With Women Writers from America: Adrienne Rich

These are quick sketches — some may run long, some short — in which I present selections from certain of the women writers of this land and recount scraps of their lives and their letters. I am anxious to point out from the very start that treating America's “great” women writers, and them alone, is not the aim of this series: the purpose, rather, is to acquaint the women readers of “The Woman's Voice” with faces and pens that I hold it needful they should know (and it is a pride for me to be the boat that carries them from one language to another and from one heritage to another) — whether these faces and pens are seasoned veterans or still fresh in bloom. And if it be said: why this writer and not that, and that piece and not this, I shrug my shoulders, name no standard by which I measure literature, and break my silence with a single word: it is taste, and taste alone, Madam!

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On my first day in Cambridge I found, in Harvard's various halls, large notices announcing the opening of the current season of the poetry readings held by the Morris Gray foundation, with a program at which Adrienne Rich would read selections from her poems. The name stirred a fresh echo in my memory, for I recalled a poem of hers I had read in Beirut in the magazine “Poetry” (a magazine founded in Chicago in 1912, from whose founding the contemporary poetic renaissance is dated; often mere publication in it was a ladder by which a poet climbed to glory). She was among the first of America's writers I came to know — after the storyteller George R. Stewart, with whom I traveled for twenty days, from Greece to New York, during which he wrote a story for young people and gave me proof that modesty may be joined to talent without diminishing it!; and after the poet John Ciardi, who, while still in the middle of his third decade, has published four volumes of verse and has in press a mighty translation of Dante; and the critic Mark Schorer, to whose works there will shortly be added a study of D. H. Lawrence.

Adrienne Rich is twenty-two springs old. My use of “springs” instead of “years” is not mere affectation: for if her poems do not yet contain the experiences of summer, the wisdom of autumn, and the visions of winter, they hold the gaiety of spring, its free flight, its fragrance, and its song. And in her style is the sweetness of spring: rarely do you see in her verse the contortion that is almost one of the marks of modern poetry; rather you see her write the poem as though she were caressing a flower — with gentleness, brevity, and delight, and with something of reverence. She was born in Baltimore, in the state of Maryland, and received her university education at Radcliffe (Radcliffe being a college for girls, who live there but take their classes at Harvard, which is confined, nominally, to men!), where she took her degree “with great distinction” last summer and was awarded the Caroline I. Wilby Prize, as well as a Phi Beta Kappa key, the highest thing to which undergraduates in the United States aspire before graduation.

Her love of poetry goes back to the years of childhood: she too lisped her poems! Before she was twenty a number of pieces had gathered to her, from which she chose forty and submitted them to Yale University, which conducts an annual competition for the country's poets under forty; collections pour in upon it from every corner of the vast land, and a great poet is entrusted with the office of judge, selecting from them only one each year, to be printed and published at the university's expense. A glance at the list of the poets who have won this prize in past years, between the First War and the present time, shows us that a number of them afterward rose to prominence and took their place in the heritage. The Yale prize for 1951 fell to Adrienne Rich. Her forty poems were published in an elegant book entitled “A Change of World,” and the poet W. H. Auden (whom the critics do not dispute to be the successor of T. S. Eliot and his second in the field of contemporary English and American poetry) wrote a five-page introduction to the collection — he being the judge who chose the winning book. In this introduction Auden

praised the craftsmanship in Adrienne Rich's poetry (and craftsmanship, in Eliot's view, is the best measure of the budding poet), her strong sense of proportion in her lines, her style, her poetic breath, and the wedding of all these to the subject she treats; he praised too the modesty he found in her poems, which, as he said, is rarely to be found in the poems of her generation; and he closed his essay by saying: “Poems are like people. The poems that will cross the reader's path in this book are elegantly but simply dressed; they speak to you quietly but do not stammer; they respect their elders but are not terrified of them; and they never invent lies. And that, in a first fruit — by my truth — is a great deal.”

Since the publication of her first book a number of new pieces have gathered to her, which she intends to publish once she has done with a long narrative poem, most of whose events take place in the imaginations of the story's characters and their memories rather than in reality. I will not conceal that I feared the reins might slip from the hand of our poet, accustomed as she is to composing short pieces, when she undertook the poem of long breath; but the portions of it I was shown proved my fear out of place. She now publishes her poems from time to time in the well-known magazines such as the “Atlantic” and “Harper's,” and in the purely literary magazines called here “the little magazines,” their readers being confined to the chosen few, such as “Poetry,” “Beloit,” the “Virginia Quarterly Review,” and others.

Although Adrienne finished her studies last year, she still lives in Cambridge, which has charmed her with the beauty of its views and its matchless cultural air; she holds that the culture she now acquires outside the classroom is no less than that which is gathered within it.

Rarely will you find a poet, writer, or thinker in this city or its neighborhood whom Adrienne does not know, and I have no doubt that these contacts, which have come easily to her and come easily to few others, are of great benefit to her.

She commands French well and pronounces it perfectly (“so long as I bear a French name, I must speak like a Frenchwoman!”), and she adores Paris, which she knows and where she will before long be spending a longer while. Often she translates the contorted poems from the French, and even composes in it — not with a view to publication but “for practice,” as she says. She is one of those conscious poets who hold that poetry is discipline and sculpture; early success does not lead them astray; rather they study the history of poetry (in more than one language), its criticism, and its development, and understand that a poem is a creature which must be cared for, and on whose upbringing time and effort must be spent, before it is thrust into the struggle of life.

In the coming academic year she will go to Oxford to pursue her higher studies — not with a view to taking any academic degree, but to spend her time in reading literature and the foundations of its criticism, and in contact with the men of thought and culture at that great university. (I had written the draft of the preceding part of this article when I took up the “Harvard Crimson” and read in it that Adrienne Rich was one of the poets awarded the Guggenheim Foundation grant, to spend a year in Europe given over to creative writing. This grant carries great worth; it is an honor which all the writers of America aspire to win, and a new distinction for this young poet.) She intends, therefore, in addition to her stay in England, to spend some time in France and Italy — and she hopes that a visit to the Arab countries may one day be granted her.

This will not be her first visit to Europe: last summer she made a journey to certain countries of Europe and North Africa — in the company of her parents, who had spent their honeymoon in those parts and lately wished to renew its memories! In North Africa she saw the Arabic script for the first time, and its beauty captivated her, as did what the Arabs express in it; and it delighted her greatly to see selections of her writings not only translated into Arabic but written in that script which is itself poetry! (And if her description of the script as poetry is right, then she herself is doubly a poet! — which is what led me to suggest that she publish her poems either in the form of a manuscript or as an album of records, for her reading of her poetry lends it a great deal.) She was lately shown translations of Arabic poems and selections of contemporary Arabic poetry, and was taken with it, inquiring in detail about its elements, its constraints, and its condition. And there poured forth informed questions about the Arab countries, the literary and women's renaissance in them, their political problems and their social conditions.

It pleased me that she should be among those who hold that the modern woman, particularly in America, goes too far in demanding “her rights,” overlooking thereby her mission in life.

And if I must say something of Adrienne's personal appearance, I will content myself with saying that she possesses a great share of sweetness, grace, and gentleness, and that she is deeply modest, doing all she can to keep her own self out of the subject of conversation. So I have had to gather these scattered fragments from what fell from her talk in the course of our meetings. Often I sought to bring her to speak of herself; she would talk at length, and when I went back over what she had said I would find that we had spoken of everything except her! (Or do I mention this to excuse the scantiness of the information in my article!)

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Before the Kaaba lies a long and rugged road, but Adrienne Rich knows the landmarks of the way, and in her right hand is the pilgrim's staff; she will therefore be in the vanguard of those who kiss the Black Stone.

I am happy to introduce my readers to Adrienne Rich.

As for me, I do not trust the familiar:
I demand miracles and signs (and they are wrought for me!)
and wonders that run in the air and wheel in space
after the imagination's design.
The lion and the leopard pace toward me
whenever I call, and the beating of wings
sends astonishment through the empty air, and from the clay
his vine springs up, unwatered,
and a golden gourd goes climbing.
I have breathed in the impossible,
and it swaggered, and hung for me from the stars
its carnival chains of light.
And a train to Mars sets out from here.
There I shall meet you, my love,
or at the burning bush in Harvard Yard.

No, my love: this is not you, nor is it I.
This is a monster or an angel, a form ever turning,
this is the will, our whip and our food.
The fangs of gold are drawn from their sheath, a long
angelic sword is drawn; both await the cry at
midnight,
in answer to a word stammered out.
Under this gaze our powers meet, made one;
and the eyes meet in the curves of the nights.
Behold the transformation that comes to pass
where mortal powers slay mortality,
and to the whole of its dreadful height rises
this monster, this angel, you and I.

Adrienne Rich

Cast pity aside:
there has been enough of that. And forsake
grief and entrenched lamentation.
How is a man to loose his bonds
from this earth, this warden of death,
this world estranged from mirth?

Show me the joyous faces only.
Pride and quick wit I ask,
people who remember laughter,
clowns of some daring, fit
for an age that would gladly destroy
the last horizon of joy.

No more elegies now,
no wailing upon the tongues.
Here is an old man who bids you laugh,
and leaves to gray hairs his testament:
your frenzy and your despair, however high they mount,
only shake a stair already crumbling.
Laughter is what a man learns
at seventy or after,
the day he wearies of frowning
and the strength he was used to gives out.
Nothing is left us but laughter
to light the darkened abyss.

And since a little of time is still ours,
let us incline once more
not to “Oedipus” but to “The Clouds.”
Cheer the players and they will answer;
in the dismal land be proud,
and raise up the men of mirth.

She who has power to call her man
back from the estranged depths
where his thought grazes, alone,
yet keeps her calm, and leaves her man free,
so that if his thoughts return to her
he finds her standing where he left her, and still his own —
she knows that this is the hardest thing to be taught.

We smile at astrological hopes
And leave the sky to expert men
Who do not reckon horoscopes
But painfully extend their ken
In mathematical debate
With slide and photographic plate.

And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.

Whatever register or law
Is drawn in digits for these two,
Venus and Jupiter keep their awe,
Wardens of brilliance, as they do
Their dual circuit of the west —
The brightest planet and her guest.

Is any light so proudly thrust
From darkness on our lifted faces
A sign of something we can trust,
Or is it that in starry places
We see the things we long to see
In fiery iconography ?

ADRIENNE RICH.