This review is taken from PN Review 285, Volume 52 Number 1, September - October 2025.
on Hilary Holladay
Hillary Hollady, The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography (Princeton University Press) £20
Scissoring Men out of the Picture
Adrienne Rich’s career began with patriarchal endorsement. While she was still a student, W.H. Auden picked her first collection, A Change of World, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Yet his introduction to it did not mention Rich until the seventh of ten paragraphs, and when it did he called her poems ‘neatly and modestly dressed’. At Harvard she studied under F.O. Matthiessen, he of American Renaissance, who would later add her to The Oxford Book of American Verse. Since then, she has had a secure place in anthologies both canonical and anti-canonical. Collections of US lesbian verse have relied on her tutelary presence.
A poetry syllabus Rich herself taught at Columbia in 1967 included no women. In retrospect, as Hilary Holladay notes, this ‘shows how far and fast she would have to travel in the next several years to become one of the nation’s premiere feminists’. Purely in terms of gender and sexuality, the distance she travelled was enormous – and she didn’t take the pretty route.
Rich later conceded that, in her first two collections, she had been blocking ‘with assimilation and technique’ the development of her own poetic voice: she had, in effect, been trying to write as a man, or at least to a male standard; and that is before we even begin to consider her growth as a woman who was lesbian. Early on, it was routine, if painful, to re-gender pronouns for universalising effect. Even so, Holladay rightly calls the circumspect early ...
Adrienne Rich’s career began with patriarchal endorsement. While she was still a student, W.H. Auden picked her first collection, A Change of World, for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Yet his introduction to it did not mention Rich until the seventh of ten paragraphs, and when it did he called her poems ‘neatly and modestly dressed’. At Harvard she studied under F.O. Matthiessen, he of American Renaissance, who would later add her to The Oxford Book of American Verse. Since then, she has had a secure place in anthologies both canonical and anti-canonical. Collections of US lesbian verse have relied on her tutelary presence.
A poetry syllabus Rich herself taught at Columbia in 1967 included no women. In retrospect, as Hilary Holladay notes, this ‘shows how far and fast she would have to travel in the next several years to become one of the nation’s premiere feminists’. Purely in terms of gender and sexuality, the distance she travelled was enormous – and she didn’t take the pretty route.
Rich later conceded that, in her first two collections, she had been blocking ‘with assimilation and technique’ the development of her own poetic voice: she had, in effect, been trying to write as a man, or at least to a male standard; and that is before we even begin to consider her growth as a woman who was lesbian. Early on, it was routine, if painful, to re-gender pronouns for universalising effect. Even so, Holladay rightly calls the circumspect early ...
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