Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970

by Adrienne Rich

More than 200 poems collected from Adrienne Rich's first six books, plus a dozen others of those decades. From their first publication, when Rich was twenty-one, in the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series, the successive volumes of her poetry have both charted the growth of her own mind and vision and mirrored our tempestuous, unsettled age. Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory.

In Collected Early Poems , readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

Genres: Poetry

435 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.

A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.

In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.

In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).

Reviews

[Professor Typewriter · Rating 4 out of 5]

With this collection, readers will read through six of Adrienne Rich’s books. This is the volume to buy and own. My appreciation of Rich as a poet and a scholar grew with this book.
Anyone coming to Rich with this book will experience a Rich that is beyond the anthologies. This is such a good book. Along with the first six books of her career, there are also other stellar Rich poems.
What a book, what a voice.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich is probably the poet who has spoken most deeply to me since I “discovered” her in the early ‘90s. Her language, her topics feel so much like home to me. I also have many of her later books, but not the early books that comprise this collection, and it was wonderful to see her growth as a poet in these early works. My favorite poem in this collection is "I Dream of the Death of Orpheus." Favorite lines from it:
"I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers are severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns."

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

my hero

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading "early" collections of poems allows you to see the development of the young poet towards the more mature (sometimes). This collection of Adrienne Rich's does that in a compelling fashion--good, solid, academic-based poems turning toward the freer, more uniquely voiced. From 1969 ("Night in the Kitchen"): "You will become a black lace cliff fronting a deadpan sea;/ nerves, friable as lightning/ ending in burnt pine forests".

[Kate Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A life I didn’t choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do."

Reading this book is a great journey into Rich's voice. Watching as she moves from the poetry she was taught that she ought to write into the poetry that she had to write.

[rinabeana · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some amazing poems in this collection. I like that she writes about a variety of subjects and is capable of expressing herself in very short verses or longer poems.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes a little self-impressed, but structurally magnificent poems. Rich earned her stripes, no question. "I will see you new again, entire/ the way we look upon the things we lose."

[Catherine]

poetry

[Moira]

I am gonna hug this and kiss it and squeeze it and call it George. And possibly sleep with it under my pillow. I think I will shelve it right next to First Cities.

[Jeannie-marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

She's one of my favorite poets.

[Kevin Albrecht]

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