Romanticization became a theme with Rich in this period. In the middle of 1970, Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for another woman. Almost as soon as she heard, Rich fired off a letter. “I feel we are losing touch with each other, which I don’t want,” she wrote him. “Perhaps part of the trouble is that the events of my own life in the past four or five years have made me very anti-romantic, and I feel a kind of romanticism in your recent decisions, a kind of sexual romanticism with which it is very hard for me to feel sympathy.”

It seems that in the aftermath of Conrad’s suicide, this is what happened: Rich began to lose faith in most forms of love. Occasionally she’d openly say so to Carruth. She was clearly unwilling to use a new romance to patch over the wound, too. This led to a lot more psychoanalysis. And a lot more time spent with women.

In a long letter to Carruth dated August 1971 that presaged many of the arguments she’d later make in Of Woman Born, Rich gave a very simple account of the source of her ideas about gender:

And above all, talking—with my women friends, not one of whom, whatever her situation, does not feel relief and hope and new courage in the crystallizations and confirmations that are taking place. And with men, including my therapist, with whom I have had extremely moving and amazing talks.

Her letters become almost wholly preoccupied with gender politics. Where formerly any discussion of sexual life has been, at best, oblique, Rich becomes suddenly frank:

For me, there has sometimes been that element, but more often a strange joyful sense of power—of taking some kind of mana into me with the sperm of a man, but also (and this I hope I’ve ceased to need or want) simple power over the man in terms of my body being absolutely necessary to him at the moment of intercourse.

Perhaps an initial period of concern was warranted, on Carruth’s part. After a few of these letters, most of which simply asked him to consider the possibility that women’s liberation really had something to say for itself, Carruth became angry with Rich. He began to become suspicious that she was moving away not just from him, but from all men. Her tone in the letters became increasingly defensive. She wrote him a letter about a long car trip she’d taken with Elizabeth Bishop—in which Bishop told her she had secretly sympathized with the women’s liberation movement—but such was the breakdown of the relationship that she felt compelled to add, “No, I haven’t been into a lesbian experience.”

When finally she told him, in 1974, that she had begun seeing a woman, he accused her of a “sexual switch.” “Too shallow, and rather cruel,” she replied, angrily, to the accusation. They stopped writing to each other for a while, and though the friendship resumed, it was rockier. The few post-1974 letters in these files are more careful, and the correspondence stopped entirely in 1977.

Another of Diving Into the Wreck’s poems, “Song,” could be read as a report of recovery from the events of 1970:

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely

Rich deflected the success of Diving Into the Wreck when she accepted its National Book Award. All those years of moving with her students had left her convinced that the project of language was not something any one person ought to be able to claim. “We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture,” she said in her speech.

That was it, the moment she smashed the mold entirely. Things like this did not happen in America, particularly in literary and intellectual America, in the 1970s. They are starting to happen more now, of course. It is no longer such a strange, unusual thing to point out that there are more voices to be heard. Maybe our perceptions have sharpened. Maybe she sharpened them.