A History of American Literature

540 The American Century: Literature since 1945

“I came to explore the wreck,” she says: “The words are purposes. / The words are

maps ...” And she describes what she calls “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not

the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” Diving deep into the deep-

est recesses of her being, exploring the “wreck” of her own life, Rich feels compelled

to jettison inherited techniques and fictions. A more open, vulnerable, and tentative

art is required, she feels, in order to map the geography of her self: a feeling that is

signaled in this poem, not only by its argument, but by its directness of speech, its

stark imagery and idiomatic rhythms, above all by the urgency of its tone. The map,

as it happens, is not just for her own use. “We are confronted,” Rich has declared in

the preface to On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Poems 1966–1978 (1979), “with ...

the failure of patriarchal politics.” “To be a woman at this time,” she goes on, “is to

know extraordinary forms of anger, joy and impatience, love and hope.” “Poetry,

words on paper, are necessary but not enough,” she insists, “we need to touch the

living who share ... our determination that the sexual myths underlying the

human condition can and shall be ... changed.” In Rich’s later work, as in fact a

volume like Fox: Poems 1998 –2000 (2001) illustrates, the confrontation with herself

is inseparable from her broader, feminist purposes; her work has become intimate,

confessional, but it is an intimacy harnessed to the service of the community, the

invention of a new social order.

From formalism to freedom in poetry

The example of Adrienne Rich is interesting and symptomatic in several ways. In the

first place, her later poetry shows how ready American poets have become to take

risks. “I have been increasingly willing,” she has said, “to let the unconscious offer its

material, to listen to more than the voice of a single idea.” This does not mean that

she offers the reader unmediated psychic experience: as she is aware (“the words are

maps”), such a thing is impossible and probably undesirable as well. Her aim, on the

contrary, is like that of many of her contemporaries: to surrender to her material

and then, in the act of writing, try to reenact its complex rhythms – to turn activity,

physical, emotional, or whatever, into speech and breath. In the second place,

she illustrates the particular triumph of the better poets of the personal. Her best

work – “Diving into the Wreck,” for instance, or “The Will to Change” – is squeezed

out of her own intimate experience; it can be painfully straightforward and frank,

but it can also be surreal and political. Personal experience, after all, includes dream

and history – the fantasies of the inner life and also the facts of that larger world of

war, work, and income tax to which every one of us, whether we like it or not, is

subject. Rich’s poetry acknowledges this. It absorbs the data of private events, the

dramas of the public stage, and the fears and desires encountered in sleep. It

incorporates the conscious and subconscious levels, intimate confession and the

historical imagination; as such, it bears comparison with the finest poets of the

personal mode over the past forty years – Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Robert

Lowell, and Sylvia Plath. Finally, Rich is representative in a richer, broader sense, in

that she was far from alone in terms of her stylistic development from formal to

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