Adrienne Rich is a contemporary American feminist poet. Rich's poetry contains a variety of subject from her earlier poetry which shows patriarchal tradition to her latest feminist poetry.
When her first volume A Change of World was at least selected...
Adrienne Rich is a contemporary American feminist poet. Rich's poetry contains a variety of subject from her earlier poetry which shows patriarchal tradition to her latest feminist poetry.
When her first volume A Change of World was at least selected by Auden for in 1951, influenced by Ezra Pound, Eliot, Frost, Lowell etc., her poetry tends to be male-centered poetic tradition. But Rich has explored the pain and anger of a creative, thinking woman in a culture that has denied the most essential aspects of her experience. As she has become increasingly conscious of her deepest feelings, her poetry has reflected her growing desire to define her experience for herself and to herlp other women collectively to re-vision their lives.
Afterward Rich has passed through the phases of self-analysis, individual assertion, and accomplishment to rejection of partriarchal values, feminist activism, and finally to building a woman-centered community.
Therefore Rich's poetry serves a prophetic function by articulating the history and ideals of the feminist struggle. By reconnecting daughters with their mothers, by envisioning the women of the future who will emerge from the feminist struggle, her poetry celebrates women's strength, possibilities, and nurturing ethos.
From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Necessities of Life, Leaflets, The Will to Change, Diving into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language to A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, Rich's poetry has evolved from the perceptions of a woman dependent on men for her social and sexual identity and economic support to the discoveries and difficulties experienced by a woman who has become autonomous and self-direction. And then she has increasingly trusted her own experience and rejected male authority.
In addition, Rich has been empowered by the romantic legacy of individualism as well as the modernist and femist struggles for literary and social autonomy. As a com temporary woman who has inherited a tradition social and artistic protest, lence and torment of a female psyche divided against itself by a tradition that doesn't permit women to perceive themselves as the sourse of their own energy.
Adrienne Rich has evolved a female aesthetic-ethic based on shared relationship, emotional reciprocity, and empathic identification. Finally as a writer, as an activist, she has tried to bring a nurturing ethos to the larger society, and to envision a society in which all women can be at home.