Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand Summary

Richard Howard worked as a lexicographer and later as a translator. His fascination with words is also seen in his poetry. In 1970, he began a series of dramatic monologues, closet dramas, and apostrophes that center on the decadent figures of the nineteenth-century high society. His morality and human temperament can still be seen in these poems of extravagance. His poems in this section include "Venetian Interior, 1889" and "At the Monument to Pierre Louys."

Adrienne Rich was an ambitious woman who used her poems as a way to analyze and discover. She was a powerful feminist in the 1960s who saw her radical feminism and lesbianism as a way for her to recover power lost to men. Recent poems focus on her Jewish heritage...