Poety Analysis: Adrienne Rich Poetry

Much of Adrienne Rich’s poetry is applauded for its rhythm and form, which helps emphasize the meaning of each poem. The freely placed lines and unique structure do not break up the poem, instead they bring power and significance to the unique features of her individual poems, stressing the meaning of the poem to the reader. Concretely, her poems have much imagery, and, also, most of the time, lack comment or conclusion to the emotions and purpose of her work. The structure, form, and rhythm of Rich’s poetry work together flawlessly to help portray the meaning of the poem, separate from just the images themselves. We can see Rich’s conscious effort to use form to portray meaning in many of her poems, but more specifically in Planetarium, Power, and For an Occupant.

As flawless and dynamic as Rich’s poetry seems to be on paper, the struggle of finding a balance between what is chemically formulated and what is actually linear freedom is constantly the focus in her work. In other works, specifically in her 1993 published book What Is Found There, Rich describes this “poetic power” and how she uses power to allow freeness in her lines. “Poetic forms – meters, rhyming patterns, the shaping of poems into symmetrical blocks of lines called couplets or stanzas – have existed since poetry was an oral activity. Such forms can easily become format, of course, where the dynamics of experience and power are forced into a fit pattern to which they have no organic relationship… But a closed form like the sestina, the sonnet, the villanelle remains inert formula or format unless the “triggering subject”… acts on imagination to make the form evolve, become responsive, or works almost in resistance to its form. It’s a struggle not to let the for...

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...otions, important themes, and the soft-spoken, but evident meanings of each poem. Rich was ‘trying to drive a tradition up against the wall’, ‘looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations’, gritting her teeth and asking where she should go.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Late Style in Beethoven. Essays on Music. Berkley: University of

California Press, 2002, p. 564-568.

Cooper, Jane R. Reading Adrienne Rich. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1984. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. That Is Found There. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2003, 1993.

Print.

Rich, Adrienne. Arts of the Possible. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984. New

York: W.W. Norton, 1984. Print.

Stephen, Burt. No Scene Could Be Worse. 3rd ed. Vol. 24. London: London Review of,

2012. Print.