The power to choose—the exhilaration and the humiliation of self-determination—is … the subject of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language, only the politics of that book divides the world in half…. In 1964, Lowell could use the word man and include everyone; in 1978, Rich has diminished her arena of meaning to include no man…. Politically speaking, I find her arguments narrow and contradictory. At the same time that she wishes to link herself with those who, "age after age," have fortified the world and to prepare herself as one of those who will provide for a new knowledge of reality, she ignores, in her silence about it, the central fact that is changing the body she enjoys and mutilating, with its insidious power, the generational cycle. (pp. 224-25)

But the strength of The Dream of a Common Language lies in the considerable number of poems that...