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)
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