The insistence on the inseparability of poetics and politics as articulated by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, two powerful voices in lesbian-feminist poetry and criticism, represents a significant contribution to twentieth-century poetry. The poetics/politics of Lorde and Rich represents movement from silence to speech and from lesbian invisibility to woman-identification as a basis for poetry, and ultimately creates a lesbian poetry that has the power for personal and social transformation. Although queer theorists have tended to reject lesbian-feminism as an essentialist and totalizing discourse, advancement in any of these three areas remains a significant achievement in poetry and politics.