Authors
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
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The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2001 (2002) draws from A Change of World (1951), The Diamond Cutters (1955), Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (1991), Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995), Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999), and Fox: Poems 1998–2000 (2001). The School among the Ruins: 2000–2004 (2004) presents subsequent work. Four valuable collections gather Rich’s essays, lectures, and speeches: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), What Is Found There?: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993), and Arts of the Possible (2001). Rich is also the author of an important study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Valuable critical essays and an interview appear in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry (1975), edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. Other studies are Reading Adrienne Rich (1984), edited by Jane Roberta Cooper; Paula Bennett’s My Life, a Loaded Gun: Female Creativity and Feminist Poetics (1986); Margaret Dickie’s Stein, Bishop and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War & Place (1997); and Molly McQuade’s By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (2000).
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Adrienne Rich was educated at Radcliffe College. In her poetry she addresses the experiences of women whose lives have often been written out of history or misrepresented in literature. Rich seeks to write in a language that integrates elements of our culture that have become separated, among them, art and politics, female poets and their identities as women. Many of her poems explore the multiple possibilities of self-definition, examining the self's potential to move fluidly through and beyond boundaries. To this end, her work is best read as a continuum. Rich's books of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language (1977), The Fact of a Doorframe (1984), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995). Her collections of prose, which complement her poetry by reflecting upon women's education and literary traditions, Jewish identity, and, as Rich puts it, the "erasure of lesbian existence," include On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1978), Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1985), and What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The poems of Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath have greatly influenced not only the achievement of a feminist voice in contemporary American letters but also the construction of a feminist poetics, a poetics which resists the prescriptions of Emerson, Whitman, Eliot, and others who affirm that the poet must achieve dominion over worldly experience, rather than conduct an open-ended dialogue with life and its various circumstances. Plath is often read as a martyr, dying young in a cultural context hostile to the fuller expression she sought. Rich is a poet of deep and daring transformations -- of herself, of her voice and prosody, and of her role as a poet in a fast-changing postwar America.
1. Plath's Ariel and Rich's Diving into the Wreck are the title poems of important collections by their respective authors. These are poems about change, about the transformation of the self. Describe the different developments of this theme in each poem. Why would these poems be appropriate as capstones to or centerpieces in collections of verse?
2. In section 9 of Rich's Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1960), the speaker says, "Time is male / and in his cups drinks to the fair." In her poem I Am in Danger--Sir-- (1966), Rich's speaker addresses Emily Dickinson as "you, woman, masculine / in single-mindedness." In these and other situations, what does Rich mean by "male" or "masculine"? Why does she refer to time itself, and to an admired woman poet, in this way?
3. Readers are often surprised to learn that Sylvia Plath's father, addressed in Daddy, was not a Nazi or a member of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but a comfortable entomologist and American citizen living in New England. Discuss Plath's use of Nazi and Holocaust imagery to describe her upbringing in a middle-class family. Compare this to Rich's use of "Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon" in section V of her Atlas of the Difficult World.
4. In Blackberrying (1961), Plath uncharacteristically uses long lines, suggestive more of Whitman than of the compression and intensity of Dickinson. Is this change of strategy effective, given the theme and mood of the poem? When Rich uses long, Whitmanesque lines in the final section of Atlas, what are the effects? In general, which form seems to you more effective for each of these writers: the lyric, with short, tight lines; or the discursive poem in a more open form? Find examples to develop your answer.
