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The Hermit's Scream

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Adrienne Rich
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Abstract

He said I had this that I could love,

As one loves visible and responsive peace,

As one loves one's own being,

As one loves that which is the end

And must be loved, as one loves that

Of which one is a part as in a unity,

A unity that is the life one loves,

So that one lives all the lives that comprise it

As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Wallace Stevens, “Yellow Afternoon”

I am a failure then, as the kind of revolutionary Anne-Marion and her acquaintances were. (Though in fact she had heard of nothing revolutionary this group had done, since she left them ten summers ago. Anne-Marion, she knew, had become a well-known poet whose poems were about her two children, and the quality of the light that fell across a lake she owned.)

Alice Walker, Meridian (200–01)

I've been haunted by a poem, as apparently simple as a ballad and with a ballad's appeal of timelessness. It's by Elizabeth Bishop, a white North American with middle-class roots. Orphaned and deracinated as a child, she grew up as a lesbian, a traveler-exile, living a significant part of her life in Brazil. She's not thought of as a political poet by most people who admire her; she's most often praised as a poet of minute observation and description. The poem is called “Chemin de Fer”:

Type
Cluster on the Poetic: From Euripides to Rich
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 5 , October 1993 , pp. 1157 - 1164
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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References

Works Cited

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