Although she considers herself a poet, author Susan Griffin is also noted as a playwright and radical feminist philosopher. In addition to her well-known play Voices, which has helped to raise the feminist consciousness of numerous women since it was first performed in 1974, she has written several highly acclaimed social studies on subjects as diverse as pornography, anthropology, and warfare. To each of her subjects she brings a radical feminist viewpoint, setting forth a well-thought-out analysis in what have often been described as lyrical, book-length prose poems.

"If there is a stronger, better, more forceful feminist poem than Griffin's 'An Answer to a Man's Question, "What Can I Do about Women's Liberation"' I'd like to see it," A. B. Eaglen states in a Library Journal review of Griffin's Like the Iris of an Eye, "—and that is only one excellent poem in a uniformly excellent collection by one of the most-quoted feminist poets writing today." Eaglen adds that the book is a "fine anthology of work that has been available before this only in anthologies and small press offerings, for collections serving women and/or lovers of good contemporary poetry." A later volume of poetry, Unremembered Country, is a poetic mosaic of female self-discovery. "All of the poems are written in a tightly controlled, minimal style," comments Bill Tremblay in American Book Review, "that witnesses to the most serious crises in our lives, even to the 'unspeakable' cruelties, while at the same time not becoming 'another facet of the original assault.'"

Griffin has also turned her attention to theorizing about issues important to women. In her Ms. review of Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her, Valerie Miner describes Griffin's task as exploring "woman's traditional identification with the earth—both as sustenance for humanity and victim of male ravage. The book is cultural anthropology, visionary prediction, literary indictment, and personal claim. Griffin's testimony about the lives of women throughout Western civilization reveals extensive research from Plato to Galileo to Freud to Emily Carr to Jane Goodall to Adrienne Rich." Concludes Miner: "Griffin moves us from pain to anger to communion with and celebration of the survival of woman and nature."

In Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revolt against Nature, Griffin explores the nature and function of pornography, claiming that it is the manifestation of the male's desire to separate emotion, desire, and feeling from himself. In a dialogue related in Women Writers of the West Coast, Griffin elaborates on this theory: "All the qualities that women are accused of—passivity, wantonness or prudery, both the fear of sex and nymphomania—all of these qualities are human qualities, human possibilities, and they are projected onto a woman." In portraying women in this manner, pornography allows men to "disassociate these parts" from themselves and conquer them physically. For the purposes of her analysis, Griffin does not limit her definition of pornography to works that are violent or sadistic but also includes "the idea that woman is submissive; that she is pretty but dumb; that she likes to be dominated; that she's an object for somebody's pleasure; that she likes to serve." In the process of developing her thesis, Griffin refutes the concept of pornography as a sexual liberator; instead, she sees it as an attempt to deny sexuality.

Pornography and Silence has drawn a variety of responses from critics. While many critics agree that her hypothesis is interesting, they fault the author for her method. In his New Republic review, Irving Kristol notes that while Griffin's "polemic against pornography and its apologists . . . is shrewd, vigorous, and leaves little unsaid," he also comments that "she seems sadly unaware" of the precedents for her argument. In addition, Kristol criticizes the author's vehement attitude, remarking that "much of her book is an autodidact's brash exploration of cultural history that is occasionally very perceptive, more often painfully sophomoric." Village Voice contributor Robert Christgau also questions Griffin's methods, finding the details of her hypothesis lacking. "As one theory of pornography," writes Christgau, "this is fairly insightful, but it's only one theory, partial at best. First of all, it doesn't apply to all pornography, although since Griffin never defines the term . . . it's hard to pin her down." In a Ms. review, however, Marcia Yudkin praises the author's analysis as "surprising, deep, and unsettling. Her soundings not only connect seemingly disparate aspects of our culture; they transform one's questions and answers about sex, history, the self, and nature."

Other critics, while admiring Griffin's analysis, remark that her political, angry delivery detracts from the message of the book. In the Washington Post Book World, Lewis H. Lapham observes that while "Pornography and Silence convincingly dissects the dehumanizing character of pornography, . . . it would have been a kindness to the reader if Griffin had resisted the temptation to make of her observations a political theory." In taking an unmovable stance, Lapham writes, "she makes so many doubtful statements . . . that her more useful remarks about the nature of pornography lose their force and urgency." Critic Ellen Willis expresses a similar opinion, noting in the New York Times Book Review that "the passages she devotes to condemning pornography, rather than analyzing it, are reductive and heavy-handed in a way the rest of the book is not."

Whatever faults it may contain, reviewers still find that Pornography and Silence contains an important message. Because it refutes the myth that women enjoy being dominated and helpless, as they are often portrayed in pornographic works, New Statesman contributor Marion Glastonbury writes that "those of us to whom this is dangerous nonsense can take heart from Susan Griffin's subtle, lucid, and compelling book. Pornography is exposed as a system of censorship which serves not to enhance but to vilify pleasure, perpetuating error by suppressing half the evidence." Yudkin similarly concludes that the book "is profound, stimulating, sophisticated, far-reaching in its implications. Although feminists are still left wondering about the First Amendment and a conscionable strategy for making pornography disappear, we are much enriched by Susan Griffin's graceful, clear, unrhetorical book."

Griffin employed a similar approach in A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, published in 1992. An examination of the destruction of the bond between humankind and nature that is caused by war and violence, A Chorus of Stones reveals a tapestry woven of personal memories, photographs, nonlinear history, and the individuals that figured in acts of warfare and social aggression in the twentieth century. Holocaust survivors like artist Kathe Kollwitz; Oscar Wilde, who was routinely persecuted for his openly "deviant" behaviors; the villainous Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler; and Royal Air Force officer Hugh Trenchard, who perfected the tactical bombing of densely populated urban areas, are but some of the individuals brought to conciousness in her work. "Griffin cinematically weaves about two dozen public lives and as many private lives around each other," comments Rosemary Keefe Curb in Belles Lettres, "often introducing individuals at a significant sensual moment but not naming them, gradually adding resonances, background details, and consequences."

Griffin's work is both political in its feminist approach and personal. A thesis central to her book is that forced separation or amputation from nature and mankind's capacity for denying the existence of evil or wrongdoing are each, in and of themselves, morally wrong, culpable acts. Griffin counts among such separations the conventional division between private or family history and public history, the history of warring nations. "To divide them is part of our denial," she states. Throughout A Chorus of Stones Griffin similarly "makes connections, analogies—between public and private pain, between the outer spheres of military conflict and personal tragedy," notes New Statesman and Society reviewer Veronica Groocock. "Skilfully interweaving the historical with the autobiographical, Griffin demonstrates how these two arenas are not disparate, but inextricably linked."

Griffin attempts not to judge, but rather to understand and to illustrate these criminal motivations through her own—noncriminal—experience. "I do not see my life as separate from history," she notes in A Chorus of Stones. "In my mind my family secrets mingle with the secrets of statesmen and bombers. Nor is my life divided from the lives of others." Curb explains Griffin's hybrid approach to her subject this way: "A Chorus of Stones is not psychoanalysis but literature. Griffin gives no documentation. Instead she offers a symphony, a palimpsest of public and private memories." Such a technique gives rise to one of the central criticisms some have made to the work. In Women's Review of Books, Lise Weil states: "Unlike Woman and Nature, which wove disparate voices into a seamless whole, this book is shapeless and unwieldy; it rambles, it sprawls, it jerks and strays and sometimes completely bogs down." Richard Restak in the New York Times Book Review, however, finds Griffin's creative approach to her subject ultimately satisfying. "While writing graphic and haunting descriptions of battle[, she] sets a standard few authors could meet: she enters the psyches of people known to her only through books and photographs, getting everything somehow just right, and yet she retains a firm grasp on her own singularity."

Summing up her philosophy of writing, Griffin once told Contemporary Authors: "As a woman, I struggle to write from my life, to reflect all the difficulties, angers, joys of my existence in a culture that attempts to silence women, or that does not take our work, our words, or our lives seriously. In this, I am a fortunate woman, to be published, to be read, to be supported, and I live within a cultural and social movement aiming toward the liberation of us all. And within and also beyond all this I experience the transformations of my soul through the holy, the ecstatic, the painfully born or joyously made word. I know now that never when I begin to write will I truly know what or how my vision will become."