Rich’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” reimagines and responds to John Donne’s 1633 poem of the same name. Donne is one of the most significant English poets of the early modern period and, in Rich’s poem, comes to symbolize the English literary canon. Ideas of a Western literary canon—or a collected body of texts essential to Western culture—gained prominence among literary critics in the 1950s and remain part of the critical debate. The goal of establishing a literary canon was to unify university curricula and to preserve Western culture through its most important works. Establishing a literary canon had the side-effect of excluding marginal voices. Works by women or people of color were rarely included in lists of canonical literature. Instead, the lists were peopled by writers like Donne: white males who had been dead for centuries.

Rich’s “Valediction” uses one of Donne’s most famous poems as a launching point for her own poetic voice. The male speaker of Donne’s “Valediction” addresses his wife and delivers a defense of his freedom of travel while simultaneously insisting that she must stay home. This gendered double standard reflects the gender divide in the Western literary canon, and Rich uses this tension to generate her own feminist critique of a male-dominated canon.