Ideal Landscape

Adrienne Rich, or at least the version of her that people typically remember, was never resigned to the status quo. By the time of her death in 2012, she’d become a feminist leader, to not pay her taxes in protest of the Vietnam War, and she refused a National Medal of Arts, political leaders. But she wasn’t always considered radical; her early works were quieter, more careful in both . One of them, the 1953 poem “Ideal Landscape,” starts with a line that now seems uncharacteristic of Rich: “We had to take the world as it was given.”