“One rainy day in the spring of 1960, the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan arrived at my door,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her essay “A Communal Poetry.” Duncan was a daemonic bard with a Homeric attitude, who often wore a black cape and a broad-brimmed hat. Rich made him tea while trying to comfort her sick son, who moved between the high chair and her lap; Duncan, whom Rich cautiously admired, “began speaking almost as soon as he entered the house” and “never ceased.” Later, driving him to Boston in the rain, Rich realized that her car was on empty and pulled into a gas station. Throughout it all, Duncan, the oracle, was still talking about “poetry, the role of the poet, myth.” Apparently, Rich’s “role” was to make tea for him, and to keep things like sick children and empty gas tanks from interrupting the great man’s groove. Rich concluded, generously, that Duncan’s “deep attachment to a mythological Feminine” made it hard for him to manage “so unarchetypal a person as an actual struggling woman caring for a sick child.”

Rich, who died in 2012, had these kinds of run-ins with literary men throughout her life. Her father was an eminent doctor and a professor at the Johns Hopkins medical school, who made her copy out verses from Blake and Keats from an early age, and graded the results; her mother, who had studied in Vienna to be a concert pianist and a composer, put aside her art to raise the family. Rich’s sense that she was the benefactor of her mother’s sacrifice and the object of her father’s fixations never left her. (Her mother died in 2000, at the age of a hundred and three.) Rich’s first book—“A Change of Life” (1951)—was published when she was just out of Radcliffe. It was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets prize by W. H. Auden, who contributed a slightly creepy foreword: the poems are, he said, “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.” Rich’s three children were born within a four-year span in the late fifties; in those days, she wrote, “women and poetry were being redomesticated.” Even Randall Jarrell, the best poetry critic of the era, proclaimed her work to be “sweet,” and wrote that Rich seemed “to us” to resemble “a princess in a fairy tale.” An unidentified poet friend, visiting her in the nineteen-eighties for the first time in years, expressed the abandonment felt by many male poets and critics, first-string bonhommes who had admired her early work and had counted on her to add some depth to the literary bench. “You disappeared!” her friend said. “You simply disappeared.” Women could also be unkind. Elizabeth Hardwick, a formidable feminist in a different key, declared, “I don’t know what happened. She got swept too far. She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.”

Rich’s refusal to be an archetype of femininity made her an archetype of feminism, a courageous trade but one that confronted her with aesthetic challenges virtually unprecedented in American poetry. Perhaps no American poet who started in the mode of accommodation so abruptly broke ranks, inventing for herself a new kind of discipline whose ethical rigors demanded fresh forms. The challenge was to make poems that crystallized her political commitments—especially to women’s consciousness and power—but did not blunt their own artistic force. Many poets of the time, influenced by Rich, decided that the idea of art was a mere bourgeois confection. Rich never did. It was too late; she had learned its uses. There was always, inside her, the fifties formalist, brought up, as she put it, “within the circumference of white language and metaphor.” Her models were Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson, brilliant women with domineering fathers, who wrote poems that acted necessarily as both expression and concealment, and whose achievement was timed to detonate in the future, when the world had prepared for them a fit audience.

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Rich’s “Collected Poems: 1950-2012” (Norton) confronts us everywhere with what she called “the war / poetry wages against itself.” She grew as a poet by self-repudiation, redefining motherhood and disowning, with real pain, her delegated roles as wife, mother, straight woman, and privileged white American. Her stands against various forms of oppression were also stands against roles so deeply ingrained as to seem, to her, essential. She never affirmed anything without first condemning its opposite, and although she saw life in these polar terms, she located the antipodes within herself. “Between extremities / Man runs his course,” wrote Yeats, whose politically inclined lyricism substantially influenced Rich’s work. The key to Rich’s genius, in fact, is Yeats’s famous aphorism, maybe the best thing anybody ever said about the art: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

It has been argued that, beginning in the sixties, Rich’s conscience turned her poems into a form of evangelism, an adjunct to her politics, which branched out from women’s rights to black power, indigenous rights, and environmentalism. This book ought to put that notion to rest. Her early formalism is sometimes channelled cunningly, as in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” the best-known poem from her first book. Aunt Jennifer is embroidering a needlepoint panel, where “Bright topaz” tigers “do not fear the men beneath the tree.” Her fingers are “fluttering through her wool,” and the “massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand”:

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

The terms here are clear enough: an oppressive uncle, a sainted aunt, the awkward shunting of Aunt Jennifer’s genius and anger into forms that are wordless, restrictive, and domestic. The needlepoint erases its maker; the poem about the needlepoint, though borrowing its formal idioms, restores Aunt Jennifer and her pain. Poetry can express both the maker and the artifact, and measure the ratios of irony between the one and the other. And yet the poem comes a little too close to embodying the idea it seems to be dismissing: that poems should coolly express the costs of women’s depredations but maintain their own “prancing,” elegant distance from violence and terror.

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” suggests the habit of metaphor in Rich’s early work, where aunts and tigers equally are planed flush into symbols. Rich soon turned against this kind of facile literary transformation, which seemed to exempt her from the violent subordination she expressed. When, in 1993, her second volume, “The Diamond Cutters,” was reissued in “Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970,” she altered some of the pronouns, which had made men seem “universal” and women merely “personal,” and appended this extraordinary note to the title poem: