Katha Pollitt on Adrienne Rich

In 1963, the year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” Rich published her first great book, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” with its indelible title sequence:

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all:        the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

This is poetry that is literally unforgettable, that memorizes itself. It is astonishing how much of the still-to-come feminist revolution Rich foreshadowed in these still-early poems: not just the rage of a brilliant woman at being forced into a lesser, false, infantilized life, but a tough, unsparing insight into its seductions: “our blight has been our sinecure: / mere talent was enough for us— / glitter in fragments and rough drafts.” Friedan made much the same points, but, because her book was topical journalism, it feels dated today: it is hard to use Friedan to convey to students, say, why a middle-class educated suburban housewife in the nineteen-fifties might have been restless and miserable, because for most young people the specifics of that life are too old and musty and alien; you might as well try to convey the world of a Roman matron or a medieval nun. But Rich’s poetry from this era still carries the shock of recognition, because it is about the deeper truths of consciousness behind the period details and interviews and statistics...

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(Compare and contrast with Ange Mlinko, sleekly self-satisfied as Katie Roiphe, chastising Rich for being so glum and fragmentary, and not, God help us all, playful enough. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” Robert Frost warned; I thought of this maxim more than once....I thought of Wallace Stevens’s distinction between the poetry of war and....I thought of Keats writing....I thought of Sir Philip Sidney.... -- what the hell.) (Did you even notice that all the poets you chose were male? Did you even notice you are buying right into the old, old argument that women are subjective and ranting and not concerned with the Real World, unlike, well, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens and Keats and....Sir Philip Sidney? Really? What, are you trying to impress Harold Bloom for some reason?)