Despite Rich's current commitment to a poetry of energetically willed process which would generate an irresistible forward momentum, breaking through the old dilemmas in a "succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next" … one is struck in rereading the volumes [of her poetry by] how much of the most significant movement in her poems is neither directly forward nor equivocal in its consequences. Instead, the critical discoveries are made when the poet insists, as she first did in a poem in A Change of World, on "stepping backward." Perhaps too much is being made these days of Rich as prophet, with too many approving critics reviewing her career eager to uncover only embryonic stirrings of her present feminist identity. (p. 142)

Even before feminism and Rich discovered each other, many of the readers of her seven volumes felt she was articulating with uncanny accuracy a familiar body of American experience, voicing in 1950 the educated ennui of that decade, and later announcing the liberal antiwar sentiments of the sixties. Precisely because the timely volumes so often seemed proven upon the pulses of her audience, Rich has been championed or condemned as the voice of larger movements than her own. Yet to appreciate the complex consistency of her poetry we cannot afford to overlook the regular reappearance of poems which from the very beginning until the present moment seem to arise from the poet's need to remove herself intentionally, if only momentarily, from any type of involvement whatsoever. Although the habit of keeping her distance has been repeatedly a source of personal suffering and guilt, it has nevertheless served throughout her career as an essential poetic advantage. (pp. 142-43)

Certainly as Rich's poetry and sensibility matured, she moved steadily away from the formulas which served, in poems like "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" … and "The Loser" … to pose emotional dilemmas with an excess of logical simplicity in precise antitheses which were then neatly resolved by a poetic control ruthless in its reserve. Instead she came to trust, especially in the volumes since Leaflets, documentary fidelity to experience and inclusiveness, even at the expense of coherence, as artistic principles. At the same time, in these poems she began more directly to accuse herself, as artist and individual, among those who were compromised and culpable. (pp. 143-44)

To see how and why Rich as a poet refuses ever to be totally taken in, but insists instead on her separateness or severalness, her ability to remain somehow free, for the moment of the poem, of the flow she must chart, we need only compare her favorite terms for describing the act of poetic imagination at several points during her career. In "Writing as Re-Vision," she names as the primary resource which enables her to write as a buoyancy of attention, a loosening of the self from the constrictions of lived experience to "enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot." (p. 144)

In the prophecy which concludes "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" … she imagines a prototype for the potent, creative woman who is similarly unconstricted and airborne. "Her mind full to the wind," this woman is a helicopter safely delivering precious cargo; yet her daring flight is also defiant, "poised, still coming, / her fine blades making the air wince." Although this vision is derived in part from Simone de Beauvoir, Rich returns to the image in three other poems over a period of fifteen years. (p. 145)

The habits of perception implicit in these images underlie the particular strengths of a frequently ambivalent poetic stance. Rather than making a single emotional response, her poems are more often energized by opposing thrusts whose tension lifts her free and yet holds her in a manner resembling an aircraft's powerful stasis in motion, its difficult balance, and its finely controlled modulations of distance. (p. 146)

[In many] poems in A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955), the sensitive, well-educated observer stands self-consciously apart and regards experience as a series of neatly framed vistas, each with an instructive corollary to literature, music or art. Although the speaker in these poems claims to regret the sense of alienation which turns the living world to allegorical tableaux, the identity of tourist provides the psychological as well as physical space for introspection. The inexperienced and undefined persona may contemplate the heavily laden landscape as a mirror which illuminates her presence yet never threatens to engulf it. For the most part, the emotional distance which operates in the poems of the first two volumes is a weary resignation, somewhat affected because so premature, of a romantic young girl who wishes to be heroically committed but is sensibly disgruntled by the premise "we had to take the world as it was given" ("Ideal Landscape")…. [We] know the speaker in these poems, as in so many later ones, as a sufferer who is uncomfortably out of place and inadvertently out of touch with the world around her. (pp. 146-47)

Randall Jarrell was one of the first to notice Rich's particular facility for shape-shifting. In reviewing The Diamond Cutters, he notes that the emancipated speaker of "Living in Sin" and the child who heard blue-black bears on the stairs at dusk in another poem are equally fantastic fictions. But when he politely complains that these dream poems could be "more nearly final than they are" and pardons the poet's youthful inexperience for the many poems which pretend and anticipate rather than report actuality, he could not have foreseen how vital this process and these experimental identities would be throughout Rich's career. For her the motive for assuming a series of masks has been neither to embroider not disguise her own identity; rather she struggles to sense it more keenly, eliminating illusions through a process of negative definition. (p. 149)

[Precisely] this sort of tension—between Rich's faith that focus, reordering, reconnecting are possible through poetry, and her anxiety that by discovering artistic patterns she may be willfully disguising the actual inconsistency or meaninglessness of her existence—informs some of her most moving work. For as eager as she is to articulate and affirm through her poetry an exact sense of who and where she is within the flux of experience, she knows that if she is free to shape her own identity, she is also forced by the subversive nature of the imagination to question repeatedly her choice of a created self. (p. 152)

"The Roofwalker" (1961) which closes the Snapshots volume and is frequently cited as Rich's announcement of her intention to become personally engaged in the risks of political activism and to forfeit her protected status as a sympathetic but esthetically distant observer deserves more careful attention in this respect. Rich dedicates the poem to Denise Levertov who was also moving from a sheltered, privileged existence toward greater social criticism in her public life and in her poetry. Levertov's advocacy of the revolutionary power of poetry to change lives and of the poet's active, personal responsibility for the consequences of her words may have influenced Rich's assessment of her own task in this poem. Yet the poem earns its particular authenticity from the poet's candid admission that in neither posture is she entirely at ease. Rich clearly claims to prefer now, rather than the careful, conservative architect of domestic arrangements she once was, "the giants, the roofwalkers" whose labors outside in storm seem to her as heroic as they are dangerous. But her language suggests that the poet is ironically aware that she may be exaggerating the stature and power of her new models in order to convince herself. (pp. 153-54)

[It] seems significant that in arranging the poems from Snapshots in her Selected Poems, the poet does not conclude with "The Roofwalker," but replaces it with "Prospective Immigrants, Please Note" (1962), which should serve to forewarn those who would come after her, cobelievers and critics alike, that they will not find in her poetry or her life a clear path of consistent, unequivocal moral imperatives…. (pp. 154-55)

The tension created by the double vision of the poet's separate selves does not exist exlusively in poems about political engagement. In Necessities of Life (1966), the poet pauses to redefine certain tenets of her emotional and artistic life. As she steps backward into a more private and more primitive relationship with her surroundings, she records in many of the poems a process of imaginative estrangement and reintegration which often involves seeing opposites as interchangeable—for instance, ugliness which harbors beauty, violence which restores innocence, or death at the heart of life. (p. 155)

[As] the identity and social context Rich witnessed in her poems became steadily more ambiguous and entangled, the lines on the page became longer, the sentences looser, simpler in their syntax, more direct in their pained declarations. While she had perceived as early as her notebooks for Snapshots that entries which appeared fragmentary, mere scraps of poems, were actually united by a common consciousness and a common theme, it was not until the "Ghazals" (7/68) of Leaflets and "The Blue Ghazals" (9/68) and "Shooting Script" (11/69-7/70) poems of The Will to Change that this conviction was fully exploited as a formal principle. In her approximation of the ghazal form of the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, Rich could achieve the immediacy and fidelity of a diary, which her passion for dating each of her poems since Snapshots revealed was an artistic necessity. The composite form, which groups five couplets together but leaves the narrative or logical connections unstated, could be extended indefinitely to create a flow of awareness in which the record of each instant is discrete, autonomous, and often epigrammatic, yet still as inconclusive as a single frame of a film.

Indeed, among her artistic models, the later volume reveals, are the suggestive, unconventional films of Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard. But what the poet gains in associative richness through the contiguous suspension of superimposition of multiple images in the longer reels of these poems is sometimes lost in emotional definition. Reading them, we may find ourselves squirming from the unedited sameness of stretches of this documentary. (p. 159)

The fourteen numbered poems which conclude The Will to Change mark Rich's accelerating awareness that the poet's mind is changing more radically and more rapidly than she can find language adequate to understand it. (p. 160)

More than ever in Diving into the Wreck (1973), the reader is encouraged to believe that the mind of the poet at the moment of change is the only poem, and that the dark waters of the poet's dreams may impel us to shared discoveries. (pp. 160-61)

"The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One" (1971) belongs beside "Snapshots," "Readings of History," "Orion" and "Planetarium" as another in the long line of poems in which the poet tests her protean powers. The poem is also quite clearly about acknowledging and acting upon the discovery of love for other women, and in its three parts moves from a painful isolated sense of failure toward the promise of an incredibly difficult but shared labor of rebirth. Rich addresses throughout the poem a person called "you." This seems for the most part a version of self-address, a means for the speaker to describe her habitual actions, or to set apart from the immediate "I" some aspect of the self for more objective consideration. Rich uses this second-person form of self-reference elsewhere … but nowhere with such ambiguous, intriguing results. (p. 161)

The multi-referential "you" of "Mirror" and the ambiguous interchangeableness and inclusiveness in this and other poems in Diving into the Wreck of "you" and "I" "we" and "she" are fundamental strategies in her attempt to repair divisions between private and public experience Rich believes have been falsely maintained through linguistic habit. In place of these, she would substitute a more fluid form of reference which actually functions, as if by sympathetic magic, to create those conditions it pretends to describe. (p. 166)

If the themes and issues of this volume and the later poems frequently derive from what the poet labels her "radical feminism,"… the complexity of the poet's self-awareness and of the images through which she approaches the sources of her wounds as well as the springs of her power prevents the poems, for the most part, from being mere vehicles for feminist propaganda. (pp. 167-68)

We should trust this impressive body of significant poetry … to tell us who [Rich] is. If we do, we understand why W. H. Auden is introducing her first book and Robert Boyers in reviewing her sixth could agree in substance that "Rich is neither a radical innovator nor the voice of an age [see CLC, Vol. 7]. Neither title fits because her best poetry proves her more precise, more subtle, more intricately personal than either of these roles would admit. (p. 170)

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Rich's current political commitment as an energizing force for her poetry, but it is hardly the goal toward which all of her earlier poetry aimed. It is merely the latest means, and one which is not inconsistent with others in her career, which serves in the essential and seemingly irresistible process of shape-shifting by which this poet seeks to know herself. (p. 171)