The Dream of a Common Language was published by W.W. Norton in 1978. It represents Rich’s full maturity as a lesbian feminist poet: having come out publicly in the mid-1970s, she writes here with a freedom and joy absent from the anguished transitional work of the previous decade. The “common language” of the title is the language women might create if freed from the distortions of patriarchal discourse — a language adequate to women’s experience, women’s bodies, women’s love.
The collection’s centerpiece is “Twenty-One Love Poems” — the first major lesbian love sequence in American poetry, written for Rich’s partner, the novelist Michelle Cliff. The poems chart a love affair with the same formal rigor that male poets have brought to heterosexual love for centuries, but with crucial differences: the lovers are equals, the power dynamics are examined rather than naturalized, and the urban landscape (the poems are set in New York) is neither backdrop nor symbol but a social reality that shapes the love.
Other major poems include “Power” (on Marie Curie, whose scientific genius destroyed her body), “Origins and History of Consciousness” (on the emergence of women’s self-knowledge), and “Transcendental Etude” (the collection’s closing meditation on the possibility of women creating a new culture from “the wreck of the old”).
Collecting The Dream of a Common Language
First edition (W.W. Norton, New York, 1978): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed copies: $150–$400