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- Title
"A Delicate, Vibrating Range of Difference": Adrienne Rich and the Postwar Lyric "We".
- Authors
Spaide, Christopher
- Abstract
When is a lyric speaker both one and many—an "I" who assembles a "we" from distinct subjectivities, orchestrating one unified utterance? How have postwar American poets transcribed human networks—exchanging communication and care, pledging themselves to support and activism—into literary texts, minutely woven on the levels of diction and syntax? Few postwar poets considered human pluralities as variously, as determinedly, as Adrienne Rich; none thought so much about, in her words, the "political problem" posed by "ordinary pronouns." Following Rich's plural pronouns from her first collection to her last poems, this essay corrects prevailing narratives about Rich's development, her generation, and the trajectory of the lyric from World War II to now. Through Rich's career, we can follow a shift absolutely crucial to postwar poetry: the reconceptualization of the lyric speaker from an unmarked, universalized placeholder into a particular self, embodied and minutely embedded within geography and history, who can eagerly draw others into her sometimes prudent, sometimes impudent "we." Breaching conventional lyric solitude, inviting in others, Rich and women poets ever since continue a modern tradition of the collectively-voiced lyric—the lyric as we have come to know it.
- Subjects
RICH, Adrienne, 1929-2012; NATIONAL Book Awards; POETRY awards; CONSCIOUSNESS in literature; REPRESSION (Psychology)
- Publication
College Literature, 2020, Vol 47, Issue 1, p89
- ISSN
0093-3139
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/lit.2020.0003