A look at Adrienne Rich …

… Ange Mlinko — Waiting for the Poetry: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?  LRB 15 July 2021. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

After Conrad’s death, Rich – whose syllabus at Columbia contained no female writers, who corresponded with Hughes but not Plath, who slept with Lowell under Elizabeth Hardwick’s nose, who ‘didn’t particularly like women’ – made herself over entirely as a radical feminist and lesbian, structuring her work and friendships, with Robin Morgan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Mary Daly, among other luminaries of the Second Wave, around the precepts of women’s liberation. Her style was now one of ‘unapologetic, even flagrant, raggedness – a move towards fulfilling her long-ago desire to write poems that were “messily passionate and grand”’. She had found an audience beyond the Ivy League.