In this thesis, I have examined the poetry of the American poet Adrienne Rich through an ecocritical perspective. Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was one of the most influential poets in American 20th-century literature. Her poetic oeuvre is inseparable from her political activism, as she is also one of the most prominent thinkers of second-wave feminism and has enabled important shifts in the understanding of motherhood, the lesbian experience, and women's writing. In this thesis, I have analyzed three poetry collections spanning between the years 1973 and 1981. In the analysis, I focused on the construction of nature, the meaning and presence of bodies of water, the presence of animals, and the significance of landscape. In Adrienne Rich's poetry, the natural world often appears as a stage for the division between nature and culture. For this reason, my theoretical foundations mainly come from contemporary material feminisms, e.g. the work of Stacy Alaimo, Donna Haraway, and Astrida Neimanis, who explore the possibilities of transcending the binary conception of the world and open up new possibilities for contemporary feminist thought.
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