Adrienne Rich began her seventh volume of poems, Diving Into the Wreck (1973), with a quote from George Eliot: "There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life." This idea goes a long way toward understanding the direction and impact of Rich's poetry: toward total awareness of self as product of history. And Adrienne Rich has come a long way from her first published book in 1951. Her earliest poems were decorous exercises; formal, conventional, written for approval by the male poets who were her models. Elegant but preoccupied with craft, her work gradually became more vital, her forms more fluid. In Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), disturbing elements in the psyche rose to the surface; she chose open forms, conversational tones, and revealed herself in assertive language instead of distant moralizing. But where the books that followed became increasingly tense and radical and tended to oversimplify political issues, her most recent collection is calmer, more expansive, though it aims at the same revolution.