Adrienne Rich once said of her college days in the late 1940s,
“I had no political ideas of my own, only the era’s vague and hallucinatory anti-Communism and the
encroaching privatism of the 1950s. Drenched in invisible assumptions of my class and race, unable to fathom
the pervasive ideology of gender, I felt “politics” as distant, vaguely sinister, the province of powerful older men
or of people I saw as fanatics. It was in poetry that I sought a grasp on the world and interior events, “ideas of
order,” even power.”
Using the poems by Adrienne Rich included in this anthology pgs. 958-968 (From The book The Northern
Introduction to Literature Shorter 12th edition By Kelly J. Mays), write an essay that charts the development of
the poet’s political consciousness.