About Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland – March 27, 2012, in Santa Cruz) was an American poet, essayist, university professor and feminist theorist. She has been called one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century. After early work that had the controlled elegance and formality characteristic of some poets in the first years of the 1950s, she began to adapt the open forms that have been central to the American tradition since Whitman. Since then, she has become one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the century. That impact has grown not only from her poetry but also from a number of ground-breaking essays, including “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”Rich’s position now is in many ways unique. She is our foremost feminist poet and an important theorist of the social construction of gender, but that dual status sometimes overshadows, and even obscures, the range of her most ambitious work. She has written a number of unforgettable short poems, variously visionary, historical, political, and polemical. Some of these, along with longer poems like “Diving into the Wreck,” have helped to define the personal and social understanding of a generation. Yet her many long poem sequences are inevitably more complex aesthetically and philosophically, and they demand extended reading and reflection.
It is in these poem sequences especially that her recurring topic of several decades—the relationship between individual experience, contemporary political and social life, and historical memory—receives its most innovative treatment. Devoted like so many other poets to understanding the burdens of national identity, she has tried to uncover at once the texture and the governing principles of the lesson Americans are least willing to learn: that we are intricately embedded in and shaped by social life. Other poets, to be sure, have dealt with the intersection of personal and public life. It was Robert Lowell's lifetime theme. But Rich is unusual in tracking these intersections with a keen sense of their temporal intricacy; in Rich, social life and politics and the lives of earlier women (like that of Marie Curie in “Power”) are registered on the pulses. Representing her adequately requires offering more than one of her poem sequences.
After the publication of The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems, in 1953 she will remain eight years without publishing, she goes through a personal crisis, of doubt, of questions, she discovers Mary Wollstonecraft, James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir and decides after her last giving birth in 1959 to regain control of her life and her writings.
In 1966, Adrienne Rich taught poetry at Columbia University in New York, where she encountered the radical ideas flooding the campus, in particular the anti-Vietnam movement and that of women's liberation. The same year, her husband was hired at the City College of New York. In 1968, she also obtained a teaching position at City College under the Seek program, which attempted to reach out to underprivileged students. In her work, radical ideas began to surface in her poetry collection Leaflets, which appeared in 1969, and more decisively in her articles which had now begun to appear in feminist journals. Her political commitment created a crisis within the couple. In 1966, the couple separated. Her husband committed suicide in 1970.
In 1971, she published her poem The Will to Change, marked by her personal evolution, which she would support in 1973 with the publication of Diving into the Wreck. With Twenty-one Love Poems in 1976, she reveals her first lesbian loves. In the last part of her life, the notable works of Adrienne Rich will be especially essays. Her articles address various themes: feminism, motherhood, civil rights, pacifism, violence against women in prisons, abuse of women, homosexuality.
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[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
