Feminism
Beginning in the 1970s, Rich began to focus more heavily on social issues of gender and sexuality in her poetry and prose. Her more strongly political works like Diving into the Wreck are the ones she is best-known for now. The theme of feminism was evident in most of her works, both poetry and prose; a self-proclaimed radical feminist, Rich used her literary prowess to make statements of activism. The poems in Diving into the Wreck and Dream of A Common Language reflect on a modern society that is, in some sense, “wrecked”: inequality persists at all levels of society, especially gender equality. Rich’s poems call for an interrogation of the history of women’s oppression, as well as poetry that actively centers and promotes women’s stories and experiences as it fights for their equality. She refused to accept the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck by herself, insisting that it be shared between three female entrants (herself, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde).
LGBTQ Advocacy
In the late 1960s, Rich separated from her husband (who later shot himself) and declared her embrace of lesbianism, which she claimed had been latent in her since adolescence. Her poetry and prose shifted to advocating for rights for the LGBTQ community as well. Most famously, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian existence” argues that, for too long, society has assumed heterosexuality is most women’s preference. What if heterosexuality is another function of patriarchal control, Rich asks? What if the search for love and tenderness in both sexes "originally lead[s] toward women?" Perhaps, Rich suggests, lesbian experience is so often erased or ignored because it deeply threatens the patriarchal structures that oppress women. These themes are consistent in her later poems and nonfiction prose, and she remained a steadfast supporter of social justice until her death in 2012.
Collective Action
Many of Rich’s poems suggest that political change is brought about not through individual will alone, but rather through collective action. This theme is evident in the title of Rich’s collection A Dream of a Common Language, which suggests that poetry can be a way for all of mankind to understand one truth. Poetry, Rich suggests, is something that can make one more aware and sensitive to other people’s existence and truth. It can relate personal experience yet still herald a “we” in which the reader feels included. Poems like “Diving into the Wreck” in fact shift from first-person to third-person perspective, a rhetorical tactic that includes the reader in the poet’s process of transformation and self-understanding, often calling them to political action.
The Role of Poetry/Art in Society
Rich’s poetry often suggests that art and poetry are a potent vehicle for social change. In “Someone is Writing a Poem,” she writes that reading a poem is not passive, nor is it the same as observing a spectacle: A poem is not “controlled and designed to manipulate mass opinion,” but something finer and more delicate. A poem creates a space in which the reader can actively engage, figuring out what speaks to them. They thus become active participants in the poem, and with poems like Rich’s that are meant to inspire political praxis, reading a poem may be the first step towards activism.
Received History and Erasure
Essays like “Compulsory Heterosexuality” are not only about LGBTQ rights; more broadly, they ask which kinds of stories are written in history, and which are not. In “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich calls on readers like herself who carry around books “in which our names to not appear.” History, Rich argues, has always been political: it tells the stories of those who are in power, erasing those who they seek to marginalize and oppress. This includes the erased lesbian history referred to in “compulsory heterosexuality,” and the erased women’s history she talks about in “Diving into the Wreck” and other poems. Through her work, Rich’s argues that only by questioning the wisdom of received history and bringing untold histories to light can we fully understand the present.
Power
Rich’s work interrogates the shape of power: the way it has shaped society in the past, and how women and queer people might wield it in the future. In the poem “In Those Years,” Rich describes “the dark birds of history” gathering to do damage while individuals avert their eyes. Based on the other themes of her work, we can view these “dark birds” to be not cabals of evil men, but societal forces like patriarchal ideals and capitalist decision-making that forgoes things like human rights and basic decency and instead foregrounds the pursuit of profit and power. Rich seeks to provide ways for those who have historically been victims of power to first recognize how they have been abused, and second to begin to see the sources of their own potential power—in communities and as individuals.
Love
Rich’s work is known for its fierce feminism and interrogation of society. However, Rich is also a love poet, and in her work, love and desire are an important antidote to despair. Her book The Dream of a Common Language features a section entitled “21 Love Poems.” In one of them, the speaker tells her lover, “I dreamed you were a poem,/ I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .” In a world characterized by the misuse of power and the rise of inequality, poems allow intimacy between reader and writer. In doing so, they are thus comparable to a flirtation or love affair—or, rather, a love affair can be viewed as a poem, as a connective experience.
