The Poétiques of Recovery in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry: "When We Dead Awaken," "On Edges," and Other Texts Anonymous 12th Grade

In her poetry, Adrienne Rich employs a rather sophisticated approach and continually redefines the representation and depiction of loss. Rich, rather than upholding the traditional elegy, she unswervingly intrudes upon its traditional definition through rejecting its transformative energy and metaphorically transforms its materiality into something symbolic. In this paper, an in-depth and explicit analysis of the poetry in which Rich presents loss as an unescapable and evasive idea and one that she revisits redefines, and reconfigures. From her best works, including “Diving into the Wreck” and “Midnight Salvage,” Adrienne Rich employs metonyms that redefine the materiality of loss and abandons the traditional use of metaphors.

In her work “When We Dead Awaken,” Adrienne Rich presents a different way of reading her poetry—one that exemplifies the process of excavation. In this aspect, she revisits her works and offers a new, diverse, and solid lenses for their re-interpretation. In “When We Dead Awaken,” Rich highlights the aspect of her melancholic poetry as excavations of overlooked lives of deceased women regardless of their status, whether renowned or familiar, mainly when the persona says, “words / get thick with unmeaning....