SOURCE: "The Dream of a Common Language: Vietnam Poetry as Reformation of Language and Feeling in the Poems of Adrienne Rich," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 97-102.

Below, Greenwald explains the effect of Rich's feminist consciousness in her poetry of the Vietnam era, highlighting her empathy with "the Enemy" and her appeal for a subjective version of the truth about war.

The presence of the Vietnam War in the poetry of Adrienne Rich must be considered in the context of her own presence at peace demonstrations and protests against the war throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and her continuing leadership in the antiwar, feminist, and civil rights movements through the present time. During the Vietnam War, Rich's poetry was her public means of political protest, at a time when poetry was less divorced from the public realm than it is now. That Rich's...