"A Way of Knowing:" Adrienne Rich's Marxism & the Poetics of Revolution

Abstract:Adrienne Rich writes in "Dreamwood" "poetry/isn't revolution but a way of knowing/why it must come" (Fact of a Doorframe 225). Here, and throughout her work, Rich argues for an understanding of poetry that is inextricably intertwined with a political analysis of the world and an urgent belief in the necessity of social change. While Rich is renowned as a poet of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), far less attention has been paid to her later political writing and the development of her political thought from radical feminism to Marxism. Drawing on published writing and archival research, this article traces the trajectory of Adrienne Rich's political thought after the WLM's decline, focusing on her articulation of a "politics of location" and her contributions to Marxism, which I argue are vastly underappreciated and essential to Rich's intellectual history and her political and poetic legacy in the twenty-first century.