![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Rich, who has become almost exclusively concerned with the relation between women and patriarchy, defines patriarchy in Of The latest poems (1974-77) try to bring together the split halves of humanity, to heal the wounds caused by misogynism and male chauvinism. The voice in Diving was militant, full of visionary anger, but it did not go beyond “self-hatred, a monotone in the mind/The shallowness of a life lived in exile” (“The Phenomenology of Anger”). But where the books that followed became increasingly tense and radical and tended to oversimplify political issues, her most recent collection is calmer, more expansive, though it aims at the same revolution. In Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), disturbing elements in the psyche rose to the surface she chose open forms, conversational tones, and revealed herself in assertive language instead of distant moralizing. Elegant but preoccupied with craft, her work gradually became more vital, her forms more fluid. Her earliest poems were decorous exercises formal, conventional, written for approval by the male poets who were her models. And Adrienne Rich has come a long way from her first published book in 1951. $9.95.Īdrienne Rich began her seventh volume of poems, Diving Into the Wreck (1973), with a quote from George Eliot: “There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.” This idea goes a long way toward understanding the direction and impact of Rich’s poetry: toward total awareness of self as product of history. ![]()
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