SOURCE: "Philoctetes Radicalized: 'Twenty-one love Poems and the Lyric Career of Adrienne Rich," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 1, Spring, 1993, pp. 61-87.

In the following essay, McGuirk situates Twenty-one Love Poems in "a context of poetics as ideology," exposing "the ideological limitations of a poetic mode" and theorizing a method of "reading lyric in general and Rich's lyric in particular."

As Willard Spiegelman points out, among the major poets of the English language in this half century, Adrienne Rich is alone in making of lyric a medium adequate to the task of propounding a politics. The Dream of a Common Language (1978), a watershed volume in this development, achieves moments of high lyrical poetry—centered in subjective experience, yet confident in the transcendent presence of otherness to the self—but a poetry that also insists on a relational, not unitary, subjectivity—social, gendered, historical: a politicized lyric self.

Given the...