‘Insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea’: Women Representing Men

Abstract

Adrienne Rich has been the most important political poet writing in English in the past 30 years. By ‘political poet’ I mean one who expresses a committed position and who deploys poetic strategies to reveal how structures of power impose themselves on the emotional lives of individuals. To understand the extent of her achievement it is necessary to read her essays alongside her poems — even aside from her stature as a poet she is an important feminist theorist. Moreover, because in each genre she largely tackles a similar range of issues, reading her as both an essayist and a poet reveals how much she has struggled with the generic boundaries of poetry in order to make it say what she wants it to say. This has made her an experimental poet, unusually, because she is a political poet: because, that is, she has pushed and pulled at the edges of the poetic in order to charge it with political meaning, and to surprise political meaning with the vivid energy of the poetic. So at one extreme, as in ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law’,¹ she has bombarded the poem with all the resources available to her — imagery, allusion, irony, parody — while at the other she has chosen a minimalism in which the boundary between poetry and discursive prose is perilously in question, as, for example, in ‘Heroines’ (292–5), which discusses with deliberately prosaic starkness the social and economic position of nineteenth-century women.