Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet, essayist, and activist. Rich’s transformations throughout her life are reflected in the transformation of her poems throughout the years. As staunchly embedded in the history of feminism as she is in that of poetry, Rich’s work endures as some of the most highly-regarded and influential poetry of the 20th-century.

Adrienne Rich: Biography

Adrienne Rich was born May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a researcher and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and her mother was a professional pianist. From a very young age, Rich was considered an academic prodigy. She wrote her first poetry collection at six and her first play at seven. Rich grew up in a Jewish household.

Rich played piano and wrote poetry as a child but gave up the piano at 16 to focus on writing poetry. She attended an all-girls high school in Baltimore. Upon her graduation from high school, Rich enrolled at Radcliffe College, where she studied writing. During her undergraduate career, Rich focused intensely on poetry. Many literary magazines published her poems, but her first major career success was her first poetry collection, A Change of World (1951). It was selected by W.H. Auden, then a senior at Yale, to be published in the Yale Younger Poets series due to her winning The Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Florence skyline, where Rich spent time living in her 20s, wikimedia

Following her Radcliffe graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford and moved to England. Rich decided not to return to Oxford during a visit to Florence, Italy and spent her remaining time abroad in Italy. Rich regularly corresponded with Alfred Conrad, a Harvard professor of economics who she had briefly met before she left America during her time abroad. In 1953, upon Rich’s return to the United States, she and Conrad were married.

In 1955, Rich published her second poetry collection, The Diamond Cutters, and her first of three sons with Conrad were born. Rich continued to win accolades into the 1960s, including the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award and another Guggenheim Fellowship to the Netherlands, where she focused on translating Dutch poetry. During this time, Rich published another poetry collection—Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963). This collection marked a change from her two previous ones. It began to deal with the themes that would define Rich’s career: her female identity and her experience with oppressive masculinity and domestic life were at war with her urges as an artist.

Rich and her family moved to New York City in 1966. Rich took up positions as a lecturer at various universities, teaching writing and poetry. She became heavily involved in the New Left political movement; issues that she advocated for were anti-war, anti-racism, and feminism. She published multiple poetry collections during this time. Marital strife also characterized this period of her life; Rich left the family home and moved into her own place in 1970. Shortly after, her husband Conrad committed suicide.

Rich immersed herself in feminist readings and began to explore new topics in her writing. Rich’s publication of Diving Into the Wreck (1973), one of her best-known poetry collections, won her the National Book Award in 1974. In her acceptance speech, she shared the award with all women and fellow nominees and close friends, Audre Lord and Alice Walker. She began to write openly about her experience as a lesbian, which she repressed for most of her life. In 1976, she began dating novelist Michelle Cliff; the two would be in a relationship together until Rich’s death in 2012. That same year she published Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, dealing directly with her sexual orientation as both a political and personal expression.

Rich continued to publish poetry collections in later years and win numerous awards, including a MacArthur Genius Grant (1994) and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1992). She declined the National Medal of Arts in 1997 offered by the Clinton-era White House as she felt that the advancement of the art and the issues she cared about were inherently at odds with the politics of the Clinton regime. Rich continued to participate in activism and protests throughout her later life.

Adrienne Rich: Death

Rich suffered for much of her life from rheumatoid arthritis. In March of 2012, at the age of 82, Rich died in her home in Santa Cruz, California, of her arthritis. Her last collection was published in 2012, entitled Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012.

Portrait of Adrienne Rich in 1980, wikimedia

During her lifetime, the feminist movement in America took shape and became what it is today. Rich was often at the forefront and advocating for progressive agendas. One of the driving forces of the development of the feminist movement in the United States was the post-World War II economic boom which led many college-educated women to question their position in the home and society.

In the 1960s, the movement saw women advocating for their independence—financially, educationally, and domestically. During this time, many national organizations were formed to advance women's rights concerning reproductive health, aid domestic violence victims, solidify women's place as political changemakers, and equal pay. These movements continued into the 1970s. In the 80s, feminist critiques began to be articulated surrounding the movement of the previous decades, criticizing its lack of racial and economic diversity. Rich was heavily involved in the movement throughout her lifetime, and the changes of the 60s were part of the impetus that caused her to dedicate her life, and much of her work, to her activism.

Works by Adrienne Rich

Rich published numerous poems, poetry collections, and essays throughout her lifetime.

Adrienne Rich Poems

Rich’s first published poetry collection was A Change of World (1951). This collection sparked Rich’s career and won her The Yale Younger Poets Prize, awarded by W.H. Auden. Of her second poetry collection, The Diamond Cutters (1955), Rich often wished that it had not been published. She saw the collection as a derivative of other poets and not representative of her own work. With Diving Into the Wreck (1973), Rich began to write about the themes that would come to define her career. The collection deals with the history of women’s liberation, feminism, and the mythology of men and women. 'An Atlas of the Difficult World' (1991) is a later poem separated into 13 parts in which Rich explores the history of the United States and honors the unheard voices from that time in that history—including Native Americans, African Americans, and ordinary women.

Adrienne Rich Books

In addition to her poetry, Rich also wrote essay collections and nonfiction. On Lies, Secret, and Silence (1979) is a collection of Rich’s prose that explores her life and the themes she draws upon in her writing and daily life: motherhood, racism, and politically-charged use of language. Her 1986 collection Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985, included one of her most famous essays and one of the most famous essays in feminist literature: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, published initially as a solo essay in 1980. In 2004, she published another essay revisiting her 1980 publication to respond to its criticisms entitled Reflections on Compulsory Heterosexuality.

Quotes by Adrienne Rich

This quotation shows one of the drivers of Rich’s transformation. She found the strictures and expectations of motherhood to be incredibly stifling and credits the experience as one of the forces that led her to realize her feminist outlook.

This is the final stanza of the poem ‘Diving Into the Wreck,’ published as part of the poetry collection of the same name in 1973. Rich explores the historical erasure of women in society and the creation of patriarchal myths thematically.

Rich’s writing style and themes transformed throughout her lifetime, as did Rich. Her first collection, A Change of World, was done in a modernist style reminiscent of her contemporaries such as W.H. Auden. Thematically, it was devoid of the topics she would later choose of political and personal importance in her life. Much of the bulk of Rich’s later poetry can be characterized by a free verse structure, conversational tone, and use of enjambment.

In her poetry, she addressed themes such as feminism, racism, homophobia, and anti-war sentiment. She rejected many of the contemporary Modernist poets who believed in the values of New Criticism, which was a poetry movement of the mid 20th-century that emphasized the close reading of poetry that was written without the need for historical context and was self-referential. By contrast, Rich dated her poems precisely so that readers could orient them in time and space and draw conclusions about the historical period to understand Rich’s reaction to it.

1. Adrienne Rich, 'Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity', 1982.

2. Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck, 1973.