Adrienne Rich's Deciphering Flame

This article considers Adrienne Rich's layered use of metaphor and enthymeme in an effort to unfold the rhetorical turns Rich employed in her post-1980s poetry. Through her later poems and essays, Rich revealed the inequities marking her contemporary times, while providing a map for understandi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Arizona quarterly 2022-09, Vol.78 (2), p.99-120
Main Author: Riley, Jeannette E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accountability
Alliances
American literature
Emotions
Essays
Language
Metaphor
Poetry
Poets
Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012)
Social change
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Summary:This article considers Adrienne Rich's layered use of metaphor and enthymeme in an effort to unfold the rhetorical turns Rich employed in her post-1980s poetry. Through her later poems and essays, Rich revealed the inequities marking her contemporary times, while providing a map for understanding one's own location in history—physical, emotional, political, geographical—as well as the need to build solidarity with others and to envision new structures and ways of being. Significantly, Rich didn't dictate to readers; rather, through increasingly frequent enthymemes, she invited them to (re)see and (re)consider the world around them, to become part of the meaning making process itself. This turn in Rich's later poetry ultimately marks her legacy as a citizen poet, one bent on providing the "deciphering flame" that illuminates the change that might emerge through collective effort.
ISSN:0004-1610
1558-9595
1558-9595
DOI:10.1353/arq.2022.0007