The goal of all this exploration is not the cultivation of "better women writers," but of women who will begin to write outside of the "law" of language, beyond the reach of male critical approval.

Thus language itself in Dream appears to be "in the act of changing its meaning" (a definition Stanley Kunitz has given of poetry) within the framework of Rich's ideological time. For those who call her "radical" (often because they claim to recognize the voice of the demagogue in her recent poems) I suggest that this altered sense of time is her most radical statement. She moves compass-like through other people's "hours and weeks" to the inevitable north of her future, her point of view. More than assaulting the prevailing esthetic, she assaults the temporality of that esthetic, our chronological sense of ourselves—and it is in this deliberately woven time warp that The Dream of a Common Language begins.

Rich asks us to dream collectively, suspend our waking sense of time's authority, presuming all and nothing, as in a dream. As a clever veteran explorer of the unconscious, she knows this mined territory well enough to ask her readers to formally consider the dream as the single metaphoric device whose radar will guide us to "consciousness."

There is irony, albeit unintentional, in the choice of the dream as governing metaphor, for it is the oldest escape hatch in poetry, the begging-off of active volition in the awesome presence of the Unconscious; and it would seem to obviate some of Rich's grandness of intention. Where the ego-organized brain gives itself over to the pulsing iconography of sleep-thinking, how can we talk about the will to change? We are not talking, after all, about the common language, but about the dream of such a language, that familiar and safe old vehicle. The halo of dream is a kind of proscenium through which the reader will view the poem. (pp. 79-80)

Many of Rich's critics believe that she "changed" to a didactic stance rather suddenly, becoming political, radical, ostensibly hostile to men. She would agree that a change from her earlier verse (imitative of Frost, Auden, Lowell) took place—but would date the shift from just after The Diamond Cutters (1955) when she "embarked on a process that was tentative and exploratory," gradually transforming her life and her poetics and her politics into a single phenomenon. (p. 82)

[Concern] about the future is exactly what fuels her unique and powerful ambition to re-write the archetypes in the cleansed vocabulary of passion and intimacy. In this vocabulary, language would be rescued, excavated at the moment of metaphor, the moment of crossing over from the literal to the symbolic. Dream is written in a dialect which attempts to speak in metaphor without exceeding the limits of its own empirical truth, to use a language which, even in its symbols, will not lie. (p. 83)

In the first section of Dream, Rich is trying to define and exorcise evil power and to pit herself and her personae against its force; in the second, she affirms woman-love in a ring of canticles touched with fiercely gentle power. These love poems have a body, unlike the manifesto-poems of the first section, which peer from a terrible brain, an unforgiving cyclopean eye. The love poems are very nearly incarnate, but entirely without lust, with an enormous aching homesickness for the Like …; and as the walls of taboo crumble, one caresses another's flesh, brushes another's hair in a witched, undersea light. The implication of choice reverberates: "I choose to love with all my intelligence."

Most of the poems in the first section are convincing. (pp. 83-4)

Though there is nothing "male" about the woman-heroes (Curie, Shatayev) who populate this first section, what makes them seem "unfemale" at times necessitates a recognition of our own conventional expectations. They manifest a terseness, an economy of feeling, we are unaccustomed to associating with women. Here are women who go "beyond" love into the extremes of knowledge (science, exploration, anger) and scale the heights of their powers of imagination. (p. 84)

Rich's tendency to generalize, to aggrandize the truth she spends so much time tracking, is disturbing. Not because I think that her occasional excesses are signs of weakness, but because they are intentional. She occasionally does violence to the language just to prove she can…. In this mood she indulges in a brand of self-heroics which congratulates itself on the page—a real temptation for a woman in her position. She has, after all, made it clear that she is in possession of a quality few American poets are ever called upon to reveal: courage. She has had the courage to turn her back on a literary "future" that seemed established and undertake a whole new definition of the future of poetry…. She has vindicated herself with Dream, a book where she has at last found a "language" equal to her themes. (pp. 84-5)

The silent community of women, whom she presumably speaks to and for, finally amounts to background, "landscape"—thawing and vaugely ominous—for the poet's private visionary struggle. The book ends and "vision begins to happen" as a woman walks away from the crowd's jargon and begins the "musing of a mind one with her body."

What emerges, for me, despite the author's passion for order, for a feminization of the universe which is practically Elizabethan in concept—a "new music of the spheres"—is her loneliness….

In the process of attaching to men and tending children, women have failed to know and love themselves and it is this division of spirit that both animates and frustrates the need for common speech, the codification of female culture. (p. 86)

It is an odd contradiction that the discovery of this concept of woman-language has both freed and subdued Rich. By way of explanation, I might oppose "male" and "female" thought processes as representative of different language-making skills and assign perfectly arbitrary characteristics to each. I might describe the "female" process as associative, emotionally or instinctually inspired, synchronous, impressionistic, producing a dream-like syntax—and the "male" process as analytic, dynamic, thematic (or theme-related), sequential, formal (as in the narrative), emotionally restrained with an externally ordered syntax.

Assuming the above distinctions, Adrienne Rich would appear to be a more "male" writer than say, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bogan, Sylvia Plath, and certainly Marcel Proust…. At her most persuasive, she is positively forensic—fencing with imaginary analytical adversaries; her mind flying at top speed toward a good knotty problem. In an "attitude-cage," she is like a lioness, pacing.

The language in Dream is much too unfinished for us to know what new and powerful forms the female order will assume, as words like "new" and "powerful" are redefined. Ultimately, in Rich's view, all will be redefined….

I would not dream of discrediting Dream for its separatist politics and so I find its speculative esthetic defensible, even exciting. The few limitations I find have to do with Rich herself, restraining herself (an ironic by-product of such unrestrained hypothesis) and subjecting herself to penurious theming …, a false "common-ness" of usage….

In the last section of Dream, entitled Not Somewhere Else, But Here, Rich is, as she says, "writing for myself." After the manifesto of the first section and the fantasy of the second, she returns to her own life, her private thoughts. Though the book sets up expectations for a "synthesis" of past and present—a leap into the future—she remains on the edge, meditating. (p. 87)

There is no despair in Rich. She is hard on herself, continually shaking herself awake from reveries, pointing herself back in the Right Direction. I like her in her "possessed" moods, in the trance of love or demonic speech; and in the crusader fire, burning new emblems of thought. But here, cooler now, in the most "ordinary" section of the book, I trust her human-ness, her self-doubt, finally (what seems hardest for her) her love for herself. (p. 88)

The writing, too, becomes more self-possessed. "Natural Resources," a poem in fourteen parts, builds as painstakingly and succinctly as a miner's tended vein. She makes sure of her footing before each step, adjusts her light, and moves further into the poem's promise. It is another "interior monologue" poem, the mind doggedly at work on the material, wresting free chip by luminous chip the striations of revelation: "the fibers of actual life as we live it now." In bare two-line stanzas, in icepick rhythm, the poem gathers momentum and bursts like an ore-laden car from the mine-shaft into light…. (pp. 88-9)

It is a natural enough ascension now to "Transcendental Etude," the most elegantly phrased and passionate soliloquy in the book. Not since Wordsworth hovered over Tintern Abbey has a poet so "appointed" landscape as symbolic grazing land…. [Rich] gathers nature into her visionary diction as if it existed only to serve her purposes here….

The delicacy and the gentle sentiments of an earlier Rich—the young poet enamored of the "Hesperidean" air and the refined craft of high order—have been taken into the embrace of the older, wiser, imperative, and more innovative voice. (p. 89)

The Dream of a Common Language is the work, as it says on the book jacket, of a "necessary" writer, one to whom it is often painful and guilt-provoking to listen. But she is much more than a conscience, much more than a rhetorician. She is, with this book, the embodiment of a kind of alternative poetics, a new time-esthetic that changes our language—how we listen and speak to ourselves. We can hear a future in her words…. The name of her new language is woman and if we're smart, we'll listen to it, even learn to speak it. (p. 90)

Carol Muske, "Backward into the Future," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright © Poetry in Review Foundation), Vol. 7, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 1979, pp. 77-90.