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    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance"
    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance"
    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance"
    Ebook41 pages29 minutes

    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535823883
    A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Adrienne Rich's "Ghost of a Chance" - Gale

      11

      Ghost of a Chance

      Adrienne Rich

      1962

      Introduction

      Ghost of a Chance was first published by Adrienne Rich in her 1963 collection Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and can also be found in the Norton Critical Edition Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose (1993). Like the collection in which it appears, Ghost of a Chance represents that moment when Rich's poetic subject turned from the masculine universal that she had been taught was the ideal subject to the specific experiences of living as an intelligent, artistic, politically engaged woman. It is one of her last poems to feature a male persona, and the imagery of the poem in which a person striving for intellectual life is dragged back into the undertow of expectation mirrors the subjects Rich was wrestling with during that time. Having won major awards for her first two books of poetry, Rich described the shock with which she realized that after her marriage she was expected to abandon her career and to devote herself to her children and to her husband's career. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and Ghost of a Chance represent the moment when she began to interrogate the definitions of masculine and feminine and how those archetypes functioned in society.

      This is the central question of all of her subsequent work, and this poem and indeed much of the collection demonstrate the work of a poet at the cusp of discovering the true subject of her life's work. Adrienne Rich has had one of the longest careers in American literary history. She published her first book in 1951 and continues to publish into her eighties. She is equally as well known for her political activism in the cause of peace and social justice as she is for her pioneering writings, in both poetry and prose, in modern feminism.

      Author Biography

      Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, to Helen and Arnold Rice Rich. Her mother had been a concert pianist, and her father was a doctor and pathologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Her parents were ambitious about Rich's future, and she excelled at school, eventually enrolling at Radcliffe College in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe, W. H. Auden awarded Rich the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, A Change of World. His citation that the poems were neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them has

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