[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":3,"doc-seo-532642-105":59,"doc-detail-532642-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",[7,13,18,23,28,33,38,43,48,51,55],{"id":8,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":10,"show_sort_weight":11,"slug":12},1,"Document","Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":14,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":15,"show_sort_weight":16,"slug":17},2,"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":19,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":20,"show_sort_weight":21,"slug":22},4,"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":24,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":25,"show_sort_weight":26,"slug":27},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":29,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":30,"show_sort_weight":31,"slug":32},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":34,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":35,"show_sort_weight":36,"slug":37},7,"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":39,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":40,"show_sort_weight":41,"slug":42},8,"Research & Report",30,"research-report",{"id":44,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":45,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":47},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":46,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":49,"show_sort_weight":46,"slug":50},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":52,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":53,"show_sort_weight":52,"slug":54},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":56,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":9,"category_name":57,"show_sort_weight":24,"slug":58},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":60,"data":61},"ok",{"site_id":62,"language":63,"slug":64,"title":65,"keywords":66,"description":67,"schema_data":68,"social_meta":123,"head_meta":125,"extra_data":127,"updated_unix":129},105,"en","poetry-commitment-an-essay-adrienne-rich","POETRY & COMMITMENT - An Essay - Adrienne Rich","","A scholarly essay by Adrienne Rich exploring how poetry functions as committed speech within politically divided societies. The text invokes Hugh MacDiarmid’s manifesto to argue for poetry grounded in difficult knowledge, concentrated human experience, and alert organization. Rich then traces Shelley’s claim that poets and philosophers act as unacknowledged legislators by confronting illegitimate authority. Through historical and interview-based examples, including Yannis Ritsos, the essay links poetic creation to civic responsibility and institutional struggle, emphasizing poetry’s active relation to revolution and oppression.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":15,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/literature/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/poetry-commitment-an-essay-adrienne-rich/532642/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/poetry-commitment-an-essay-adrienne-rich/532642.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"Rhys","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-21","2026-10-09",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":81},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"How does MacDiarmid’s manifesto define the role of poetry?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"Rich highlights MacDiarmid’s view of poetry as a stand against intellectual apathy, founded on difficult knowledge and words shaped by layered human experience. The poem also presents poetry as highly organized and intensely alert, with the poet working like a nurse during an operation.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What does Shelley’s idea about poets and philosophers imply in this essay?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Rich contrasts the commonly quoted line about poets as unacknowledged legislators with Shelley’s broader political essay, where he explicitly links poets and philosophers to reform. For Shelley, poetry and political philosophy align with active confrontation of illegitimate authority.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How is commitment shown through examples like Yannis Ritsos?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"Rich uses Ritsos’s response to a military junta official to argue that being a poet entails civic duty and political concern. The essay reinforces this with Ritsos’s experiences of imprisonment and censorship, treating his poetry as a voice for a nation shaped by invasion, occupation, and civil war.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},532642,1792184965,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":14,"category_name":15,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":81,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},687207024643,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_3d24733baf745e90a7e4bdd5f77d97b2","POETRY & COMMITMENT  \nAN ESSAY  \nADRIENNE RICH  \nwith an Afterword by Mark Doty  \nW • W • Norton & Company • New York • London  \nAdjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to  \npreserve line breaks.  \nPOETRY & COMMITMENT  \n1  \nPoets, readers of poetry, strangers and friends, I’m honored and glad to be here among you.  \nThere’s an invisible presence in this room, whom I want to invoke: the great Scottish Marxist bard Hugh MacDiarmid. I’ll begin by reading from his exuberant, discursive manifesto called, bluntly, “The Kind of Poetry IWant.” I’ll offer a few extracts and hope you’ll read the whole poem for yourselves:  \nA poetry the quality of which  \nIs a stand made against intellectual apathy, Its material founded, like Gray’s, on difficult knowledge And its metres those of a poet  \nWho has studied Pindar and Welsh poetry,  \nBut, more than that, its words coming from a mind Which has experienced the sifted layers on layers Of human lives—aware ofthe innumerable dead And the innumerable to-be-born …  \nA speech, a poetry, to bring to bear upon life The concentrated strength of all our being …  \nIs not this what we require?— … A fineness and profundity of organization Which is the condition of a variety enough To express all the world’s …  \nIn photographic language,“wide-angle”poems … A poetry like an operating theatre  \nSparkling with a swift, deft energy,  \nEnergy quiet and contained and fearfully alert,  \nIn which the poet exists only as a nurse during an operation …  \nA poetry in which the images  \nWork up on each other ’s shoulders like Zouave acrobats, Or strange and fascinating as the Javanese dancer, Retna Mohini, or profound and complicated  \nLike all the work of Ram Gopal and his company …  \nPoetry of such an integration as cannot be effected Until a new and conscious organization of society  \nGenerates a new view Of the world as a whole …  \n—A learned poetry wholly free of the brutal love of ignorance; And the poetry of a poet with no use  \nFor any of the simpler forms ofpersonal success.  \nA manifesto of desire for “a new and conscious organization of society” anda poetic view to match it. A manifesto that acknowledges the scope, tensions, and contradictions of the poet’s undertaking. Let’s bear in mind the phrases “difficult knowledge,” “the concentrated strength of all our being” the poem as “wide-angled,” but also the image of the poet as nurse in the operating theater: “fearfully alert.”  \n2  \nWhat I’d like to do here is touch on some aspects of poetry as it’s created and received in an even more violently politicized and brutally divided world than the one MacDiarmid knew. This won’t be a shapely lecture; rather, I’ll be scanning the terrain of poetry and commitment with many jump cuts, hoping some of this may rub off in other sessions and conversations.  \nTo begin: what do I mean by commitment?  \nI’ll flash back to 1821: Shelley ’s claim, in “The Defence of Poetry,” that“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Piously overquoted, mostly out of context, it’s taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power—in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay “A Philosophic View of Reform,” Shelley had written that “Poets and philosophers [italics mine] are the unacknowledged” etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft.  \nAnd Shelley was, no mistake, out to change the legislation of his time. For him there was no contradiction among poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. This was perfectly apparent to the reviewer in the High Tory Quarterly who mocked him as follows:  \nMr. Shelley would abrogate our laws…. He would abolish the rights ofproperty…. He would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles    \nHis poem “Queen Mab,” denounced and suppressed when fi","cbCaigzwPwALNYgN","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaigzwPwALNYgN","pdf",482111,35,"English","# Poetry & Commitment\n## Hugh MacDiarmid’s manifesto and the idea of committed poetry\n## Defining commitment through Shelley and political confrontation\n## The committed poet in the world: Ritsos and civic duty","[{\"question\":\"How does MacDiarmid’s manifesto define the role of poetry?\",\"answer\":\"Rich highlights MacDiarmid’s view of poetry as a stand against intellectual apathy, founded on difficult knowledge and words shaped by layered human experience. The poem also presents poetry as highly organized and intensely alert, with the poet working like a nurse during an operation.\"},{\"question\":\"What does Shelley’s idea about poets and philosophers imply in this essay?\",\"answer\":\"Rich contrasts the commonly quoted line about poets as unacknowledged legislators with Shelley’s broader political essay, where he explicitly links poets and philosophers to reform. For Shelley, poetry and political philosophy align with active confrontation of illegitimate authority.\"},{\"question\":\"How is commitment shown through examples like Yannis Ritsos?\",\"answer\":\"Rich uses Ritsos’s response to a military junta official to argue that being a poet entails civic duty and political concern. The essay reinforces this with Ritsos’s experiences of imprisonment and censorship, treating his poetry as a voice for a nation shaped by invasion, occupation, and civil war.\"}]","POETRY & COMMITMENT - An Essay - Adrienne Rich | PDF",1791583393,54]