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Adrienne Rich Twenty One Love Poem

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Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American Poet and feminist born May 16, 1929 died March 27th 2012, was born in Baltimore, Maryland and the oldest of two sisters from a middle class family, Rich was educated by her parents until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951, the same year her first book of poems, A Change of World, appeared. 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. Adrienne was known to be one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",and was credited with bringing "the …show more content…

Looking at the section beginning “No one has imagined us,” I didn’t identify the “us” necessarily as female but more generally just as humanity struggling and that their the only one who notice how rough things are, which, incidentally, I think is more powerful left unnamed because it allows the reader to take on the poem for him or herself. Then I read “live like trees,” which i get the sense it means they want to live naturally, free from the patriarchal oppression, and be able to branch out, take up space in this city. The poet makes reference to the opera Tristand und Isolde (a story about lovers that do confuse death and love, due to a love potion) and makes a point to say that the opera is NOT the story -- that fate, magic, love potions, etc., have nothing to do with it. The existential theme is continued when the poet mentions a tape recorder -- a device that can only record sound, what is actually said and done. In a sense, she is saying that actions are what are important -- thoughts and intentions are meaningless in death, what remains after we are gone is how we were are seen by others. If our actions define who we are or how we tried to love, the recorded may "have caught some ghost of us" -- that recordable actions are what will be remembered after death. She is saying that love is what we say and do, what we choose to act upon by ourselves despite the "forces that rage within us and against." I think it 's also

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