“Writing as Re/vision”: Imagery in Adrienne Rich’s Later Poetry as Modeled in The School Among the Ruins

Adrienne Rich (b.1929-) is an American poet, prose writer, and a socio-political activist. Equally important, she usually identifies herself as  a white American lesbian feminist as well as a non-Zionist Jewish with Marxist sympathies. All these affiliations motivated her life-orientations and art tremendously. No wonder then that her socio-political sympathies informed the themes and imagery of her poetry in degrees throughout the different stages of its development. The trajectory of Rich spans, in effect, two social movements whose far-reaching influences should not be overlooked: "Feminism" in its 1960s and 1970s high tide as well as its running into a post structural Feminism, and "The Men's Movement" of the 1990s. The feminist wave that dominated the 60s and the 70s inspired the major part of her poetry prior to An Atlas of the Difficult World 1988-1991. The masculinity that emerged in the 1990s as a reaction to the feminist excesses aimed at achieving a sort of balance. It is assumed that the poetry of The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 is a clear manifestation of the will to change following the various socio-political transformations of the 1990s. The objective of this study is to show how poetry, in Rich's case, functions as a communicative utterance rather than merely a self-expression. It aims, also, at pinpointing the technical changes undergoing Rich's imagery in this volume. The network of images employed by Rich in the volume is, hypothetically, revealing of a down-toning of feminism as a movement, a calming down of the ideological zeal of Rich herself as an advocate of that movement in addition to the marks of exhaustion characterizing an poet. However, the poet's feminism never dies out, but it is rather balanced by  more universal  concerns.