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 the voice of the demagogue in her recent poems) I suggest that this altered sense of time is her most radical statement. She moves compass-like through other people's "hours and weeks" to the inevitable north of her future, her point of view. More than assaulting the prevailing esthetic, she assaults the temporality of that esthetic, our chronological sense of ourselves—and it is in this deliberately woven time warp that The...