The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich.

Toward the end of “Diving into the Wreck,” one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey:

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into “the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality—“the thing itself and not the myth”—was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn’t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar. 

As an undergraduate at Radcliffe, Rich was enthralled by the poems of W. B. Yeats, from whose lucid cadences she took what she needed to enhance her aesthetic craft. As she confides in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” the “dialogue between art and politics … excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language.” To be sure, there are countless differences between these two writers, in particular large gaps between the Irish artist’s problematic sexual politics and Rich’s radical reimaginings of gender, as well as between Yeats’s eccentric (and aristocratic) mysticism and Rich’s social realism. (She was never, she notes, interested in “his elaborate mythological systems.”) Yet what links the speaks to you”—Rich spoke just as passionately for women, and more specifically for lesbians, for black women, for working-class women, for Jews, and, in a larger sense, for the dispossessed, for those whom the poet Anne Winters has called “the displaced of capital.”