives. Looking back on this volume as well as her second, The Diamond Cutters (1955). Rich herself noted that “in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order.” In order to create aesthetic beauty and regular order, she had omitted some of the uglier parts of her own experience.
In 1963, Rich’s volume Snapshots of a Daughter in Law broke from her earlier poetry in an attempt to capture her particularly female experience as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law. The poems in this collection shift to free verse. In the titular poem, Rich shows some of her own dissatisfaction with female experience:
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
In these lines, she discusses the “moldering” or rotting of a woman’s mind after becoming a wife. She has been relegated to a merely domestic role, and her anger is palpable. This poem unfolds as a serial poem with numbered parts, a form that would appear many more times throughout her oeuvre. This collection thus marked a turning point in Rich’s career, and in her life. Soon after its publication, her move to New York precipitated her involvement in progressive social issues such as protesting the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, and feminist activism. By the end of the decade, Rich separated from her husband and began identifying as lesbian.
Rich’s poetry from the 1970s onward charts her transformation, and the themes of rebirth and revision figure prominently in her works. Her 1971 collection The Will to Change discusses the need for individuals to interrogate their complicity in collective forms of oppression. In “Snapshots of Godard,” she writes, “the mind of the poet is changing / the moment of change is the only poem." Continuing this interrogation was her 1973 collection Diving Into the Wreck, which persists as one of her most well-known works, in particular the title poem. The title poem is an extended metaphor that examines female existence in a patriarchal world, and depicts the reclamation of self through a journey into the unconscious mind. Other poems like “The Phenomenology of Anger” trace her rage at the state of the world. This long poem, with 10 numbered sections, concludes that people respond differently to the chaos and horror of the world:
many sleep
the whole way
others sit
staring holes of fire into the air
others plan rebellion:
night after night
awake in prison, my mind
licked at the mattress like a flame
till the cellblock went up roaring
In this poem, Rich suggests that poetry itself is a form of rebellion, and a way to make sense of political rage. Significantly, Diving Into the Wreck was awarded the National Book Award, a distinction Rich split with Allen Ginsberg in 1974. In a characteristic show of solidarity with all women, Rich declined to accept the award individually, but accepted it with fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, on behalf of all women "whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.” Rich’s poetry from the 1970s, including The Dream of a Common Language, continued to promote poetry and art as an antidote to rage. In the poem “Origins and History of Consciousness,” Rich writes of “the true nature of poetry. The drive/to connect. The dream of a common language” (ll. 11-12).
Rich’s late poetry and prose continued to take up these themes and formal concerns. Her other works contain symbolic calls for unity and connection, particularly among women. Always political, deeply individual, and deeply compelling, her prose works address issues of sexuality, motherhood, contemporary culture, and radical feminism. The best known of these is her 1980 essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" from her prose collection, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1980). In it, Rich argues for a more expansive view of women’s sexuality and increased lesbian visibility, while seeking to undermine the notion of female heterosexuality as normal, required, and obligatory. In 1993, she again used a distinguished honor as an opportunity for political activism. When she was selected for the National Medal of the Arts, she refused the prestigious award to protest the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts by the House of Representatives.
Rich’s belief in the importance of art is also a common theme in her poetry. Her 1995 volume Dark Fields of the Republic looks back on the inertia of American politics and life, and poems like “In Those Years” regret a lack of communal solidarity in the face of inequality. Rich’s career was long and prolific, and she wrote and published nearly right up until her death in 2012. Through her writing, she continually challenged cultural perceptions of the self, of gender, and of sexuality, as well as her own beliefs and assumptions. Her poetry and prose works serve as important parts of the feminist canon, and her activism has earned her distinction as one of the most prominent feminists and LGBT activists of the late-20th century.
