Typically the eternal masculine stereotype implies rationality, objectivity, aggression, domination and manipulation of people and environment, and a separation of man as knower from both woman and nature as objects of knowledge. The Dream constantly exposes the damaging man-made chasm between the sexes, the artificial polarization of human characteristics into the false but familiar stereotypes imposed by society. Bolder, more intense and compelling than most contemporary women poets, Rich can now also be tender and generous. The Dream, however, is less calculated to repudiate men than to provide an imaginative identification with all women. Rich, who has become almost exclusively concerned with the relation between women and patriarchy, defines patriarchy in Of Woman Born (1976 her award-winning study of motherhood as experience and institution) as the power of the fathers, an all-pervasive system in which men determine what part women shall or shall not play. 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 Phenom enology of Anger’). 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.īut 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. 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.

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.

Adrienne 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.’

The dream of a common language