Great Regulars: But generally, [Adrienne] Rich is far

from simplistic, for she knows and reminds us of how poetry itself is born of war, that her poetry and ours has roots in the blood and gore of Homer's "Iliad," with its "ugly glory" where "open-eyed wounds/feed enormous flies/Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze." In "Reading the 'Iliad' (as if) for the First Time," she recognizes that even Keats's "Grecian Urn," with its beauty as truth, has as its background a sea "stricken" with ominous "black long-oared ships" of war, and a shore of "chariots shields greaved muscled legs/horses rearing Beauty! flesh before gangrene." Here, Rich deftly evokes the confusion of battle by piling her words into a collision of broken syntax.

from Rodger Kamenetz: The Jewish Daily Forward: The Rich and the Bloody

~~~~~~~~~~~