Adrienne Rich’s early work used traditional poetic forms featuring meter and rhyme. In contrast, “An Atlas of the Difficult World” is part of her later-career adoption of free verse: lines of irregular length, lacking formally dictated structure. Despite its seeming looseness, however, free verse is nevertheless highly deliberate. In interviews surrounding the publication of the poem, Rich described testing words for their sound or for their syllable count in an effort to create lines of poetry that worked like music. Thus, the variations in the metrics give the poem the feeling of urgent recitation. Indeed, Rich’s collected papers, donated shortly before her death to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, reveal her process of drafting and redrafting, and her scrupulous attention to finding the perfect word. The poem’s idiosyncratic punctuation and unexpected gaps allow every line, when recited aloud, to reflect its emotional content.

Rich’s use of enjambment creates rhythm without relying on the predictable pattern of conventional meters. In conventional poetry, most lines move toward a grammatical closure, typically indicated by a period or a comma. An enjambed line, however, carries its grammar onto the next line—readers are not meant to pause between the two lines.