Endpapers: Adrienne Rich’s Signature to Her Life

In the final poems she wrote, the American poet Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) self-consciously reflects on her impending death while also revisiting her past life. By doing so, she follows the example of many other twentieth-century American poets, including James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and Wallace Stevens, who also did that in their final volumes of poetry. This chapter, “Endpapers: Adrienne Rich’s Signature to Her Life,” analyzes how Rich’s last poems compare to the last poems of her peers, and whether they constitute a different style from her earlier poems. Rich’s last poems owe most to Merrill who similarly showed how an agile mind experiences being confronted by a sick and decaying body. Yet Rich revisits earlier themes and topics more assiduously than her contemporaries in her last poems, and she also refers more frequently to the act of writing and reading, and to the materiality of books. What is most striking about Rich’s final poems is that she often refers to sounds that cannot be fully heard or understood by listeners. It suggests that Rich might have been afraid that the message of her lifetime of writing was not coming through loudly and clearly enough.