In the following essay, McGuirk situates Twenty-one Love Poems in "a context of poetics as ideology," exposing "the ideological limitations of a poetic mode" and theorizing a method of "reading lyric in general and Rich's lyric in particular."

In the essay below, Hammer meditates on various aspects of the relation between "culture" and "AIDS"—between aesthetics and sexuality—by comparing Rich's "In Memoriam: D. K." and James Merrill's "Farewell Performance."

Below, Greenwald explains the effect of Rich's feminist consciousness in her poetry of the Vietnam era, highlighting her empathy with "the Enemy" and her appeal for a subjective version of the truth about war.

Below, Flowers ponders the significance of Rich's substitution of the "experiential, subjective, personal" feminine pronoun she for the "analytical, objective, universal" masculine pronoun he in her poem "Afterward," elucidating the consequence in relation to both feminist criticism specifically and literary criticism in general.

In the following essay, Templeton provides an overview of the major trends and themes of criticism in Rich's poetry.

[Rich] has for a long time been interested in American life as registered and suffered by those not in power, those not directly responsible for it, and especially women…. Rich has also written about isolated pioneer figures, whose "unarticulate" lives preserved qualities gone underground—qualities which she, in her poetry, would like to make available to the present. Increasingly in the 1970s that interest has taken on a political cast in connection with the women's movem...

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 ...

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...

In the review below, Donoghue faults the themes and tone of Dark Fields of the Republic, claiming that "each of the poems is interesting mainly because [Rich wrote it."]

A woman in a patriarchal society such as ours, Rich has said, "in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall or shall not play," is defined by powerlessness. In her poetry Rich probes the effects of such a society on women and moves toward personal and political ways of breaking out of it. An early poem, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," examines the life of a woman dominated, indeed "terrified by men." Creating in her needlepoint tigers a ...

[Mixed] motives—to enlarge "feminist theory" and to express a personal experience of a fateful kind—account for the title of Adrienne Rich's book [Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution]. Motherhood as experience appears in autobiographical episodes interspersed through much longer reflections attempting to analyze motherhood as a social institution. It is impossible to discuss either the autobiography or the analysis without raising the problem of partisa...

In the following essay, Henneberg identifies the feminine and masculine positions in the early poem "Autumn Equinox" in terms of the primary concerns of Rich's later poetry: "the dream and the limitations of a common language."

The power to choose—the exhilaration and the humiliation of self-determination—is … the subject of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language, only the politics of that book divides the world in half…. In 1964, Lowell could use the word man and include everyone; in 1978, Rich has diminished her arena of meaning to include no man…. Politically speaking, I find her arguments narrow and contradictory. At the same time that she wishes to link herself with those who,...

In the following glowing review of Dark Fields of the Republic, St. John admires Rich's poetic style for its blending of personal details with broad public concerns.

It's an unhappy fact of life and of prose that ideology tends to coarsen, and sometimes to fossilize, the moral imagination; it leaves little room for nuance or for play. In the writing of some (though by no means all) feminist theorists, insight becomes a bludgeoning rod instead of lightning flash; and the greatest danger for the ideologue who is also political activist is not that she will become corrupt, but that she will bore her readers into disaffection…. It is vexing to be told (as we a...

"Diving Into the Wreck" … was fueled by an immense pounding energy, a raw power, "raw" in the sense of "wound." It was played on a kettle drum with an ax, to a warehouse filled with riot casualties. By contrast, "The Dream of a Common Language" is played on the piano, at evening, beside a half-open window. There are one or two other people in the room, friends of the player, and perhaps some strangers listening outside. The music is subdued but ...

[Of Woman Born] is a disturbing book. In a footnote on page 76 the author, a poet and critic, writes: "I never read a child-rearing manual … that raised the question of infanticide." This strikes me as an observation so inappropriate to the subject at hand—motherhood—that it raises doubts as to whether reality and wish have not been hopelessly lost in one another, and throws a good many of Rich's insights into serious question.

Adrienne Rich's [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977] frustrates oblique approaches and defies moderate responses. Breathtakingly beautiful and moving for the most part, it is sometimes depressingly narrow and mean. Nor is there enough between to allow one to relax into qualified judgments without misrepresenting the book. Even when the good and the bad float in the same medium, they rarely dissolve into the merely interesting or the mediocre. Still, The Dream of a Common Language:...

Adrienne Rich notes dryly that "the first verbal attack slung at the woman who demonstrates a primary loyalty to herself and other women is man-hater."… [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978] continues to offer its primary loyalties to women. The author also refuses to allow her very real compassion for men (which an astute reader will not miss) to defuse her conclusions, nor does she parade evidence of her "humanism" (a word Rich has elsewhere s...

Adrienne Rich's prose moves with force, clarity, energy; and soothes with a poet's grace and elegance. The only bad prose in ["On Lies, Secrets, and Silence"] is its title, which conveys a wholly inaccurate idea of whining and whimpering within. Feminism, pedagogy and literature, not lies, secrets and silence, are the subjects covered by her essays. The literary studies are brilliant: on Anne Bradstreet, on "Jane Eyre" and on Emily Dickinson, about whom Adrienne Ric...

Poet Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, chose the topic of motherhood "because it was a crucial, still relatively unexplored, area for feminist theory."… She thoroughly documents the powerlessness of women in a patriarchal culture and vividly depicts its results. Aware that literature on pre-patriarchal cultures is scarce, Rich offers her analysis of its importance along with her vividly depicted experience of motherhood, an experience potentially desirable, but destroyed by the instituti...