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1 7 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W W I L L A R D S P I E G E L M A N The Collected Poems of Adrienne Rich is a heavy book, in several senses. With more than twelve hundred pages, including annotations and a solid, sympathetic introduction by Claudia Rankine, it tips the scales at four pounds, more than most new personal computers . It is not suitable for airplane travel. It would be di≈cult to prop up on your chest in bed at night. Most of all, it bears the considerable weight of its author’s concerns, passions, furies, obsessions, and artistic experiments throughout the sixty-two years of her fecund literary career. Rich died in 2012 and never got to see what Wallace Stevens called a ‘‘planet on the table’’ (his term for his Collected Poems), or to express her valedictory gratitude as clearly and happily as Stevens did: ‘‘Ariel was glad he had written his poems.’’ This is too bad. I hope she realized that her work had enriched the lives of many individual readers as well as the state of American letters during the tumultuous second half of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Rich’s formidable presence on our national C o l l e c t e d P o e m s , 1 9 5 0 – 2 0 1 2 , by Adrienne Rich (Norton, 1,216 pp., $50) 1 7 2 S P I E G E L M A N Y literary and larger cultural/public scene reflected and, in turn, produced changes in the zeitgeist. She not only was a√ected by every major political crusade of the past half century – the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s movement , gay liberation – but she also became, as few poets ever do, the living embodiment of the causes she fiercely fought for. Her poetry, like her prose, is the living testimony to her life. Most people who attended her public readings of her work came away, as I did, with feelings of considerable appreciation. For a writer who said she loathed mere theatricality, she gave memorable, numinous performances. Rich’s unwavering political commitment and her refusal to separate life and work came at a cost, at least with regard to her poetry: It’s not easy to warm up to her. She was never a lighthearted poet. Reading her can be a burden. She may be the most important poet after Wordsworth who lacks a genuine sense of humor. (Ezra Pound, before he went totally mad, was able to maintain an acid, sardonic touch in Mauberley. And even Wordsworth occasionally a√ects joviality if not wit in some of the poems in Lyrical Ballads.) Her importance as a poet is in inverse proportion to any quality of nimbleness she brought to her work. Reading through this volume, one wishes for a bit of levity. At all stages of her career, Rich serves up heaps of humane feeling, compassion, and tenderness to accompany her anger, heroism, educational zeal, and political outrage. But of wit, irony, the pleasures of ordinary, casual, easy secular life, there’s not a lot of evidence. This is not her major key. Her tones, like her concerns, are mostly serious, often somber, and occasionally grim. Mounting the barricades does not profit from, or encourage, a light touch. The primary question for a literary critic, rather than a sociologist , cultural historian or feminist theorist, is, How does this work fit into the vast panorama of American poetry in the post–World War II era? Regardless of its author’s public persona, how does it change the genus we call poetry, to which it belongs? The answer, not surprisingly, is that Rich’s oeuvre is greater than the sum of its parts. Rich started as one kind of poet and then seemed to become another kind of poet, all the while maintaining intellectual and stylistic continuities that extended through the arc of her long career. As with any person, so also with any artist: it all comes P O...

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