An Atlas of the Difficult World

“An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991), by renowned American poet Adrienne Rich, is a 13-poem cycle about the US in the early 1990s, as the country wrestled with the moral implications of the unfolding Persian Gulf War. Casting an unblinking eye at a nation in turmoil, Rich investigates what it means to be a patriot of an imperfect nation, suggesting that in those imperfections lies a sustaining promise of hope in the darkest times. 

In the poems, Rich assumes the role of Citizen Poet. The cycle moves across space and time; its poems venture from California to New York and shuttle backward from the present into America’s troubled and troubling history. For Rich, this vast canvas represented a broadening of her vision. Her poetry had long championed the rights of women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and the LGBT community. Here, she highlights the complicated dynamic between America’s shining aspirations and its often unsettling past. 

Because the poem features 13 linked sections, this guide’s citations will refer to both section and line number. Sections are labeled using Roman numerals; within each section, line numbering restarts at 1.

POET BIOGRAPHY

Adrienne Rich was born in West Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929. Although she grew up during the Depression, she enjoyed an affluent upbringing; her father was the chair of the pathology department at nearby Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and her mother was a concert pianist. Both parents encouraged Rich’s love of reading and her early aspiration to write poetry. 

By the time she finished her undergraduate studies at Radcliffe College, Rich had already completed a significant body of original poetry. In 1951, the year that she graduated, her work was selected for publication by the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets, chaired by seminal English poet W. H. Auden. The critical establishment welcomed Rich, praising her poetry for its cool, deft control of complicated rhythm and rhyme patterns. 

Over the next decade, Rich—now married to a Harvard economist and mother to three sons—continued publishing poetry that grew more public. By the 1960s, Rich tackled hot-button issues including racism, women’s rights, the environment, wealth disparity, sexual identity, and the immorality of US involvement in Vietnam. She also experimented with free verse, inspired by her study of the democratic poetry of Walt Whitman. Rich left her husband, who soon after died by suicide.

Rich came into national prominence in the 1970s, beginning with her collection Diving into the Wreck (1974), which received the National Book Award. As a lesbian Jewish woman, Rich became increasingly engaged in confronting her culture, from which she felt marginalized. Throughout her career, she published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as several collections of essays. The poetry collection An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) was shortlisted for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. In addition, Rich was awarded the 1994 Wallace Stevens Award, recognizing impactful American poets; the 1999 Lannan Achievement Prize, awarded to writers who work for social justice; and the 2003 Bollingen Prize, a lifetime achievement award for American poets. In 1997, however, Rich declined the National Medal of the Arts, awarded annually by the White House to 12 exemplary American artists, citing her reservations about the government’s interference with the creative freedom of artists.

Rich died at age 82 on March 27, 2012. She remains one of the most respected and widely taught American poets of the fin-de-millennium. 

POEM TEXT

Rich, Adrienne. “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” An Atlas of the Difficult World, Poems 1988-1991. 1992. W. W. Norton.

SUMMARY

Section I

The poem opens with a description of the rich agricultural abundance of California’s Salinas Valley, “THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD” (Line I.5). The poem depicts workers who tend the farms and pick the crops, and those who wash the fruits and vegetables for market, acknowledging the hard life of the working-class poor and the reality of domestic violence and poor educational opportunities. Rich, who was living in Santa Cruz, California, at the time of the poem’s composition, introduces herself in the section’s closing stanza: “It should not surprise you,” she tells her reader, “to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean / eluding me” (Lines I.67-68). In the poem’s closing lines she declares herself to be the same woman, restless and curious, that she has always been.

Section II

Rich lays out her vision for the cycle of poems. She will offer not so much a map of America as a “mural” (Line II.1) of it. That suggests the poems’ meticulous detailing and pictorial quality and their immersion in the physical world. She suggests the poem will have a panoramic sweep, offering a litany of places she will visit—deserts, farmlands, cities and their suburbs, cemeteries, Civil War battlefields, and even Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley (the “rockabilly boy” [Line II.7]).

Section III

Rich, now writing at a table in Vermont and cutting an apple into slivers, dives into her memories of growing up. A child of privilege, she recalls summering in New England with her family and “reading under a summer tree in the landscape / of the rural working poor” (Lines III.33-34). She remembers her father’s admonition to commit to her studies even in the summer. The poet, in the present, steps out onto the porch at night in a “warm warm pneumonia wind” (Line III.55). She watches a spider tirelessly spin its web, spinning a “house within a house, on her own terms” (Line III.68).

Section IV

The poet introduces the growing environmental problem of waste. The poet notes the abundance along the roadside and the “borderless streams” (Line IV.13) from Vermont to California of the girasol, a sunflower with striking, wide petals that suggest the sun. The poet juxtaposes the gorgeous simplicity of the wildflower with the accumulating piles of waste that mar the beautiful sweep of the American countryside.

Section V

The poet returns to California by way of historic places that suggest the darker events in American history: the courthouse at Appomattox where the Civil War ended; Wounded Knee in South Dakota, where federal troops massacred hundreds of Lakota people in 1890; Los Alamos, the New Mexico government facility where the first atom bomb was constructed in 1945; and Selma, Alabama, the site of a vicious confrontation between civil rights activists and state troopers in 1965. She demands, “Catch if you can your country’s moment” (Line V.1).

The poet drives along San Francisco Bay and notes, in the heavy fog, the outline of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary out on an island. Beyond it is the shadowy swell of Gold Mountain, a reminder of the 1849 gold rush that brought thousands of greedy settlers to the coast. “Old ghosts,” the poet notes, “crouch hoarsely whispering / under Gold Mountain” (Lines V.28-29). The poet repeats her determination to uncover her country. 

In the closing stanza, the poet refers to a 1988 attack of two lesbians who were camping and hiking along the Appalachian Trail. The attacker killed one and wounded the other. The man charged with the killing defended his actions as a response to the women mocking his crude remarks about them. This is “not a bad dream of mine” (Line V.38), Rich laments. Rather, these horrors are as important to understanding America as “the smell of wild mint and the sweet coursing of water” (Line V.45-46). 

Section VI

The poet turns to America as an immigrant nation. She recounts the Great Potato Famine that triggered a massive flight of Irish people to America in the mid-19th century. For these poor Irish immigrants, “bitter and deep, shallow and drunken” (Line VI.8), poetry became an outlet for their suffering, a way to manage their anxieties. She records the difficult life they faced in the new land, “rack-rented, harshened, numbed by labor unending” (Line VI.11). 

Section VII (“The Dream Site”)

This section depicts New York City, “the city of dreadful light” (Line VII.12), where Rich lived for a time before moving to California. For Rich, New York is a city of noise, congested streets, and residents cramming on tar roofs just to feel a breeze and see the stars. It is a city webbed by subways, “crowded with bodies young and ordinary” (Line VII.16), moving relentlessly and noisily underneath its streets. 

Section VIII

This is a brief meditation on a lone driver making his way along a highway in California. The driver moves restlessly through traffic, fearful only of the moment when the traffic might stop and he will have to stare “straight into It” (Line VIII.4)—the “it” here being the reality of the terrifying emptiness and loneliness of his fast-paced lifestyle. 

Section IX

Continuing the theme of the existential loneliness at the heart of America, this section uses two intimidating natural landscapes—California’s Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon—to suggest both the vastness and the emptiness of contemporary life. The poet imagines the original pioneers who first came upon these places and first felt the sublime expanse of nature itself. A century later, that loneliness still afflicts the reader, even during moments of intimacy and connection: “You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness” (Line IX.8). 

Section X

In this section, the poet draws on the letters of George Jackson, a Black activist who was sentenced to life in California’s notorious Soledad Prison for his part in killing a corrections officer during a prison riot. Jackson’s letters, published in 1970, addressed the Black community, encouraging resistance of the oppression and racism of white people. The letters, which Rich quotes in this section, become a testimony to the aching loneliness (soledad is Spanish for “solitude”) and the desperate emptiness she feels in both the Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon.

Section XI

Rich begins the peroration, or the concluding and often rousing part of an address. She asks what it means for a patriot to love their country, arguing that a patriot is not merely content to be an unconstructive critic of their country. Rather, the patriot “is one who wrestles with the soul of her country as she would wrestle with her own being” (Lines XI.32-33). A patriot asks difficult questions, explores a country’s darkest moments, and questions how and why it arrived there and where it is going now: “Where are we moored [...] What behooves us” (Lines XI.42-43).

Section XII

The poet drives through the sweeping beauty of New Mexico, recording it as a form of reverence: “What homage will be paid to beauty?” (Line XII.4). The exquisite landscape of New Mexico is haunted by the ghosts of Indigenous cultures long gone—“crimson, indigo, Indian distance, Indian Presence” (Line XII.10). The beauty of the landscape fuses with the poet’s recollections of driving through New Mexico with her companion—perhaps a friend, or perhaps a lover—some weeks before. Her companion’s beauty was as much physical as it was spiritual: “Your spirit’s gaze informing your body.” (Line XII.14). Her beloved and the natural landscape become a single splendid transcendent tableau.

Section XIII (“Dedication”)

The poet closes with a grand outreach to her readers: “I know you are reading this poem” (Line XIII.1). She moves through different scenarios in which readers might be absorbing her lines: at a desk, in a bookstore, in a bedroom, on a subway, in hospital waiting rooms, or warming milk for a crying baby. She reaches out to readers young and old, alone or surrounded by others. She closes by celebrating the most mysterious and wonderful union of all, the bond between a lonely poet and a lonely reader: “I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read / there where you have landed, stripped as you are” (Lines XIII.38-39).