SOURCE: "Philoctetes Radicalized: 'Twenty-one love Poems and the Lyric Career of Adrienne Rich," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 61-87.

[In the following essay, McGuirk situates Twenty-one Love Poems in "a context of poetics as ideology," exposing "the ideological limitations of a poetic mode" and theorizing a method of "reading lyric in general and Rich's lyric in particular."]

As Willard Spiegelman points out, among the major poets of the English language in this half century, Adrienne Rich is alone in making of lyric a medium adequate to the task of propounding a politics. The Dream of a Common Language (1978), a watershed volume in this development, achieves moments of high lyrical poetry—centered in subjective experience, yet confident in the transcendent presence of otherness to the self—but a poetry that also insists on a relational, not unitary, subjectivity—social, gendered, historical: a politicized lyric self.

Given the tendency in some current criticism to regard lyric as a belated poetic mode and to employ it critically as a rather inert concept, reading a contemporary in relation to lyric might seem a regressive activity. It is my contention that a better theorized lyric—not a new apology for lyric, but a reading that inserts lyric in the world as an ideological practice—will provide leverage for understanding the development of a highly politicized poet like Rich, whose work traverses the line between lyric expression and rhetorical act. Theorizing lyric in terms of a lyric self alone will be unhelpful here, if not misleading. For Paula Bennett, Rich, along with Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, would seem to write a purified lyric—a medium that does not mediate—in which these women were able to throw off "self-alienating masks," to speak "directly from the unacceptable core of their being" and so to attain "the crown or lyric 'I' they knew was theirs." This conception of lyric as transparent window on the individual woman's being is inadequate to Rich's work for two related reasons.

First, although Rich's work can be situated within a poetics of the lyric derived from romanticism, her work shows strong affinities with the rhetorical tradition as well. Her dream of a common language, her sense of a common world of women and a readership of women, finds a gloss in Hans-Georg Gadamer's note that the basis of the rhetorical tradition lies in "an art of common speech, the language of our common sense, our sensus communis," that "rhetoric … demands that one know for whom one is speaking." Rhetoric, then—and this is the sense in which I will use the term—as language disposed toward others, whether overt in direct address or implicit in stances that reflect an awareness of a broad, socially conceived audience. Second, lyric is not simply a site for the expression of a given content. While Rich's experience as a woman is obviously the primary context and motive of her later work, the ideological practice of lyric remains both a condition of and an impediment to the project of making the love between women the basis of "a whole new poetry."

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has noted that in the 1970s, "the act of cultural criticism became [Rich's] central lyric act," and a number of writers have made similar claims placing Rich's work in this terrain between lyric and rhetoric. Joanne Feit Diehl has written of the oscillation in Dream between intimate address (associated with lyric) and assertion (associated with rhetoric), while Charles Altieri and Spiegelman have remarked on the presence in Rich's work of the period of both lyrical and discursive elements. I aim simply to contribute to this general perception by adjusting the critical focus. If lyric is not to remain finally a romantic quality or tendency which is somehow united in Rich's work with discursive, cultural, and political activity, it needs an ideological identity. Rich's political art, I think, attempts to insert lyric into an ideological field. The resulting changes demand our notice. Ideology, according to Louis Althusser's influential definition, is the representation of an imaginary relationship of the subject to her conditions of existence. Like the aesthetic in general, romantic lyric presents itself as "ideologically innocent"; its ideological power resides in this very "innocence," which is achieved on the one hand by miming the exact structure of Althusser's trope of ideology—"I address myself to you"—and on the other by suppressing signs of its address to readers. Obviously it is produced for public consumption, yet lyric's inward focus is such that in addressing itself to no one in particular, or to a "you" that is socially unconditioned, any awareness of audience remains concealed. Thus—to transpose Theodor Adorno's terms—in reading romantic lyric, "Precisely that which is not [ideological] in a poem should become its [ideological] aspect."

As a whole, The Dream of a Common Language conveys through its affirmations of identity and community—of the "primary presence of women to ourselves and each other"—the strength of a faith won in struggle. The highest expression of this faith is "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," an account by the leader of a women's climbing team of its members' growing strength and love and interdependence as they prepare for the climb on which they eventually die. Speaking from a transcendent afterlife. Shatayev declares, "if in this sleep I speak / it's with a voice no longer personal (I want to say with voices)." In contrast to these women "stream[ing] into the unfinished," the poem's addressee, Shatayev's husband, comes alone to find the bodies: "with your love your loss / … / You climbed here for yourself / we climbed for ourselves." Surpassing her husband, a figure for the solitary male poet as well as men in general, Rich's Shatayev affirms the greater transcendence possible when women bond together in communal enterprise.

Twenty-one Love Poems, however, presents a more conflicted negotiation between identity and difference, poetry and the world. Like the "Phantasia," it seeks to place the individual lyric poet in a wider human context, but here this means opening the intimate space of the love lyric to social and literary contexts, contexts that challenge rather than support the poet's desire for woman-to-woman bonding. As such it offers an occasion for examining both the problematic relations between lyric and the rhetorical dimension, and the local dialogue of lyric and rhetoric that occupies the poetic center of Rich's later work. In this essay I have three entwined tasks: to situate Rich's work in a poetic context—a context of poetics as ideology; to present a reading of the Love Poems as a trial of the ideological limitations of a poetic mode; and to attempt provisionally to theorize reading lyric in general and Rich's lyric in particular.

Philoctetes Radicalized

I want to begin with an allusion Rich makes that will stand as a trope of the career that preceded her feminist work of the seventies. In the eighth of the Twenty-one Love Poems, the poet remembers herself "years back … / hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes / in woman's form, limping the long path"—she is above a cliff, pondering suicide, "nursing, measuring that wound." The story of Philoctetes, the Greek archer bitten by a venomous snake on the journey to Troy and abandoned by his fellows on the uninhabited island of Lemnos, receives a reading apposite to the case of Rich in Edmund Wilson's "Philoctetes: The Wound and the Bow," the famous title essay of a book published, and reprinted numerous times, around mid-century and surely known to Rich. According to one commentator, Wilson "sought to read the [play] Philoktetes as Sophokles' universal statement on the role of the artist in society: wounded, outcast, lacking some inner quality that might permit him or her to engage in the mundane events of life." But Wilson really constructs this reading by grafting onto Sophocles' work the symbolist play of the same name by André Gide. Gide's Philoctetes tells his would-be rescuers, Odysseus and the youth Neoptolemus, that during his years alone, "I came to understand that words inevitably become more beautiful from the moment they are no longer put together in response to the demands of others." For Wilson, this "anchorite" who claims that his "only care is to be" is "a literary man." Odysseus, in contrast, is a practical man and, not incidentally, a skillful rhetorician, a counterfigure to Gide's hero, who refuses the world of action and allows the intruders to steal his magic bow. Sophocles' hero goes on to the Trojan War, but only after he is liberated from his bitter personal isolation by the sympathetic understanding of Neoptolemus.

The figure of Philoctetes evokes a number of intersecting relations: relations between self and world; self-love, personal love, and love or duty in community; between the poem as self-reflexive utterance (the symbolist ideal) or self-complete dramatic object (the New Critical ideal) and the poem as a rhetorical practice closely linked to political change, which is to say, the poem as an activity of the self grounded in ethos. Adrienne Rich is a poet who, though she continues to write from the lyric "I," becomes in the seventies increasingly active in the rhetorical dimension, producing a lyric that moves from the pole of pathos—a concept that has virtually defined lyric since the romantics—closer to the pole of rhetoric and ethos. Since the romantics, and until recently, lyric has been considered a rhetoric-free realm. That is, the relation of poem to audience has been treated as accidental rather than substantial. But lyric has, of course, had a rhetoric. Jerome McGann calls it "a rhetoric of displacement" in which "the audience is not addressed directly." The lyric norm, then, as Northrop Frye puts it, echoing John Stuart Mill, is for the poem to be "preeminently the utterance that is overheard." One important consequence of the norm, McGann writes, "is the illusion of freedom which it fosters—as if the reader were not being placed under the power of the writer's rhetoric." In other words, since the reader of lyric need not be aware of herself or himself as reader, since the deictics of the poem remain general and the speaker nameless (and typically genderless), the mechanism of identification that powers lyric is relatively simplified. The reader, merging with the poet, becomes the passive consumer of the poet's experience.

My argument here is that by the time of The Dream of a Common Language, Rich has "unfictionalized" a mode of discourse theorized by the New Critics in terms of dramatic propriety and "embodied" meaning, as opposed to a propositional or rhetorical meaning. Margaret Atwood's comment, that "Rich's poems do not demand the willing suspension of disbelief. They demand belief," gestures in this direction. Rich, in short, radicalizes the lyric mode in the service of a feminist poetics and politics that would erase the ideological lines drawn between the male figures: the political Odysseus. Philoctetes the "literary man," and the sympathetic or emotional Neoptolemus.

Rich's first two volumes, A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955), are characterized by a will to passivity expressed in claims like, "We had to take the world as it was given." A typical gesture is the measured retreat from a chaotic, threatening world that can only be suffered, and held at bay only by artistic form. James Breslin writes of "Storm Warnings"—in which the poet, closing up a house against a storm, declares, "the wind will rise. / We can only close the shutters"—that it is "both an expression of Rich's yearning for the well-made autotelic poem and a revelation of the psychological needs such poetry serves." In other poems, the human is virtually identified with passive suffering, while "inhuman" art consoles or redeems by transforming suffering into pathos. "A too compassionate art is half an art," the poet argues in "At a Bach Concert": "Only such proud restraining purity [as Bach's] / Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart."

The root sense of the term pathos is, of course, "to suffer." The literary sense of the term is exemplified and epitomized in Rich's early work, where pathos is suffering displaced to a poetic plane, or "suffering made literary"—universal, necessary, part of the human condition. Sharon Cameron has noted that "Lyric speakers … do not have names." Here, in addition to simplifying identification, the absence of name—like the absence of gender—helps to persuade us of the universality of what is a particular experience. For example, the alienation felt by the protagonist of "The Tourist and the Town," whose experience issues in the banal generalization, "To work and suffer is to be at home," is in fact the quite special sensation of a sensitive, young, upper-class American woman touring Europe after college graduation. Rich confirms this reading in changing the pronoun of the poem, in a later selection of her work, from "he" to "she," because, she says, the poem was really about herself. "When the poem was written," she explains, "a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect, or merely 'personal.'" Counterpressures appear throughout these volumes, in poems like the well-known "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," which portrays a woman whose hands embroider prancing tigers while burdened by "The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band"; but the poet remains determinedly among those "who," in her own phrase, "know limits." The reader of these poems, passive first in merely overhearing—or merely suffering—the poems, is doubly dyed in pathos by sharing the perspective of a poet who, finally, chooses to suffer the world.

If Rich's later project is primarily, as Altieri puts it, "a matter of ethos," if she seeks to situate the lyric self in the political world, this means replacing the pathos of the private lyric self with the "woman-centered," "woman-identified" experience of ethical community. At the center of such experience for Rich, as critics have noted, is the love relationship between two women. The love poem or poem of relationship has, however, been a constant in her work, and as such it may provide a reference point for any account of changes in her career.

In the fifties, Rich's love or marriage poems typically present a wife- or lover-poet maturely propounding the wisdom of accepting limits. "An Unsaid Word" untypically foregrounds gender difference, but in a manner embarrassingly determined to approve a relation permitted only by a sexist ideology:

     She who has the power to call her man
     From that estranged intensity
     Where his mind forages alone,
     Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,
     And when his thoughts to her return
     Stands where he left her, still his own,
     Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

Though the poet is determined, the indirections of this poem betray a resistance to straightforward advocacy of a sexist position. The negative—"unsaid word"—indicates that there is in fact "a word" held in abeyance, while the hypothetical mode of the poem suggests an inability finally to accept the imperative the poem apparently takes as a given. In the end, "An Unsaid Word" leaves the impression of personal will and identity reined in by ideological will, by prosodic skill and syntactic control.

In the sixties, Rich discovers that "The world breathes underneath our bed," and that the well-wrought lyric poem cannot accommodate her present experience of the world. Throughout the decade, she increasingly employs more fragmented forms, collage techniques that depend as much on the juxtaposition of statement and image as the control of a single speaker. While the influence of Charles Olson, who decried "the lyrical interference of the individual as ego" and advocated "composition by field," is evident, the field of Rich's action is never, as in Olson's "Objectism," merely phenomenal but always political: the poet is not an object among other objects, but a subject among other subjects. Rich's career as a political poet begins with Leaflets (1969). "I want this to reach you," she writes in the title poem, "who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred / … / I want this to be yours"—poetry, then, as leaflets, "scraps of paper" dispersed into the broad community, performing, Rich hopes, an ethical task. One measure of her growth as a rhetorical poet in the last two decades is the "Dedications" poem of her recent sequence "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Knowing now that her poetry reaches people, she recites a litany Whitmanian in its confidence: "I know you are reading this poem / late, before leaving your office / … / I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room / of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers / … / I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope." It is in the seventies, with the development of a positive feminism and an alternative order to the bourgeois marriage and well-wrought poem, that Rich begins to break a path that will lead beyond the lyric of pathos to a rhetorical lyric practice.

Rich's influential and widely suggestive essay "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (1971) marks the early phase of an overt feminism. There Rich speaks compellingly of the need to discover "ways … in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united." Perhaps it is in response to this need that the trope of address comes to govern much of her work, since in address the poet does not turn away from relation, as does the poet of the inward meditative lyric, but sustains or creates relation as she shapes her poem. For Rich, forging the poem is forging relation. In addition, address to historical women can serve a communal function, linking the lyric self to ethical community, for it uses apostrophe's seeming power to raise the dead and to bestow subjectivity in order to bring distant or historical women into the imaginative life of contemporary readers. It thus contributes to the development of a feminist ethos which needs, like any ethos, vivid exemplary figures and a historical dimension.

The Philoctetes of Gide, it is clear, would be anathema to the feminist Rich. The old Rich, the ancestor she alludes to in the Philoctetes poem, was a woman who established herself as a poet in the New Critical fifties and survived the anguished sixties and the interval of anger and sense of victimization that preceded the affirmations of The Dream of a Common Language. Now she tells her lover, "The woman who cherished / her suffering is dead … / I want to go on from here with you / fighting the temptation to make a career of pain." Philoctetes' own career of pain, in Sophocles' play, ended in a return to practical and communal activity—the Trojan War. Rich's return is significantly different. If the figure of a solitary, (emotionally) wounded woman on a cliff, contemplating suicide, evokes Ovid's Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff in despair of the love of a man, then, in her will to go on with a woman, her battle a matter of sustaining a self in relationship with an other, Rich at once rejects her own flirtation with suicide, the figure of the self-destructive woman in literature, and embraces the historical Sappho who chose to love women, and to sing not epics of war but lyrics of relation.

The Sequence of Love Poems

When we come to the sequence of love poems, however, relation loses the relatively clear lines of definition it possesses in the public sphere. With an intimate relationship already in place, the ongoing, potentially endless character of the form tends to release the poet from the work of forging relation in order to meditate on love, on his own responses, and on the discourse of love itself. The result is often the transformation of the addressed lover into a merely voiceless figure—a mirror—by which the poet establishes and explores his or her identity. But meditation on the discourse of love can also probe and question its own conventions. Thus Rich, in poem VII of the Twenty-one Love Poems:

     Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals,
     that modulated cantata of the wild?
     or, when away from you I try to create you in words,
     am I simply using you …

These questions articulate a problematic that seems endemic to the lyric mode, which I want to address here: is this natural, spontaneous (and therefore innocent) song, or is it a ruse that serves only to establish my identity?

Addressed by a woman-poet to an unnamed woman-lover, Twenty-one Love Poems, in Diehl's words, "seek[s] to combine a self-consciousness associated with establishing an alternative poetic ground based on a lesbian relationship, a world without men, and an attempt to convert a specific intimacy into a paradigm that maps the possibilities of such a relationship for a radically alternative poetics." This account, with its professionalizing "seek to" and "an attempt to," emphasizes the nature of the sequence as trial, a trial both of the poet's political project and of the possibilities of the love sequence for woman-to-woman relationships. The love sequence is on trial because it is a form that has embodied specific gender relations. The very conventions Rich seeks to overcome operate not just in the poem's content but in the very materia of her discourse. Thus the questions I cited above are not an instance only, as Jan Montefiore argues, of the poet "worr[ying] lest the inevitable gap between the text she produces and her lived, shared experience, may make her risk reducing her lover to a prop in her own poems' linguistic drama": they exemplify, as well as question, the problematic at the heart of romantic lyric, for although they literally direct themselves to an addressee, they remain "rhetorical" (in the conventional sense), impelling a monologue forward rather than initiating a dialogue. They thus verge upon "using" their addressee as "prop" themselves, exerting, in effect, an ideological force upon her. Nevertheless, in articulating a problematic, they raise it into critical view, and thus direct us toward the poetic center of the issues the sequence explores.

In an essay on "the rhetorics of sexuality," Margaret Homans outlines a figurative strategy Emily Dickinson employs to rewrite the romance plot of male desire for a distant woman. Unable to translate his desire into action, the Petrarchan lover-poet only displaces it to a figurative plane where he constructs his absent beloved as a tissue of metaphors of his own making. Stimulated by these—usually visual—metaphors, he gazes upon her image. She becomes a mirror of his desire that, however, merely perpetuates his desire, creating a very mise en abîme of pathos. In contrast, Homans argues, Dickinson, relying principally on metonymy, which is based on contiguity rather than absence, represents "a female sexuality (privileging touch) that is also a female textuality (privileging metonymy)." Jane Hedley offers an account of Rich's revision of the romance plot in the same terms. Rich celebrates contact: waking in her lover's bed, traveling together, lovemaking and desire expressed as touch, not gaze. As Hedley notes, when Rich goes beyond the merely literal description of her lover's hands—"precisely equal to my own— / only the thumb is longer, larger"—by asserting that "in these hands / I could trust the world," she is using metonymy: "Hands become a figure for the power of women as it might be exercised along various dimensions." This metonymic textuality echoes the sexuality Rich represents in the unnumbered "Floating Poem":

     the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—
     your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
     me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
     reaching where I had been waiting years for you
     in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.

Touch, contact, mutuality, the presence of two lovers to one another—these replace the gaze of desire dominant in the male tradition.

Homans argues that "a poem's rhetoric is dialectically bound up with its subject matter"; its particular use of figures, like metaphor and metonymy, is ideological. Ethical revision, however, one might argue, begins with the character of the lover-poet, "a woman sworn to lucidity," as Rich puts it in an earlier poem—active, questioning, determined to make love not an escape but a way of being in the world. Intimate I-you discourse tends to exclude the world of third persons, so that the drift into "a solitude à deux," as DuPlessis notes, has to be consciously resisted. So strong is the drift, and so strong is Rich's determination to resist it, that she immediately defends against it: her first act is to declare the need to live in the patriarchal city and to understand "our" lives as part of that city:

      Wherever in this city, screens flicker
      with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
      victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
      we also have to walk … if simply as we walk
      through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
      of our own neighborhoods.
      We need to grasp our lives inseparable
      from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal,
      those disgraces[.]

She does not, in Breslin's terms, yearn for the well-made autotelic poem, and she is determined to resist the psychology such poetry serves. These lovers will not live in "sonnets, little rooms," like those Donne envisioned canonized in his poem canonized by the New Criticism. Indeed, as Hedley points out, the absence in the opening poem of the pronoun "I" emphasizes Rich's aim to ground the lovers' life and the sequence itself in literal contemporary history. Moreover, it works rhetorically to invite us as readers into the poem and posits our collective experience as the context for the individual lovers' experience. The sequence then attempts to negotiate, for an "I" and a "you," a space that touches on one side the absolute collectivity represented by "we" and, on the other, the isolation of "I" alone, the only pronoun in the final poem.

Unwilling to accept a symbolist or romantic isolation freed from ethical concern, the poet must invoke contexts; but since, as she says, "No one has imagined us"—that is, lesbians, in art and literature—she must repeatedly invoke texts from the masculine tradition. The result is that, in first allowing these texts presence, and perhaps even priority, in order to deny their pertinence, the poet must employ largely negative ways of defining the lovers' life together. This is in striking contrast to the rest of a volume characterized by affirmation. It is as if here, at the center of her project, in the intimate space of "two lovers of one gender," she is most vulnerable and therefore most embattled. The allusion to Philoctetes is a complex example of simultaneous invocation, revision, and negation. In another poem, the poet figures the lovers' life together as a journey by car through an uncharted territory where the signal their radio picks up is "neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung / but a woman's voice singing old songs / with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute / plucked and fingered by women outside the law." Later, as the relationship falters, she warns that "Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, / women at least should know the difference / between love and death. No poison cup, / No penance." And in a poem I will deal with in some detail further on, her lover's passive response to the end of the relationship is "in fugue" with the pathos of Matthew Arnold's "To Marguerite," a poem in which the speaker attributes the "severance" of two lovers to the ruling of "a God."

What such negations and countering affirmations reflect is an imbalance and the consequent difficulty which, as Diehl writes, the sequence "so starkly articulate[s]: the difficulty of reinventing names for experience, of placing the female self at the center of the mimetic process." The male texts are actual and specific; neither the women musicians nor the songs have specific existence. Not surprisingly, when the poet imagines what the lovers' experience might provide for others, her vision is notably generalized:

      Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
      should have caught some ghost of us …:
      ...............
      this we were, this is how we tried to love,
      and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
      and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
      within us and against us, against us and within us.

Perhaps the poet wishes by such generalities to avoid mythologizing the relationship. Nevertheless, the need for "reinventing names," given the lack of suitable objects in the existing culture, often leads Rich to attempt to name the lovers' experience by identifying them with an equally generalized nature:

      We want to live like trees,
      .................
      our animal passion rooted in the city. (I)
 
      Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
      of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,
      the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring. (III)
 
      Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
      rotating in their midnight meadow (XII)
 
                    —tender, delicate
      your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
      of the fiddlehead fern in forests
      just washed by sun. ("Floating Poem")

Rich's commitment to ethos, however, to situating the poem within the existing social order, forestalls the potential for pathos in such identifications. Indeed, the social texts with which Rich has framed her experience can only undermine, or at least compromise, the identifications with nature. From the opening lines, the sequence rejects the notion of a "green world" outside the problematics of patriarchy, whether for women-lovers or a feminist lyric poet. Even the unnumbered "Floating Poem" is "simultaneously give[n] and denie[d] its inviolability" by the poems around it.

Consider in this connection the questions of poem VII. The first—"Is all this close to the wolverines' howled signals …?"—links naturalness of speech with naturalness of being, pondering whether the discourse of the love poems possesses the naturalness attributed elsewhere to the lovers themselves. The second—"when away from you I try to create you in words, / am I simply using you …?"—ponders an opposite view: that this poem is language, signs not signals, the scheme of a linguistically constituted "I," a means of self-definition in relation to others—and an inescapably social activity. In the first question, the poet's "cantata of the wild" looks to be a green world within discourse and the "I" itself an unconditioned subjectivity of natural process. But if Rich's project is in part to take the lyric "I" beyond romantic pathos to participate in ethos, there must be found a means of making the transcendent world it appears to inhabit contingent, and of making the reader's experience of the poem ethical too, more than a vicarious experience of the pathos of unconditioned subjectivity. The second question points to such a means, in a direction I want to begin to follow now.

"I am Adrienne"

Emile Benveniste's argument that subjectivity is established in uttering the pronoun "I" can be brought to bear on lyric discourse in obvious, but limited, ways. The conversational model Benveniste employs—where the positions "I" and "you" are exchanged by individuals in dialogue—is only partly fulfilled by the monologic lyric. The polarity of "I" and "you," Benveniste writes, "does not mean either equality or symmetry: 'ego' always has a position of transcendence with regard to you." This describes a linguistic condition for Twenty-one Love Poems that is complicated, however, by the poems' eventual deployment of the relationship between enunciation and enounced. As the utterance that is overheard, lyric normally suppresses the distinction between the two, compelling us to read a poem as if it were transparently the utterance of a single speaker when in fact the writer/enunciator and the enounced, or represented "I," are not the same. While transparency can be made translucency by different formal and rhetorical strategies that highlight enunciation (address to the reader, overt artifice, disjunctive syntax, and so forth), such remain exceptions to general practice. The "prosody of natural speech," as Antony Easthope points out, has been normative in English poetry since the Renaissance.

One effect of the "prosody of natural speech" is the immediate sense of voice that lyric produces. Voice, or the strong impression of the presence of a speaking "I," and not character, class, or gender, is the principal feature of lyric poetry. To say that voice always predominates over situation in lyric is another way of saying that the "I" always holds a position of transcendence. It is easy to see, then, why lyric has been valorized as a mode that expresses and enlists wide sympathies—a mode that convinces the reader of its universality simply by "suturing" him or her into the subject position of the represented, and usually unnamed, speaker.

In an interview published in 1977, shortly after the publication of Twenty-one Love Poems as a chapbook, Rich recalled her response to two heterosexual women friends who, as she says, "wrote to me about reading Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring me how 'universal' the poems were. I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why, I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and stripped of its meaning, 'integrated' into heterosexual romance. That kind of 'acceptance' of the book seems to me a refusal of its deepest implications." Montefiore suggests that while Rich's anger at her friends' insensitivity is just, it is not fully informed in the matter of her poetry, for although the lesbian content of the poem must be acknowledged, "it does not follow that the language or form of the poetry is specifically female: there is nothing intrinsically gendered about free verse"; "injection of new experiential content is not in itself a transformation of poetry." More pertinent, I would argue, is the generally displaced rhetoric of the poems. Only a refusal to read a lyric poem can evade the pressure of the powerful operation that allows us no perspective except that of the represented speaker while seducing us, as McGann notes, with an illusion of freedom from rhetorical constraint. Lyric, in short, insists that we experience the poem principally through identification. So it should not be surprising that a sympathetic, and careless, reader, invited to identify with the poems' speaker, should call the poems "universal,"

The sequence, however, increasingly works against such simple identification—and against the step up to universals. The mechanism of identification is complicated by the accumulation of various deictics for the poem that compete with the generalized deictics of lyric (here, there, then, now, I you) for dominance. The range of reference in Twenty-one Love Poems, both literal and literary, counters the inward drift of love lyric, as well as our tendency to read the protagonists as timeless fictions. Though Rich does at moments rather blandly insist on the ordinariness of things transformed ("the early light of spring / flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado, / the Discount Wares, the shoe store"), references like these establish a literal setting for the poems' action. The name of the friend, "Kenneth," who "tells me he's been arranging his books / so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types," bears no discernible symbolic trace; such detail serves to remind us of the literal, social identity of the speaker—she's not just a lover—and to impede simple identification by the reader with the speaker. The climax of the sequence occurs when the poet gives the most central literal detail, her own name. "Now you're in fugue," she tells her lover,

                         across from what some I'm sure
     Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea.
 
     Those are the words that come to mind.
     I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn
     pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—?
     Close between grief and anger, a space opens
     where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder. (XVIII)

Obtruding the literal poet upon the fictional "I" of the sequence, this passage betrays the lyric promise of identification. Remember Sharon Cameron's observation that lyric speakers do not have names, and the New Critical principle that, for the purposes of reading and criticism, poets are extraneous to their poems. A recent objection to Rich's self-naming comes from a different critical quarter which, however, shares that emphasis on fiction.

Margaret Homans's discussion of The Dream of a Common Language in Women Writers and Poetic Identity is mainly concerned with showing the advantages of "Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev," which offers romantic transcendence of nature to women, over "Transcendental Etude." The latter poem concludes with the vision of a woman who in weaving together the small scraps of nature at hand becomes "one with her body." Her "composition" has nothing to do with "mere will to mastery." Homans finds in this rejection of the high values of art, and the identification of the woman with nature, a reductive vision for women and a poetic that is "poetically terminal," because it tries "to make an end to figuration." This high investment in figuration and transcendence is reflected in the tenor of Homans's all too brief response to Rich's literal self-naming:

When Rich says "… I am Adrienne alone" … that particular personal "I" differs greatly from the sense of self that underlies much of Romantic poetry. Wordsworth, egotist though he is, does not name himself Wordsworth; "creative soul" and "Poet" are names that enlarge the self, where explicit naming would diminish it…. The unmasked and reductive "I" is only a further function of that belief in the literal, that it can be expressed and have literal effects. The new "I" [of feminist poetry] has nothing to do with creative power; its purpose is to make poetry approximate as closely as possible a personal, spoken communication.

Homans's critique misses the mark. I think, because it assumes that what lies before a woman poet is an either/or choice between transcendence and literal identifications. In my view, Rich's project has more to do with articulating a relationship between transcendence and history, and that relationship comes down, in lyric poetry, to a relationship between the "I" itself and the social text of the world.

Rich may align the lovers with that social text through allusion to the masculine tradition in art and reference to the world outside their door, but these strategies do not touch the "I," which is, as in all lyric, the center of the poems. However much the poet might attempt to make that identity a political and contingent one, the "I" cannot ever refer outside the poem, since the pronoun "I" has no referent in the way that "tree," for example, has; "its task is to indicate the person uttering the present instance of discourse that contains the 'I'." "I" is inescapably transcendent with respect to any other aspect of a lyric poem.

The problem for Twenty-one Love Poems that follows is this: the sequence contains two incompatible propositions about the relation between the poet and her world, two ideologies. The first is the declared one: "we have to grasp our lives inseparable from those rancid dreams"—of the literal urban setting, patriarchal history, the masculine tradition in poetry. The second is embedded in the discourse of an "I" addressing a "you." It says that "I" and "you" are the only real presences in the poem. Or, to put a finer point on it, it suggests that only "I" is really present, since "you" remains without speech and never occupies the center of discourse.

In naming herself, however, the poet becomes a third person, someone who is called Adrienne, and thus radically compromises her privileged position as transcendent "I." She no longer speaks from the position of the represented "I," or enounced subject, but from a position of enunciation. Rich acknowledges, in effect, a double position: she is inescapably transcendent "I" and a person with a name given by history; hers is an act of recognition, specifically that "'I' is ideological." Her lover meanwhile "turn[s] aside from pain" and succumbs to Arnoldian pathos.

If Rich recognizes that "'I' is ideological," she will not therefore cease to write from her subjectivity. It is in part the wish to escape the ideological condition of language that leads to a poetics of pathos—like that represented by Gide's symbolist Philoctetes—which includes rhetoric in its vocabulary only as a term of disparagement. Rich is pragmatic, if nothing else: to be politically efficacious, to be ethical, means to engage the "oppressor's language." Moreover, it is only the full experience of transcendence in freely uttering the pronoun "I," an experience long denied to women. that allows one to intervene in the ideological field which is history. Saying "I am Adrienne," then, does not erase the transcendent "I" of the lyric poet but balances it, across the copula, with the contingent identity given by history.

Lyric/Rhetoric

In firmly dividing poetry from rhetoric, Mill expressed a growing prejudice of his age: "Eloquence is heard," he wrote, "poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience: the peculiarity of poetry appears to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener." That Frye followed Mill in his influential account of the modes and genres suggests that the prejudice still has currency. "Can anyone but a philistine … talk about lyric poetry and society?"—that is the question Adorno anticipates as he approaches his topic; lyric, it is understood, has exclusively to do with private experience. Closer to our time, Jonathan Arac notes that even in the most recent and sophisticated work to be published on lyric, the anthology Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, "The most common sense among those who have used the notion is that lyric expresses pure subjectivity."

Postmodernist criticism has sought to release poetry from the equation with romantic lyric implicit in statements like Mill's, but lyric itself remains unregenerate. The opposition of lyric to rhetorical concerns, to ethos, still structures our thinking and prevents us from understanding lyric historically as a flexible mode that moves back and forth—through historical periods, or within the body of a poet's work—between inward meditation, address to a "you" with awareness of a wider audience, and direct address to a broad community by the literal poet.

In this essay, I have largely assumed the opposition, taking "lyric" to mean "romantic lyric" and allowing it to structure my argument. Twenty-one Love Poems is exemplary in this regard. It begins by addressing a thematic opposition—lovers/city—which it seeks to dissolve, or transform, but moves crucially to address the related discursive opposition of poetry and rhetoric. In doing so, Twenty-one Love Poems serves to prepare the more radical move in later volumes to a nonromantic lyric.

I want to make this clearer. If Rich in a sense "unfictionalizes," it is not to move lyric toward the confessional mode, but to bring it into the realm of ethos. To appreciate her work, then, we need a notion of lyric capacious enough to comprehend the rhetorical dimension and criteria beyond, in Donald Wesling's words, the merely "singable, and the personal." Marjorie Perloff, judging it a "curious twist," suggests that while "Rich regularly writes in the lyric first person," she is "a notably impersonal, didactic poet." She complains further that Rich "is so anxious to teach and to persuade that she tends to forget that form is itself a political statement." All that Rich offers, in Perloff's view, is the thin poetic gruel of teaching and persuading. The problem here is that Perloff's critical assumptions—chiefly, that the form/content dichotomy represents the sum of what is poetically relevant—cannot comprehend a poetry that conjoins lyric and rhetoric, integrating formal effect and personal detail with a rhetorical purpose.

In The Dream of a Common Language, part of that purpose is to urge on (women) readers the value of identification among women: "The drive / to connect," Rich tells us, is of "the true nature of poetry." But the connection, as I've been arguing, is not simple. Lyric's mechanism of identification becomes demanding and specific, since the poet is no longer the passive, nameless, genderless, or timeless self of her early work but instead is active, named, gendered, and historical. Rich's assumption of a female audience, one that is not a ghetto, in a manner that is not embattled, is a rhetorical move both politically and poetically significant. Politically, the lyric norm is a resource: to begin with, the norm invites readers into identification with lyric speakers; in Rich's poetry, identification is demanding but a source of strength as well—as, for example, the "Phantasia" seeks to make clear. Poetically, the assumption of a female audience has to change the way we read lyric poetry. It is not only Philoctetes, the poet, who has been radicalized: Rich's poetry radicalizes the reading of lyric, for women directly, secondarily for men, by challenging the gender complacency that goes with conventional interpretation. Reading lyric becomes an ethical practice. Instead of passively consuming the experience of an unconditioned lyric "I," we are challenged by difference, and by awareness of the enunciating poet behind the "I" of the poem.

As Rich moves away in the eighties from the emphasis of the seventies on woman-identified, potentially transcendent experience and further from romantic ideals generally, the mechanism of identification is less critical. We are more likely to encounter poems addressed to literal named people and poems self-consciously about Rich's personal and historical existence as poet and citizen. Hence the title of a 1986 volume, Your Native Land, Your Life. The "I" of these later volumes is, then, even more explicitly constructed rhetorically and ethically, rather than by virtue of a displaced rhetoric and private pathos that permit the illusion of transcendence. In "Sources," an autobiographical sequence of twenty-three poems dated 1981–82, Rich addresses her long-dead husband:

I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me…. I've had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists. I hate the way they use the dead.

Yet I can't finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you.

Here is a poet fully cognizant of the problematics of address. Like ideology—remembering Althusser's trope, "I address myself to you"—address creates a listening subject by, paradoxically, subjecting it to the speaking "I." Rich affirms it nevertheless as a mode of relationship in poetry that she is unwilling to do without—a rhetoric, which makes the lyric poem more than the "musings" of the poet to herself. If she is to use the dead, or living, in poetry, her risk will at least be underwritten by her own contingency and responsibility. Once explicitly named in Twenty-one Love Poems, Rich no longer speaks as the enounced "I" of a discourse that presumes its ideological innocence, but writes from the position of an enunciating "Adrienne."