When Adrienne Rich began writing poetry, her father encouraged her to read and to write. She learned how to write from predominantly male "masters", and imitated their styles and poetics. Her first book, A Change of World was chosen for the `Yale Younger Poets series` by a male poet, W. H. Auden. In the beginning of the 1960`s, however, she began to listen to her inner female voice, identifying and concentrating on feminist subjects, as in Snapshots of a Daugher-in-Law, published in 1963. Since then, a great part of Rich`s published poems strongly voice concerns such as protection of women`s rights, discrimination against women, and issues of opportunity and participation. These poems focus on the need for structural reforms rather than reflecting on the poet`s inner life or on insights concerning the interrelationship between poetry and the human body. Nevertheless, the more detached the poems seem when examining practical matters such as social ideologies and reforms, the more do they also reveal perspectives on the female physiology (what Kristeva calls `the semiotic`), the unconscious, and language. Rich`s poetry does not deal with these topics in the manner of a scientist, who studies materials from an objective point of view, but subjectively investigates the ways in which the body and physicality articulate metaphorically. The aim of this research is therefore to analyze how physical and physiological elements diversify themselves in Rich`s poetry, rather than to discuss these elements from the objective point of view. Rich suggests in her poetry that `the language of flesh` or `the language of body` should be regarded as the highest form of poetic language, contrasting with "spoiled language", which has no association with the flesh. This physiological language, which she calls "more than a symptom", is opposed to conceptual language whose meanings are normally codified. Emanating directly from the writer`s flesh, life, pulse, breath, etc., it makes immediate contact with the reader`s physicality, its words being ridden with the physical and spiritual constituents of the writer. Rich demonstrates her attempts to find the poetic language which will connect her own pulse to that of the reader`s, when she says, "I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by." Rich`s language is also a living language in which vital relationships are recognized between the human physical rhythm and the cycle of nature, relationships such as that between the menstruation cycle and the lunar cycle. Saussurean arbitrary relations between the signifier and the signified tend to be absent in her work. Signifiers are bound to the pre-linguistic stage in which they cannot articulate fully but signify through the flesh the instinctual, pre-oedipal desires only metaphorically. Because her language depends on the powers and functions of the physical body, therefore, she suffers from incapacity to express symbolic meanings. Rather, it imprints `signifiance` upon our semiotic body before delivering any articulated meanings. Without such a language, Rich prefers to keep silent. Rich suggests that since language is traditionally focused on expressing abstract, moral, racial, historical facts which are regarded as significant values in a male-dominate society, it cannot appreciate or fully describe functions concerned with the body. She also believes that physical wisdom and truths have long been ignored by patriarchical societies. Despite these considerations, she hopes that the language of body will, in the final analysis, bring universal harmony and liberty to human beings, rather than opportunities and happiness only to women.