In addition, stress that the political background of the poems by Adrienne Rich connects the personal and the political. Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions Rich employs free verse, dialogue, and the interweaving of several voices. She evolves from a more tightly constructed traditional rhymed poetry to a more open, loose, and flexible poetic line. The instructor must stress again that poetic subjects are chosen often for their political value and importance. It is important once again to stress that politics and art are intertwined, that they cannot be separated.
Aesthetic matters affect the conditions of everyday life.
Original Audience Adrienne Rich has written her poetry for all time. While it grows out of the political conflicts and tensions of the feminist movement and the antiwar protests of the sixties and seventies, it speaks of universal issues of relationships between men and women and between women and women that will endure for generations to come. Also, it might be useful to teach poets like Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder , who were, after all, poets of the beat movement of the late '50s and early '60s. They were poets with a vision, as is Rich. It might be useful to discuss the evolution of the more free and more flexible line that begins with Walt Whitman and the greater flexibility of subject matter that also begins with Whitman and Emily Dickinson and to carry this discussion on through William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg to discuss the evolution of the free verse that Rich uses.