Adrienne Rich

Abstract

Adrienne Cecile Rich (b. 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, MD; d. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible—an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952); the National Book Award for Poetry (1974); honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989); several lifetime achievement awards; the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006); and many more. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .” [1976], The Dream of a Common Language [1978], and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]) and turned to political activism. Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. To being a woman, a mother, a writer, and a lesbian, she later added her concerns about her own Jewishness. In the 1980s, her poetry and prose became manifestations of her own physical pain and remained true to her idea of the “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978). For Rich, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” was always true. After 2000 she participated in antiwar movements and continued to write poetry and prose. From 1976 until her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff, in California.