The Depiction of Human Misery in Sharon Olds' 'The Food-Thief' and Adrienne Rich's 'Shattered Head'

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Department of English and Linguistics), language: English, abstract: When it comes to women's poetry in the 20th and 21st centuries, Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich are two of the most accomplished poets of our time. Rich became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for her engagement in (feminist) politics, as an activist, strongly committed to the use of poetry as an instrument of social change. Olds, who was born thirteen years after Rich, is not so much known for her political engagement but rather her obsession with 'the foodlike and procreative possibilities of human bodies,' and her love for 'images of animals, soil, blood and eggs' (Ostriker 242). The sometimes physical aggressiveness of her style and provocative poems like 'The Pope's Penis' have even earned her a reputation for being pornographic. Human misery as a topic in poetry is probably as old as the genre of poetry itself, but what can be of particular interest is how such a seemingly basic human condition can be used poetically to bring across different messages. In the following analysis of Rich's poem 'Shattered Head' and Olds's 'The Food-Thief', I will exemplify how the contrasting depictions of human misery were used by the poets to convey their very different political attitudes.