Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich was an influential American poet, essayist, and feminist known for her exploration of themes related to gender, identity, and social justice. Born in 1929, she began writing poetry in childhood, encouraged by her father, and later honed her craft at Radcliffe College. Rich's early work, including her first collection, "A Change of World," adhered to traditional poetic forms influenced by male poets. However, her experiences as a wife and mother led her to express a distinctly female perspective, particularly in her collection "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law."
Rich's activism intensified in the 1960s as she became involved in civil rights and antiwar movements, eventually identifying as a radical feminist. This shift is evident in her acclaimed work, "Diving into the Wreck," which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. Coming out as a lesbian in 1976, Rich incorporated explicitly lesbian themes in her writings, notably in "The Dream of a Common Language." Her later works continued to engage critically with the intersections of poetry and politics. Rich's legacy includes not only her literary contributions but also her staunch advocacy for the arts and women's rights, exemplified by her refusal of the National Medal of Arts in 1997. She passed away in 2012, leaving behind a profound impact on contemporary literature and feminist thought.
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Subject Terms
Adrienne Rich
Poet
- Born: May 16, 1929
- Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
- Died: March 27, 2012
Author Profile
As a child, Adrienne Rich was encouraged to write poetry by her father. At Radcliffe College, she continued to study the formal craft of poetry as practiced and taught by male teachers. In 1951, Rich’s first volume of poetry, A Change of World, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Rich was praised as a fine poet and as a modest young woman who respected her elders. The poems in her first two collections are traditional in form, modeled on the male poets Rich studied.
At twenty-four, Rich married Harvard economics professor Alfred Haskell Conrad. She had three children by the time she was thirty. The conflict between the traditional roles of mother and wife and her professional accomplishments left her frustrated. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law begins to express a woman’s point of view. Rich and her family moved to New York City in 1966 and became involved in civil rights and antiwar campaigns. In 1969, she separated from Conrad, who committed suicide in 1970. During the 1970s, Rich became a radical feminist, active in the women’s rights movement. The collections published during these years express these political themes. The most prominent, Diving into the Wreck, shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with The Fall of America by Allen Ginsberg.
Rich came out as a lesbian in 1976, and her collection The Dream of a Common Language includes explicitly lesbian poems. In the early 1980s, she moved to western Massachusetts with her partner, Michelle Cliff. Her essays and poetry with political themes were sometimes criticized as more didactic than artful. Rich continued to evolve politically and artistically. She moved to California, writing and teaching at Stanford University. Her books published in the 1990s confront the relationship among poetry and politics and issues of contemporary American life. In 1997 she declined to accept the National Medal of Arts, in protest against the policies of the Clinton administration and congressional efforts to cut arts funding. In 2002 she was appointed to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. She continued publishing, protesting, and receiving lifetime achievement awards until her death in 2012 at the age of eighty-two. She was survived by Cliff, her three sons, and two grandchildren. Adrienne Rich’s life and work sought to balance the conflicting demands of poetry, which was her vocation, with the ideology of engagement that her life brought to her art.
Bibliography
"Adrienne Rich." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.
Altieri, Charles. “Self-Reflection as Action: The Recent Work of Adrienne Rich.” Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Print.
Cooper, Jane Roberta, ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Review and Re-Visions, 1951–1981. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1984. Print.
Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Print.
Estrin, Barbara L. The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Fox, Margalit. "Adrienne Rich, Influential Feminist Poet, Dies at 82." New York Times. New York Times, 28 Mar. 2012. Web. 7 Mar. 2016.
Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, and Albert Gelpi, eds. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose. New York: Norton, 1993. Print.
Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, a New Tradition. New York: Harper, 1976. Print.
Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1986. Print.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. Print.
Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1994. Print.
Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics, and the Body. Newbury Park: Sage, 1998. Print.