[Rich] has for a long time been interested in American life as registered and suffered by those not in power, those not directly responsible for it, and especially women…. Rich has also written about isolated pioneer figures, whose "unarticulate" lives preserved qualities gone underground—qualities which she, in her poetry, would like to make available to the present. Increasingly in the 1970s that interest has taken on a political cast in connection with the women's movement and feminism. Her prose study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)—parts autobiography, history, anthropology—is the most ambitious sign of her commitment to expressing and investigating the unexpressed feelings of women. But it is important to remember that this has been a long-standing concern of Rich's poetry. People who frame questions about the effect of her ideological commitment upon her poetry are, I think, looking in the wrong direction. Part of the ideological commitment is to poetry and the special powers of its language to probe and reveal. (pp. 137-38)

The final line of ["From an Old House in America"]—"Any woman's death diminishes me"—alludes to Donne's famous line. Its shock value drains away fairly quickly on second reading. Rich knows, of course, that Donne's meditation doesn't refer to the death of men alone, and her own version seems less "true" than simply being a signal, a semaphore, saying that certain kinds of language from the past just won't do. The line is a deliberate narrowing of focus, an unsubtle way of talking about a subject Rich treats with as much point and with more complexity in images which in this same poem precede the "put-down" of Donne. The subject of this poem is women's dream of isolation. The loaded gun [which was a sexual image in "Face to Face"] is that of the watchful frontier woman at her stockade, and Rich imagines, with a great deal of psychological penetration, that this dream also "snares" a woman's pride. It may be like a "suicidal leaf" (the half-rhyme "life" close to the surface) ready for combustion under the burning-glass.

I have used this example for two reasons. First, to cite one instance of the way Rich's feminism has come forward in her recent writing. Second, and more important, to suggest that the shock value of a line like "Any woman's death diminishes me"—and our agreement or disagreement with its place as poetry—should not blind us to the fact that else-where in the same work Rich is continuing a task more effective as poetry and more profoundly political. Rich's images—like the "loaded gun" of "Face to Face" and " From an Old House …"—often attach themselves in the mind to feelings of ardor and tension. Sometimes, as in "Face to Face," the poem is pitched toward a meeting or a reconciliation. The main action takes place in stillness, an isolated concentration to find the "old plain words," the "God-given secret," which will, in the meetings dreaded and desired, both explode and reach out for understanding. In the later assertiveness of "From an Old House …" the "loaded gun" defines boundaries of self, a stockade within which exploration and attention to the self are taking place. No immediate release is promised. But in both these examples, Rich is straining toward a charged language which will make the self, at last, palpable. (pp. 140-41)

Composing in charged phrases shifts attention to her images, draws the pulse of the poem to them and away from verbs. In many of Rich's poems the images—close to the truth of dreams—rest close to one another in a complexly realized present…. Rich appropriates the manner to the coil and recoil of emotions. Her ardor transmutes traditional modernist materials. Above all, she puts them at the service of dialogue. What marks her … is the explicit demand her speakers make not only to understand but to be understood. They fight off the notion that insights remain solitary, unshared, dribble off into the past. What's more, her poems, however public in reference, proceed in a tone of intimate argument, as if understanding—political as well as private—is only manifest in the tones with which we explain ourselves to lovers, friends, our closest selves. Whether this radical intensity can be attained and sustained is the question George Eliot asked in Middlemarch, and the one Rich asks again and again as her poems make the attempt. (p. 142)

[In her] period of apprenticeship Rich was guided by instinct to the literary modes and postures through which she could express a smouldering and independent nature—one which impressed itself more directly in later work. It is interesting how, in the mannerly tones of her Frostian narratives, she goes intuitively to the core frustration of women dwindling into marriage. She is also not blinded by the glittering surround of heroic figures to whom she is in other ways drawn. In "Euryclea's Tale" (1958), impersonating Ulysses's old nurse, or in "The Knight," playing the critic of heroes herself, she is marvelously penetrating about the burdens and derelictions of traditional warriors. "Who will unhorse this rider / and free him from between / the walls of iron" ("The Knight"). "I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting / for a father dawdling among the isles" ("Euryclea's Tale").

Yet still we see the knight "under his crackling banner / he rides like a ship in sail." And Euryclea, baffled and resentful on the part of the boy Telemachus, still can think of Ulysses's vagrancy in more romantic terms…. (p. 144)

The ambush here is the storyteller's own susceptibility to all facets of the story, to the all-encompassing light in which Ulysses's travels may be viewed…. (p. 145)

In taking on earlier literary modes and historical figures, Rich very often found an angle of the subject which allowed her to enter the scene guardedly. But the time she wrote "Antinoüs: the Diaries" it was with a measure of self-disgust. Only later, when they were no longer part of the inherited "poetry of furs and manners"—and through the strange economy of a poet's memory—was she to welcome back those glints of richness as signs, not of a transmitted love of surfaces, but as answering to the hidden resources of the spirit. Modulated, in a different key, a chastened opulence was to be one way of talking about the sunken treasure of personality—the lost, the suppressed, the unspoken—in Rich's more disciplined, radical poems. For example, in "Diving into the Wreck" (1972), one way of talking about confusions of history and sexuality, the damages, the riches rotting and waiting to be unlocked, was to imagine them among shifting underwater forms, "the silver, copper, vermeil cargo," the sea-creatures "swaying their crenellated fans," "the ribs of the disaster / curving their assertion / among the tentative haunters."

But when she published Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Rich was using her "literary" skills ("The Knight," "Euryclea's Tale" and "Antinoüs: the Diaries" were all collected in this volume) in an irritated way. She had found her subject: fighting free of what sheltered her, others' homes, others' books and language; but she had not found her own way of speaking. In the forthright title poem, the "snapshots of a daughter-in-law" are part of a highly literary strategy, ironically like "The Waste Land," testing traditional poetic representations of women against deflating modern instances of women's daily experiences, inner strengths and resentments…. (pp. 145-46)

The literary irritation is twinned with a mounting bitterness far more central, the discovery of "the silent isolation of minds in marriage," as Helen Vendler puts it. (pp. 146-47)

Distinctions fall away—Yeats's dictum that the poet must choose between perfection of the life and perfection of the work, for example. The pain and conflict which Rich records in her account would energize her work for years to come…. With Snapshots, Rich began dating each of her poems by year, a way of limiting their claims, of signalling that they spoke only for their moment. The poems were seen as instruments of passage, of self-scrutiny and resolve in the present. (pp. 147-48)

Necessities of Life is a remarkable collection. In its mainly pastoral setting, the New England woods, Rich plays out, with freedom and feeling, a number of contradictory roles, which in the urban domesticity of Snapshots and in her later books had and would conflict with one another. In Necessities of Life she seems to enjoy a precarious immunity, the chance to experience a various self…. The title poem acts out, metaphorically, with wry satisfaction, the rebirth of a tough little self…. (p. 151)

It is strange then that the assertive self of some of these poems [in Necessities of Life] does not penetrate the poems of love and marriage; that those poems are lyrics of disintegration and the fine winnowing of self. Necessities of Life is in a delicate equilibrium, fully open to those rich and contradictory feelings. What is more astonishing is that it closes with a poem which breaks that pattern. The poem … is "Face to Face" and in it, almost for the first time, Rich anticipates bringing together both the energies of the solitary ego and the energies of dialogue, of a lovers' relationship. The poem hopes for the nourishment of a marriage through the charged revelation of the inner life…. What language [the lovers] were to speak was yet to be discovered.

The books which follow Necessities of Life seem driven by the craving for new ways of talking, so that the asserted, palpable self might be accepted as the basis of relation between lovers, husband and wife, friends…. Gone the old instinct that the ego must dwindle in relationships. Her poems lie like wishes on the pages. They make the further implicit claim … that the recharged and regenerated selves are the only true basis of political change. Both her radicalism of the late 1960s and her feminism in the 1970s, at their most convincing, rest on self-scrutiny and individual growth. Leaflets, The Will to Change and Diving into the Wreck ask to be read less like books of detachable polished poems and more like journals—patient, laconic, eloquent but dating themselves, provisional instruments of passage in the present. One doesn't turn back. (They are, for example, not the kind of journals into which one hundred new poems could be dropped retrospectively, as was the case in the second edition of Robert Lowell's Notebook.)

It is striking how many of these poems are about fresh starts, as if that position had to be re-imagined constantly to keep up the intensity of the verse, bypass disappointments, overcome the pain of broken connections. (pp. 154-55)

Rich had, in Leaflets, begun to write ghazals, a form borrowed from the Urdu poet Ghalib, and anticipating the fluid play of images she described in "Images for Godard." The ghazal had a minimum of five couplets, each free-standing and independent of the others. "The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal." Each of her ghazals was dated, as were the letters, "pieces" and finally "films" and "photographs" which make up The Will to Change. To cut images as free as possible from ordinary temporal sequence became Rich's aim, convinced as she was that "In America we have only the present tense." Syntactical irregularities became a means of self-interrogation, as in this scene in an old house [in "The Blue Ghazals"]:

  To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams
  and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.
 
  Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,
  wading against the tide, and with the tide….

These sentence fragments raise ghosts of questions and conclusions. Being incomplete, they expose fears and loyalties at the same moment, and their grammar suggests how such emotions float entwined and unresolved in the mind. (p. 159)

"Diving into the Wreck" [presents] adventures behind the common definitions of sexuality and beyond the damages done by acculturation and conditioning. It is here also that Rich makes her strongest political identification with feminism, in her attempts to define experiences unique to women or to define the damages done by false definitions of sexual identity. Into her images she has been able to concentrate much of what has always been in her poetry: what it is like to feel oppressed, betrayed and unfulfilled. The explicit identification with feminism sometimes sets poems off balance. But this is a matter of presentation and not—as some critics have suggested—because Rich has radically changed the direction or interests of her writing. (p. 162)

Rich's poems are bound to be restless, bound to be looking constantly for new beginnings, because they will never resign themselves to solitude.

The pressure under which she writes has led her in new directions. Her prose study Of Woman Born represents several years of study and finally brings together materials from anthropology, history and from her own life as both child and mother…. [It grows] out of the tensions between the sexes which her poems have always explored, asking this time—and appropriately in prose—whether they are ingrained in the biological differences between men and women or historically conditioned. The central effort of feminism, but here explored through the special experience of motherhood, the way she has felt it and the way it has been defined in Western societies. (pp. 163-64)

[It] is clear that Rich's sustained prose effort and large historical framework will take some of the pressure off what she expects of individual poems. Especially in the early 1970s, one could hear in Rich's poems the growing frustrations and anger accumulated by re-imagining again and again the fresh starts, the efforts at reconciliation. Titles like "Burning Oneself In" and "Burning Oneself Out" speak for themselves. "The Phenomenology of Anger" (1972) acts out some of women's deepest nightmares and cravings for violence, but it also speaks Rich's special frustration as an image-maker, all those years hoping for dialogue…. Even redirecting her violence, there is … at the back of Rich's mind a suppressed dream of dialogue and regenerated selves.

And twinned with the anger in these recent poems, there is also an enlarged awareness—a new voice, I think, in Rich's work—of the tragedy wrought into human relationships and into the attempts at dialogue and exchange. There are two particularly important examples: on the level of social injustice, her "Meditations for a Savage Child" and, less general, a poem of blunted love, "Cartographies of Silence." "Meditations for a Savage Child" is a remarkable poem based on the documents Truffaut also used so movingly in his film L'Enfant Sauvage, the records of the French doctor, J. M. Itard (now published as The Wild Boy of Aveyron). Itard had observed and partly "civilized" a savage child in the late eighteenth century. Rich, perhaps following Truffaut, introduces excerpts from the doctor's accounts as points of departure for each of the five sections of her poem. Unlike Truffaut, who chose to play the part of Itard in his film, Rich often takes on the role of the child, or ponders what he has to teach her, as she engages in a series of meditative exchanges with the voice of Itard. The poem is partly a long historical register of Rich's own divided spirit. Itard is an adversary but not an enemy, as they gaze across the ambitious ruins of Enlightenment philosophy. In the solicitous elegance of his prose, she finds words which have been emptied of their meaning: humanity, administrators, protection of the government—the roots of much which would have once engaged her own ardor. But in the mysteries of childrearing, of miseducation, she locates everything which defeats that ardor. (pp. 164-66)

In its very title "Cartographies of Silence" sends us back to the ardor for a knowledge of human relationships which has animated much of Rich's work. But the poem itself turns an appraising, sad eye on the large energies involved in a career so fervently directed outward. It is hard to know, now that some of Rich's force and passionate intelligence has been directed into prose, just what role poetry will come to play in her life and in her writing. Critics have in the past pointed out how much, in her commitment to the notation of present feelings, the pain of the moment, Rich has given up the traditional retrospective and shaping functions of verse. Poems like "Meditations for a Savage Child" and "Cartographies of Silence" show that whatever she has relinquished she has given up purposefully, that she understands the price of her ardor without giving up her rights to it. (p. 169)

David Kalstone, "Adrienne Rich: 'Face to Face'," in his Five Temperaments: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery (copyright © 1977 by David Kalstone; reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.), Oxford University Press, New York, 1977, pp. 129-69.