SOURCE: "Wrestling with the Mother and Father: 'His' and 'Her' in Adrienne Rich," in Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life, edited by Nancy Owen Nelson, University of North Texas Press, 1995, pp. 54-63.

Below, Flowers ponders the significance of Rich's substitution of the "experiential, subjective, personal" feminine pronoun she for the "analytical, objective, universal" masculine pronoun he in her poem "Afterward," elucidating the consequence in relation to both feminist criticism specifically and literary criticism in general.

On a summer Texas day twenty years ago, a footnote to a poem shifted the geography of my mind. I have been wrestling with the issues this footnote raised ever since. The poem was Adrienne Rich's lyric "Afterward":

    Now that your hopes are shamed, you stand
    At last believing and resigned,
    And none of us who touch your hand
    Know how to give you back in kind
    The words...