A Change of World was published by Yale University Press in 1951 as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, selected and introduced by W.H. Auden. Rich was twenty-one, recently graduated from Radcliffe, and the poems display the qualities Auden praised in his foreword: formal craft, intellectual precision, emotional restraint — “neatly and modestly dressed.”
The poems are accomplished in a way that now reads as symptomatic: a young woman writing perfectly within the conventions of male-dominated academic poetry, producing work that earns male approval precisely because it does not challenge the assumptions of its tradition. Rich herself would later describe these early poems as “asbestos gloves” — protective devices that allowed her to handle dangerous material without being burned.
The collection’s significance is retrospective: knowing what Rich would become (the preeminent American feminist poet, a radical lesbian thinker, a voice of uncompromising political engagement), the decorum of these early poems reveals the cost of conformity. The “change of world” the title promises is both the aspiration of the young poet and — unknowingly — a prophecy of Rich’s own transformation over the next two decades.
Collecting A Change of World
First edition (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1951): Cloth with dust jacket. Yale Younger Poets.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$600
- Very good: $75–$200
- Rich’s first book — increasingly valuable as her reputation stabilizes