Feminism in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich: A Comparison of Her Early and Late Poems

• Thesis title in Czech: Feminismus v poezii Adrienne Rich: Srovnání její rané a pozdní tvorby
• Thesis title in English: Feminism in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich: A Comparison of Her Early and Late Poems
• Key words: Adrienne Rich; americká poezie 20. století, feminismus, ženská literatura
• English key words: Adrienne Rich; 20th-century American Poetry; Feminism; Women's Writing
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2012/2013
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. Pavla Veselá, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 29.05.2013
• Date of assignment: 29.05.2013
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 04.06.2013
• Date and time of defence: 10.02.2015 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 22.01.2015
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.02.2015
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: doc. Justin Quinn, Ph.D.

Guidelines

Adrienne Rich, one of the most widely read American poets, essayists and feminists of the second half of the twentieth century, managed to bring the oppression of women to the forefront of social discourse. Her feminism, however, took years to develop. Rich examined the marginalization of women in society already in her first collection, A Change of World (1951), through poems such as “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” or “An Unsaid Word”; or through poems “The Snow Queen” or “Living in Sin” from her second collection The Diamond Cutters (1955). Nevertheless, in “Aunt Jennifer´s Tigers,” for example, Rich only pointed to the conventions which women were forced to accept quietly. The subject of the poem, Aunt Jennifer, is controlled, and so is the form: the poem is composed of three perfect quatrains with only slight variations in iambic pentameter and a strict rhyme pattern (aabb ccdd eeff). In contrast, Rich’s later collection, Diving into the Wreck (1973), reflects her bold feminist attitudes. The speaker of poems such as “Diving into the Wreck” or “When We Dead Awaken” is freed from the conventions regarding women´s issues, which is underscored by the poet’s use of irregular free verse. In the midst of the social transformation that took place in the 1970s, Rich therefore managed to bring out the desire of a woman for freedom and strength, although her beginnings were rather diffident. Nevertheless, eventually feminism became a fundamental aspect of Rich’s poetry, which is evident from her late collections, such as An Atlas of The Difficult World (1991) or Midnight Salvage (1999).

References

Primary sources:
Rich, Adrienne. Collected Early Poems 1950 – 1970. New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.
Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973.
Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950 – 2001. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Secondary sources:
Langdell, Cheri Colby. The Moment of Change. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2004.
Strine, Mary S. 'The Politics of Asking Women´s Questions: Voice and Value in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich.' Text and Performance Quarterly, January 1989: 24 – 41.
Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics and the Body. London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1997.
Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2008.