An Atlas of the Difficult World

“An Atlas of the Difficult World” taps into a rich tradition in American literature of poets who use their individual voices to speak on behalf of the citizenry as a whole. The resulting poems, situated in a historical context, address moments of perceived moral crisis whose outcomes will determine nothing less than national identity. 

Famous examples include Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps, a cycle of poems about his horrific experiences as a field medic during the Civil War; the poems produced during the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s that look hard at American racism and bigotry; and the harsh sociocultural critiques offered to a complacent and hypocritical America in the 1950s by the Beat poets, most notably Allen Ginsburg. Twenty-first-century poems in this tradition express outrage over the environmental crisis, immigration, the rise of AI, racism, economic inequities, and sexism. The common feature of these disparate pieces of literature is poets speaking not as individuals but as self-appointed guardians of the ideals and values of the American experiment—ideals and values they see negated by these crises. 

In “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” Rich sets aside her identities; although she composed poems about being a Jewish person, a woman, and a lesbian, she here jettisons these aspects of herself to become a Citizen Poet alarmed by the US turning away from its own cherished ideals. As Citizen Poet, Rich attempts to achieve two related goals: to raise awareness of America’s precarious status and to challenge readers to rise above despair or cynicism to embrace the power of activism—to do something about the perilous state of the union. American Citizen Poets position poetry as an act of profound optimism, a public act designed to engage and rouse readers to affect significant change.