The power to choose—the exhilaration and the humiliation of self-determination—is … the subject of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language, only the politics of that book divides the world in half…. In 1964, Lowell could use the word man and include everyone; in 1978, Rich has diminished her arena of meaning to include no man…. Politically speaking, I find her arguments narrow and contradictory. At the same time that she wishes to link herself with those who, "age after age," have fortified the world and to prepare herself as one of those who will provide for a new knowledge of reality, she ignores, in her silence about it, the central fact that is changing the body she enjoys and mutilating, with its insidious power, the generational cycle. (pp. 224-25)

But the strength of The Dream of a Common Language lies in the considerable number of poems that move beyond feminist concerns and explore and accept the responsibility for choice. In these, Rich's voice achieves a quality of independence that Wallace Stevens found in the paintings of Marcel Gromaire: "Being rebellious is being oneself and being oneself is not being part of the automata of one's times." (p. 226)

The method of the book is exemplified by a pattern of return. Definitions arrived at in one poem are reworked in another, threads cast earlier are picked up at the end, like the fugues, the etudes, the telephone calls back and forth, the "calico and velvet scraps" woven again and again to emerge in the concluding tapestry of the final poem. Placing the search for selfhood first, Rich answers, by example, the nullifying "automata" of our time. That search involves a movement toward, and a movement away from, the other woman—lover, sister, mother—with whom she is involved. The struggle between "two lovers of one gender,/ … two women of one generation" … emerges, in the course of the book, not any easier than the struggle between the sexes. Behind the poems lies the fear that the "common" domain may be only a misconception fostered by the "drive to connect" which anyone, entering the room of Rich's poetry, feels. In embracing the dream of a common language, Rich seems aware that it exists as a chimera, an allusion never to be discovered and as a possibility, a goal ever to be pursued. (pp. 226-27)

What keeps the book vital is not the initially anticipated answer but the surprisingly difficult question that arises, in the title poem, after a seemingly fatal plunge…. (p. 227)

Through the parallel similes (poems, heroines, shadows) Rich establishes the connection between her hopes and fears, between the dream of love-making and the difficulty of love-abiding…. The poems, the heroines, the loves become the inspiration, the fecund liquid, out of which language and the life Rich seeks, is formed. (p. 228)

Freedom to choose in this book means freedom to reject, to move away and to admit that the mind creates divisions even while the body feels "no existence apart" … from her lover. Rich despairs over the split between her life as a woman which compels her toward the other and her life as a writer which drives her, occasionally, away. Forced, by her own desire for honesty, to choose, she opts at the end of a poem called "Splittings," to "love this time for once/with all my intelligence."… "Intelligence" involves seeing clearly enough to admit that there are moments when the individual needs to retreat to the self, to split in order to surface again. (pp. 229-30)

In the section titled "Twenty-One Love Poems," the conflict between the longing to abnegate, and to assume, power is addressed directly to the lover…. The beloved becomes, in the dream, the inspired object and inspiring subject, a unifying force, pulling together scattered drafts and carbons littered about as testimony to the inadequacy of language. The poems in this series celebrate the joy of love for those who are not young, detailing the exhilaration of the next morning, coffee and music, made delicious by a body satisfied. They are erotic in detail, tracing the history of a relationship quickened by a feeling that lost ground must be made up and sharpened by an awareness that time alone is necessary too. As earlier, words rupture. The speaker's compulsion to determine a place for herself, whether it be inside feeling the embrace of love, or outside describing the effect of it, haunts the series. (p. 230)

The poems have a habit of picking up words again, as if in the intervening time between them the lover asked, argumentatively, "what does this line mean?" The tendency to redefine conveys the idea that nothing is unconditional, not even a printed word…. The enemy in these poems is neither fate nor other people but the self (or that part of the self) that seeks to circumscribe and name and speak. (p. 231)

In the moving last poems, the speaker is alone, examining the split within herself, recognizing that if a renaissance is to take place, she is responsible for nurturing it…. In words repeated throughout the book, "unbuilt house," "unmade bed," and "unmade life," Rich conveys her sense of herself as half-born, lying somewhere between the death of an old story and the life of a new poetry, in the "solstice" between nostalgic glances at the past and enthusiastic preparations for an awakening. (pp. 231-32)

The Dream of a Common Language arrives at an understanding of the process of life which includes a deflated aim: to be common is to do what any woman does. (p. 233)

[The] point of The Dream of a Common Language is that the speaker is prepared to become, when necessary, the divisive element. Having found love, she can risk it, knowing that there remains in her the capacity to grow regardless of what happens as a result of an initiating danger.

The conclusion of The Dream of a Common Language is confident because the speaker has established the source of renewal, and the problem of division, in the private domain. If the poems occasionally seem burdened by a rhetoric reducing men and exalting women, they evolve into a new phase, questioning, and accepting, the self. (p. 234)