Re-Forming the Cradle: Adrienne Rich's 'Transcendental Etude'
Author: Jane Hedley
Source: Norton Critical Edition of Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, with selected Reviews and Criticism (2nd edition)
Re-Forming the Cradle: Adrienne Rich's 'Transcendental Etude' was selected for re-publication in the Norton Critical Edition of as one of a handful of pieces of exemplary commentary the editors have chosen to "span many decades and [critical] methodologies."
Description: In the very fabric of its diction as well as in its handling of the conventions of the Romantic crisis-lyric, 'Transcendental Etude,' the closing poem in Rich's pathbreaking 1978 volume The Dream of a Common Language, established for her feminist poetics of language a distinctively American lineage. As much as Walt Whitman's and Noah Webster's, Rich's dream of a common language was an American dream.