A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Rich wrote both poetry and feminist critiques. Often, as with her “Valediction,” she blended these categories. This connection between feminist theory and poetry is one of the defining aspects of the Women’s Liberation Movement that began in the 1960s. The intersectional movement fought for gender equality in part through foregrounding women’s voices and experiences. For many women, publishing in either newspapers or academic journals was inaccessible. Poetry and the literary arts, however, had a longer tradition of publishing female voices. Poetry, therefore, was an accessible platform for many women to share their experiences and perspective during this period. The proliferation of the female written voice in the 1960s helped gain momentum for the Equal Pay and Civil Rights acts.

Rich’s “Valediction” emphasizes the importance of female poetic voices by engaging with the history of female erasure. The speaker of Donne’s “Valediction” explicitly restricts the kind of female freedom and expression that members of the Women’s Liberation Movement fought for. By reimagining the poem from the historically silent female perspective, Rich highlights the absence of female voices. The suggestion that Rich’s speaker achieves their freedom of movement through “bus[es]” (Line 9) modernizes Donne’s poem by showing how social infrastructure can aid female independence. Though the medical advertisements on the bus complicates this attention to social infrastructure, the speaker’s reliance on public transportation reinforces the intersectional nature of the Women’s Liberation Movement.