Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

While Adrienne Rich is best known for her poetry, she also was also a prolific essayist and literary critic. Over the course of her career, she published six collections of essays and a number of individual essays in journals. During the 1970s, Rich emerged as a prominent voice in feminist literary criticism, a literary movement that arose in the United States during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s as women’s liberation reverberated across the arts and academia. Feminist literary critics sought to understand the patriarchal roots underlying mainstream interpretations of various works of literature and examine how one’s own gender influences how one reads and interprets text. Rich advocated for lesbian and feminist readings of old texts, stating, “Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival” (Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York, W. W Norton & Company, 1979). Throughout her career, Rich wrote a number of critical essays on both male and female poets, analyzing