The Rhetoric of Self in Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich

The Author: Paul Wadden is the author of numerous articles on literature and literary studies appearing in College Literature, Mediations, and The Hemingway Review, among other journals. His essays on politics and culture have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many other newspapers and magazines. He received his Ph.D. in English from Illinois State University and currently teaches English at International Christian University, Tokyo.

"Paul Wadden reinstates the value of poetry at a moment when our best critical consciences have rejected notions of private subjectivity and social agency. Amid an increasingly aggressive language of imperialism and moral certitude, the poetry of Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich becomes instrumental in negotiating the interplay between the emancipation of Romantic subjectivity and the resistance to received systems of meaning. Wadden's dialogical approach in 'The Rhetoric of Self' unsettles received ontologies in order to discover catalysts for action in a lyric journey in which both poet and reader resist the imposition of discursive order and instead engage in a purposive interrogation and negotiated shaping of the 'real'.
Through thematically contoured close readings of the notion of doubling in the poetry of Bly and Rich, Wadden skillfully reveals the necessity for perpetual questioning and vigorous unrest that both these poets put to work in their social interventions and (re)constructions. Their poetry facilitates recognition of the dissonance and resistance inherent in social prescriptions of politics, sexuality, and hegemony.
Wadden's lucid readings present opportunities for approaching poetry by reinvigorating, and at times refusing, traditional notions about poets and poetry, agency and culture. And his pedagogical application of poetry to composition in the final chapter provides writing students with insightful strategies for vitalizing linguistic responsibility in the scrupulous investigation of what Wadden calls 'the tension between inheritance and initiative'." (Victoria Frenkel Harris, author of 'The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly')