The dream and the dialogue

Adrienne Rich's poetry has long engaged critics in questions about the nature of poetic art, the character of poetic tradition, and the value of poetry as a political and cultural activity. At the same time, it has attracted many general readers, largely because it expresses the personal, social, and intellectual crises faced by feminists during the last thirty years. In this study, Alice Templeton looks at the ways in which feminist thinking has influenced Rich's poetics while, simultaneously, her poetic practice has shaped her feminist conceptions. Templeton begins by exploring the tensions between epic, eulogistic, and lyric claims made in the poems collected in Diving into the Wreck (1973). She then examines the strategies Rich uses in subsequent collections to test and refine her feminist thinking. Templeton focuses, in particular, on the "dialogic moments" of cultural participation that Rich's poetry provides for the poet and the reader. These "moments," Templeton argues, can dispel myths of social determinism even as they implicate readers in an ethically charged communal bond. . By demonstrating the contributions that Rich has made both to feminist thinking and to our ways of reading poetic tradition, The Dream and the Dialogue treats Rich as a poet of ideas and places her work solidly in the context of contemporary literary theory.