A change of world. [Poems] With a foreword by W. H. Auden.

by Adrienne Rich

This reissue of Adrienne Rich’s first poetry collection reaffirms the author’s place as one of our most important American poets.A Change of World was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Out of print for decades, this initial collection launched the career of a poet whose work has been crucial to discussions of gender, race, and class, pushing formal boundaries and consistently examining both self and society.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Womens, Ebooks, American

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1951

About the author

Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.

A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.

In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.

In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in the poetry section of the bookstore, looking for my latest fix, when I noticed A Change of World on the shelf. An Adrienne Rich collection I hadn’t read yet? I picked it up and made my way to the checkout. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized this was Rich’s very first collection, published in 1951 when she was around 21 (!) years old. Reading this made me feel like a time traveler of sorts; I kept thinking, “Girl, wait until you see what you’re going to write 25 years from now, because it is going to BLOW your MIND.” But that’s not entirely fair to this book, which is a truly fine collection of poems, more formal in style and sweeping in theme than her later works (influenced, no doubt, by poets like Auden and Lowell, both of whom praised this collection), and mind-bogglingly precocious. Of course, you can see inklings of the poet and essayist she would become, perhaps most obviously in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” (pretty bold for its time) and in the opening lines of “Vertigo” (“As for me, I distrust the commonplace”) and “Air Without Incense” (“We eat this body and remain ourselves”). As she matured, Rich retained very little of the style on display here, but this collection was obviously a necessary step in finding her voice, valuable not only for what it is but also for what it foreshadows.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a forthcoming Norton reissue of Rich’s first collection from 1951. I’d always thought of her as a later, feminist poet, so it was jolting to see an introduction from W.H. Auden – that made it feel like a real generational crossover. It’s a very impressive debut, full of mannered, rhyme-rich verse. Two favorites were “Walden 1950” (“Thoreau, lank ghost, comes back to visit Concord, / Finds the town like all towns, much the same— / A little less remote, less independent”) and “The Innocents.” I’ll be interested to read some of her later work and see if she loosened up with form.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a lot to like in Adrienne Rich's first poetry collection, originally published in 1951 when she was merely 21 years old. I came to her late in her life, mourned her recent passing in 2012, but regardless what stage of life her poems come from, I have always found resonance in the pages. I'm happy to see the republication of this original volume!

Many of her more recent poems do not rhyme, but many of the poems in this volume do, but often in ways you don't notice until they are read aloud. Some of it reminded me a bit of Sara Teasdale, who I only ever knew about after reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, about a man creating an anthology of rhyming poetry.

My favorites from A Change of World:

Storm Warnings (read online)
"...Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction...
The wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters."

Air Without Incense - (this one made me wonder about her religious background!)
"We eat this body and remain ourselves...."

An Unsaid Word
"She who has power to call her man...."

Stepping Backward (read online)
"...We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire....
Let us return to imperfection's school...."

Itinerary (this is a different title than the Rich poem I find in the Paris Review with the same name)
"...Oceans are
A property of mind. All maps are fiction,
All travelers come to separate frontiers."

The Springboard - a foreshadowing of "Diving Into the Wreck" perhaps?

Life and Letters
"An old man's wasting brain; a ruined city...."

I received a copy of this from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Whereas most review copies are not final copy and can't be quoted, I felt that since this was a reprint, it was probably okay.

[Allie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've only read a smattering of Adrienne Rich's poetry before, but what I read I like. This was a pretty exceptional first poetry collection. You can tell Rich was talented from the get-go.

[Kailin Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't mean to grab Rich's very first volume of poetry to start with, and I'm grateful we don't stay 21 for long. Auden's forward somehow read as gently scathing and self-absorbed, while also being accurate — these are careful, modest poems.

I went back to the bookstore and grabbed A Dream of Common Language, and it feels meaningful to me to have two collections of her poetry from what seems like disparate identities on my nightstand these days. I'm looking forward to the rest of her work.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm embarking on a reading of Adrienne Rich's massive and indispensable Collected Poems: 1950-2012, and I'll be reflecting on each of the original published volumes.

Chosen by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series--the event that launched Rich's career--A Change of World is a carefully crafted set of late high modernist reflections on the world as, to use Robert Frost's phrase, "a diminished thing." It's striking, and a bit frightening, that the first poem, "Storm Warnings" reads with nearly the same immediacy in 2016 as it did when it was published in 1951. "Between foreseeing and averting change/ lies all the mastery of elements/Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter." Drawing the curtains against a darkening sky, Rich concludes "These are the things that we have learned to do/Who live in troubled regions."

Throughout, Rich contemplates the modernist idea of art as a source of control, or maybe just the feeling--possibly the illusion?--of control. Her crystalline metrics and attention to the sound of every vowel and consonant reenforces the sense that the besieged world requires the closest attention. She writes from a distance, no doubt reflecting her life as a young faculty wife at Harvard. It would be decades before she'd identify and name the deepest sources, but her voice sounds notes of exile, of being a stranger in a strange land.

With each volume, I'll flag the poems that speak to me most powerfully almost thirty years after I published my book, Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics. In A Change of World those include the immoral "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," "Storm Warnings," "Vertigo," "By No Means Native," "Air without Incense," "An Unsaid Word," and "The Rain of Blood."

[Waqas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. I should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique;
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth."

Pleasantly surprised by Adrienne Rich's first collection. (Didn't know Aunt Jennifer's Tigers was one of the early poems.) Much different from her later work -- She was 21! -- but exciting and diverse poems nevertheless with great form and a bold humility.

[lezhypatia · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the foreword, W.H. Auden describes these poems in a revoltingly paternalistic manner— “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.”
Unfortunately, he’s not quite wrong.
Definitely Rich’s weakest body of work.

[Uther Pendragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richly musical and beautifully ornate, these poems are intelligent yet accessible, profound and stirring all the way down to the syllable.

There are a ton of skills on display, and she had a lot to say in this one. It's a superb first collection.

Here's the second stanza of Five O'Clock, Beacon Hill

Curtis, in sand-grey coat and tie of madder,
Meets elder values with polite negation.
I, between yew and lily, in resignation
Watch lime-green shade across his left cheek spatter.



Her later works have rhyme, but as far as I can remember none of them use rhyme as heavily as the poems in A Change of World.

In the following poem, in my opinion, if you pronounce penates as puhNAHdeez (pəˈnädēz) rather than puhNAYdeez (pəˈnādēz), and pronounce every syllable of every other word, there's a tremendous accumulation of rhyme and near rhyme. The same effect occurs in several other poems throughout the collection.


The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

The birds about the house pretend to be
Penates of our domesticity.
And when the cardinal wants to play at prophet
We never tell his eminence to come off it.

The crows, too, in the dawn prognosticate
Like ministers at a funeral of state
The pigeons in their surplices of white
Assemble for some careful Anglican rite.

Only these guests who rarely come our way
Dictate no oracles for us while they stay.
No matter what we try to make them mean
Their coming lends no answer to our scene.

We scatter scatter seed and call them by their name,
Remembering what has changed since last they came.



Here's another poem I like

The Ultimate Act

What if the world's corruption nears,
The consequence they dare not name?
We shall but realize our fears
And having tasted them go on,
Neither from hope of grace nor fame,
Delivered from remorse and shame,
And do the things left to be done
For no sake other than their own.
The quarry shall be stalked and won,
The bed invaded, and the game
Played till the roof comes tumbling down
And win or lose are all the same.
Action at such a pitch shall flame
Only beneath a final sun.

[Leah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been plodding through this since last April - not because it's not good (it's great), but because I'm not always in the mood for poetry or in the headspace to properly absorb it. I've read some of Adrienne Rich's later works (never in a contained collection, always à la carte, if you will) and loved them, so it was interesting to read this - her debut collection - and see how it all began. Many of these poems have a grand, epic quality that presage her later otherworldly work. My favorites were the ones steeped in religion and ritual, and the penultimate poem about the slow, tragically beautiful disassembling of an aging, brilliant thinker's mind.

[Katie]

I enjoyed this one more than I thought I would. I had never really read any of Adrienne Rich's poetry before, and I expected the themes to be similar to the ones she addresses in her essays. In this collection at least, they aren't. I can't even really characterise the overarching theme, except that there is a great deal of melancholy and discourse about change. Either way, I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to reading more of Rich's poetry soon.

[andré crombie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,
Refusing to acknowledge any hour,
But what can one clock do to stop the game
When others go on striking just the same?
Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,
Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,
Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing
From all the restless ways we must be going
And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,
Whether around a clockface or a world.

[Gemma Laurence · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore Adrienne Rich and I’d actually never heard of this collection! What a treat to stumble into her first ever collection of poems, with a forward by my other favorite poet, W.H. Auden. His forward was truly like “She wrote this at 21? Damn.” In this collection you can see her developing her voice and finding themes that return in her later works. Very interesting stuff!

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really impossible to rate. Rich's first book, published when she was a senior in college, is full of end rhymes, regular meters, and neat stanzas, but the poet she is in the process of becoming peeks through just often enough to make this an engaging read.

[Aya · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are good but definitely you see the formal influence

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poems are clear, and powerful. Each one delivers a message that will have you vowing to change yourself and to change the world.

[Kayla Randolph · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems get better each time you read them. As you grow, the meanings multiply to fit where you are in life. Two favorites are "A View of the Terrace" and "Walden 1950."

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

As for me, I distrust the commonplace.

[Yumeko (blushes) · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's not bad, it's simply not my thing.

[angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

as a lover of astrology, it ends with the best diss to astrologers and astrology i’ve ever seen.

[Lisa M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the first day of the New Year, I set out into the world to find a collection of poetry to read - I had already read everything I owned. The library was closed, and so was my favorite bookstore. Thankfully, Barnes and Noble was open!

As I looked at the shelves for something that stood out to me, I found this Rich collection I have not read before. When I realized it was her first collection, I felt apprehensive. I read another early collection, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," a few years ago and I was not impressed. I felt that she was beginning to experiment with bringing the political into her poems - or perhaps she was beginning to experiment with being political in life - and that came off as too abstract and too pedagogical.

It was interesting to read "A Change of World," because this collection shows us a Rich before she outwardly identified as a lesbian (even before her marriage) and before she outwardly expressed radical political leanings. After I read "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," I wondered if this collection could hold up. It did!

These poems are certainly more traditional in nature than Rich's later work; she relies on form and rhyme more than she does in later years. At 21 Rich shows a talented mastery of form and word choice that many older writers never do. It was amazing to read this poetry, which was very good in it's own right, and to see it overshadowed by what would come in the future. Rich was extremely talented.

Themes of this poetry included hope and what happens when we lose ambition. Again, these poems aren't as involved with identity politics as her later work ("Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," is a feminist exception,) but there are a few radical selections ("Air Without Incense," a poem questioning Christianity in the 1950s.)

If anyone else wrote this, it would receive raving reviews. But, as I read it, I found myself smiling and telling the 21-year-old Rich that she just hasn't reached her full potential yet.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Change of World is Rich's first collection. She has said she was tempted to revise or remove some pieces from the volume, before its re-release in the 90s, but decided against it. I agree with her and am glad she elected not to change anything. Most of the poems in this collection are brilliant work but there are a few weaker ones, attributable to her limits in experience at the time she wrote them. It is comforting to see that luminaries struggle as much as lesser lights. It gives us a genuine portrait of her growth as a writer. I have found the same is true for Plath, Frost, Eliot, and even Auden. The poems also provide a glimpse of the 50s' ruling class - the teas, the sprees, the consciousness of conduct and place in the social strata, and the urge to rebel.

Rich makes use of rhyme, syllable counting, and formulae, iambics, sonnets, and so forth, which surprised me, at first, even though I had read some of them before in anthologies. For the most part, she is successful and the better pieces sparkle with insight, sensitivity, and intelligence. there are a couple of places where she stretches to make a rhyme and as always with this category of gaff, these stretches are too pat. They damage the work, draining it of meaning.

It is a collection that can be studied and taught. I recommend this book to poets and students of poetry, without reservation.

[Magali · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems that spoke to me.

[Isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

clearly a first volume, and not as well-done as rich's other poetry; here she doesn't seem to have found her voice yet. "itinerary" and "the return of the evening grosbeaks" are still lovely.