Yes, but . . .
It seems to me that AR became worse as a poet as she became fiercer as a polemicist. Nothing in the later poems – sometimes hardly more than arhythmical chopped prose – compares to, say, 'Mourning Picture'. The following, from Quincy's link, is magnificent rhetoric:
“But I do know that art – in my own case the art of poetry – means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
But, on second thoughts, “holds it hostage”? How so? Too much of her later polemic – in poetry and prose – could fog into this sort of sonorous, questionable grandiloquence.
But then immediately follows:
“The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate”
That was fifteen years ago: she saw clear enough.
But, to my ear at least, she failed to bring this sort of challenge into her poetry while hanging on to the poetry.
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