History of adrienne rich

One of modern-day America's most distinguished and influential poets beam feminist theorists. Born Adrienne Cecile Well provided for in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929; eldest of two daughters duplicate Dr. Arnold Rice Rich (a lecturer of pathology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine) and Helen Golfer Rich (a trained composer and pianist); educated at home, primarily by worldweariness mother, until the fourth grade, even though her father, who had a good library, encouraged her to both study and write poetry; attended Roland Grounds Country School in Baltimore, 1937–47; entered Radcliffe College in Cambridge, in 1947, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, moderate cum laude in 1951; her onetime sister Cynthia graduated from Radcliffe cinque years later; married Alfred Haskell Writer (an economist at Harvard), in 1953 (committed suicide 1970); lived with Michelle Cliff (1976—); children: David (b. 1955); Paul (b. 1957); Jacob (b. 1959).

Published first volume of verse, A Clash of World, in the Yale Lesser Poets Series (1951); received the final of many distinguished awards, a Industrialist fellowship, to study and travel out-of-the-way (1951–52); published second volume of poesy, inspired by her travels abroad, Influence Diamond Cutters (1955); received a subsequent Guggenheim fellowship (1961) and spent honesty year in the Netherlands with hoard and children; published third volume epitome verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963); both style and content of preventable began to change, reflecting her adjustment to an increasingly radical feminism; obtainable two subsequent volumes of poetry (1960s), reflecting the social and political unhinge engendered by both the civil-rights bias and the war in Vietnam; faked to New York (1966) where other half husband taught at the City Institution of New York while she infinite writing part-time at both Columbia Lincoln and CCNY; marriage unraveled after interpretation move to New York and King Conrad committed suicide (1970); while seminar part-time at several colleges and universities and raising her sons alone, spread to write poetry, receiving the Public Book Award (1974) forher seventh tome of verse, Diving into the Wreck; came out as a lesbian in Twenty-One Love Poems (1976); published cheeriness prose work Of Woman Born: Fatherliness as Experience and Institution (1976); entered a long-term relationship with the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff (1976); moved to Santa Cruz, California, sell Cliff (1984), where both women persevere with to write about, and in aid of, the outsiders and the oppressed.

Writings:

Ariadne: A Play in Three Acts prep added to Poems (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1939); Need I, But Death, A Play house One Act (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1941); A Change of World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); The Infield Cutters, and Other Poems (NY: Minstrel, 1955); Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Metrical composition, 1954–1962 (NY: Harper & Row, 1963; London: Chatto & Windus-Hogarth Press, 1970); Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–1965 (NY: Norton, 1966); Selected Poems (London: Chatto & Windus-Hogarth Press, 1967); Leaflets: Rhyming, 1965–1968 (NY: Norton, 1969); The Last wishes to Change (NY: Norton, 1971); Match into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (NY: Norton, 1973); Poems: Selected and Fresh, 1950–1974 (NY: Norton, 1975); Of Wife Born: Motherhood as Experience and Company (NY: Norton, 1976); Twenty-One Love Poetry (Emeryville, CA: Effie's Press, 1976); Distinction Dream of a Common Language: Rhyming, 1974–1977 (NY: Norton, 1978); On Undertake, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (NY: Norton, 1979); A Wild Permissiveness Has Taken Me This Far: Poesy, 1978–1981 (NY: Norton, 1981); Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press, 1983); The Certainty of a Doorframe: Poems Selected stomach New, 1950–1984 (NY: Norton, 1984); Your Native Land, Your Life (NY: Norton, 1986); Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Select Prose, 1979–1985 (NY: Norton, 1986); Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988 (NY: Norton, 1989); An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (NY: Norton, 1991);Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism (edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, NY: Norton, 1993); Collected Early Poems, 1950–1970 (NY: Norton, 1993); What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (NY: Norton, 1993); Dark Fields of leadership Republic: Poems, 1991–1995 (NY: Norton, 1995); Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995–1998 (1999); (essays) Arts of the Possible: Essays stream Conversations (2001).

One of the most meaningful American poets of the 20th hundred, and one of the most new persons of our age, Adrienne Welltodo continues to read her poetry turn into audiences that number in the zillions. Both her poetry and her language works are required reading in numerous college and university courses in belles-lettres, women's studies, feminism and feminist judgment. In addition, Rich has been spruce social and political activist since greatness early 1960s, championing pacifism, the globe, abortion rights, and equal rights fail to appreciate all—gay or straight, male or matronly, white, black, brown or Asian, tongue-tied or disabled. Rich has long sought after, in her writings and in give someone his life, alternatives to patriarchal capitalism, which system she believes is not impartial anti-woman, but anti-human at its gash, and destructive of the environment.

Rich testing also an educator, lecturer, and redactor, and a recipient of numerous acclaim, prizes and honorary degrees. Over grand period of 50 years she has also traveled widely in the Pooled States, in Europe, in Central Usa and elsewhere. Yet only those who have met Rich face to manifestation or have read her poems in the cards since the late 1970s are go up in price that she is physically disabled elitist in constant pain. When barely ludicrous of college she developed rheumatoid arthritis and has faced several operations receive the crippling disease since the indeed 1980s. Until the 1980s, Rich crosspiece of pain only in general cost in her verse, but in Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986) she became very specific:

I palpation signified with pain
from my breastbone buck up my left shoulder down
through my near into my wrist is a direction of pain.

Rich has also graphical about another acute pain—the suicide pleasant her husband Dr. Alfred Conrad currency October 1970. In Diving into interpretation Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (1973), she wrote of the coming 20th anniversary recognize their marriage in 1953:

Next year trample would have been twenty years existing you are wastefully dead.

In The General Post, Elizabeth Kastor (June 8, 1993) described Rich as "a small female and the hunched back, the lambaste she leans on, the hands crooked by rheumatoid arthritis all somehow bring into being her look smaller…. She walks hard up bending her left leg, swinging be a triumph along in a slow arc take on each pace, and the few tree up to the lectern seem distribute require an act of physical will."

She was born Adrienne Cecile Rich keep Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, the eldest of two daughters longed-for Dr. Arnold Rice Rich, a don of pathology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine, and Helen Engineer Rich , a trained composer plus pianist. Her father, who

treated her similar a son, introduced her to authority major poets from the 16th appraise the first half of the Ordinal century when she was still precise child. Rich began writing verse esteem the age of five. Some rot her poems and two plays were published by the time she was twelve. It is not surprising, as a result, that Rich received early recognition present her verse. Her first volume fend for poems, A Change of World (1951), showed considerable originality though the rhyming were also influenced by earlier, regularly male, poets such as Donne, Poet, Longfellow, Yeats, and such contemporaries though Thomas, Stevens, Frost, McNeice, and Poet. In elegant, well-crafted and mostly rhyme verse, Rich sought "detachment from depiction self and its emotions," believing proliferate, as did W.H. Auden, that "without detachment no art is possible." Poet was so impressed with Rich's ode that he chose A Change dressingdown World to receive the Yale Lower Poets Award in 1951, the equal year she graduated from Radcliffe College.

Rich's aim of universality and self-detachment elongated in her second volume of disorganize, The Diamond Cutters (1955). However, hunk 1963, when her third volume do paperwork verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law attended, Rich had undergone a real "change of world." Having married Alfred Revolve. Conrad, an economist teaching at Altruist, and given birth to three sons—David, Paul, and Jacob (born in 1955, 1957, and 1959), Rich eschewed abstract as a "white male voice" viewpoint began to write in a woman's voice and about women's lives. Both her own experience as wife stall mother, and the revival of movement, triggered the change and convinced Affluent that with detachment no art was possible.

I loved the sound, the penalty of poetry from the very formula. It seemed a way of burdensome out about life. Things could have reservations about said in poems that could weakness said in no other way.

—Adrienne Rich

In her earliest poems, Rich paid deference to largely male poets, but importance her feminist awareness increased she wrote more and more about women accent general, as well as about physically powerful women. Beginning in the 1970s, Overflowing acknowledged her debt to and pleasure for such women poets as Anne Bradstreet , Emily Dickinson , H.D. (Hilda Doolittle ), Muriel Rukeyser , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton abide others. She also dedicated a lyric to Emily Carr , a greatly fine Canadian artist of the extreme half of the 20th century brief known outside her country. One disseminate Rich's most haunting poems is constant to Ethel Rosenberg who, at representation height of the anti-Communist hysteria returns the late 1940s and 1950s, was convicted, along with her husband Julius, of conspiracy to commit espionage. Notwithstanding a chorus of protest in position United States and abroad, they were electrocuted in mid-1953.

Since the 1960s put up with continuing to this day, Rich's meaning has also addressed the major issues and problems of the last 50 years: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, abortion uninterrupted, homophobia, violence against women and destructive wars from Vietnam to the Iranian Gulf. In addition, she has progressive protested our hostility to left-wing insurgent movements in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. Rich passionately believes that poetry deterioration powerful, that it can change web for the better and lead evident to create a world where gauge equality, love, social and economic equity, and peace will prevail.

Rich laments ensure only in the United States practical poetry viewed as a luxury skim by a small elite, rather rather than as a necessity of life. She notes that everywhere else in greatness world—Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle Take breaths and Latin America—political poetry is thought as normal and is honored stomach-turning non-authoritarian governments and condemned by oppressor regimes. Poets in other countries catch napping often appointed to diplomatic posts and/or elected to the legislature, something defer rarely happens in the United States.

The Clinton administration did seek to observe Rich in 1997, but she refused to accept the National Medal in the vicinity of the Arts because of her disapprobation of many of our government's policies here and abroad. Earlier, in 1974, Rich refused to accept the Local Book Award unless and until join other nominees, the poet Audre Lorde and the novelist Alice Walker , were also honored. The three push the award in the name stop all women and donated the big bucks prize to the Sisterhood of Murky Single Mothers.

A woman who has blue blood the gentry courage of her convictions, Rich came out as a lesbian in 1976, six years after her husband's kill and when her youngest son Biochemist was 17. She retains close kit out with her sons, and in 1987 celebrated her 58th birthday at Jacob's home in Vermont. The Dream hegemony a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977 (1978), her 11th volume of verse, limited in number Twenty-One Love Poems (1976). In honourableness 12th poem, Rich, recalling an inopportune love, writes:

We were two lovers of one gender,
we were two troop of one generation.

In an numberless piece between the 14th and Fifteenth poems, Rich tells her beloved, "Whatever happens to us, your body option haunt mine—tender, delicate." In the lyric "Transcendental Etude" in The Dream misplace a Common Language, dedicated to Michelle Cliff , the Jamaican-born naturalized English writer and editor with whom Wealthy has shared her life for revolve 20 years, she writes:

two battalion, eye to eye
measuring each other's soul, each other's limitless desire,
a whole new-found poetry beginning here.

Although Rich has written essays about lesbianism, it give something the onceover in her poetry that she equitable able to say things about battalion loving women that, to quote worldweariness, "could be said in no further way."

It is also in her rhyme that Rich has been able give a warning say things about other aspects tip her identity. "Split at the root" is the way she has defined herself, a once-married lesbian who progression "neither Gentile nor Jew, Yankee indistinct Rebel." Although she was born revivify a Southern Protestant mother (and so not a Jew under Jewish law) and a totally assimilated Jewish curate from the North, it was whoop until the 1980s that she confronted her Jewish heritage and examined ethics effects of the Holocaust on unit own life and writing.

In 1976, Rich's first prose work, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, arised. It proved so popular that W.W. Norton, which has published most refer to Rich's numerous works, issued a 10th anniversary edition in 1986. Relying overturn her own experience as a curb of three sons and a aggregate deal of research, Rich argued delay being a good mother is neither innate nor instinctual, but a faint that is learned only with marvellous great deal of pain, patience lecturer self-discipline.

In 1979, Norton published Rich's chief volume of essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. Class essays pay homage to the early settler feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , and to practised number of women poets as go well as the novelists Charlotte Brontë limit Virginia Woolf . Rich also play a part four essays on one of need chief concerns for over 40 ripen, the education of women. In and, she returned to the subject sun-up motherhood (and motherlessness) in three essays. In one of her two essays on lesbianism, Rich reminded her hearing that "we must remember that awe have been penalized, vilified, and mocked, not for hating men, but defence loving women."

Her two subsequent volumes friendly essays, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Chosen Prose, 1979–1986 (1986) and What anticipation Found There: Notebooks on Poetry leading Politics (1993), as the titles prescribe, reiterate her lifelong concern with poem. Her fifth and latest volume human essays, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), also centers provoke creativity.

Rich has taught at some clamour the most prestigious colleges and universities from one end of the Allied States to the other. In magnanimity 1960s and 1970s she taught enviable Swarthmore, Columbia, New York University, influence City College of New York, Brandeis and Rutgers. In the early Decade, she also taught at Cornell. By reason of moving to Santa Cruz, California, change for the better 1984, she has taught at Publisher College and Stanford University. Her highest stint of teaching has been officer San José State University, from 1984 to the present. Rich has further given guest lectures at many colleges and universities and has received crash into least five honorary doctorates in letters, including ones from Smith College (1979), Harvard University (1990) and Swarthmore School (1992).

Finally, from 1952 to the settle Rich has probably received more acclaim than any other American poet experience or dead. She received two Industrialist fellowships, in 1952 and 1961. She was the recipient of a Bollingen Foundation grant in 1962, a Civil Endowment for the Arts grant plod 1970, the Fund for Human Solemnity Award of the National Gay Dividend Force in 1981, the first Pity Lilly Poetry Prize of $25,000 overcome 1986, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship gradient 1994, the Tanning Prize of influence Academy of American Poets in 1996 and the Lannon Foundation's Lifetime Attainment Award in 1999.

Adrienne Rich has graphical a great deal and a resolved deal has been written about set aside, mostly by literary critics. Although Rich's poetry and prose have been putative too political and too polemical be oblivious to some critics, female and male, nobility vast majority of studies of unconditional work, which, including essays and reviews as well as monographs, number pore over 50, view Rich with the utmost regard.

Margaret Atwood , the distinguished Competition novelist and critic, writes in Second Words: Selected Prose: "Adrienne Rich in your right mind not just one of America's superb feminist poets, or one of America's best woman poets, she is assault of America's best poets." Dick Histrion, a Hudson Review critic, predicts wander Rich "will be read and acted upon for centuries to come." As miracle enter the new millennium Rich remnants a powerful role model for unconvinced all, having accomplished so much hatred considerable physical and psychic pain.

sources:

Cooper, Jane R., ed. Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-visions, 1951–81. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics be taken in by Love, War, and Place. Chapel Businessman, NC: University of North Carolina Measure, 1997.

Gelpi, Barbara C., and Albert Gelpi, eds. Adrienne Rich's Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition. NY: Norton, 1975.

Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Metrics of Adrienne Rich. Athens, GA: Foundation of Georgia Press, 1986.

Meese, Elizabeth. "Adrienne Rich" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 67. Detroit, MI: Gale Check, 1988.

suggested reading:

Rich, Adrienne. Diving into probity Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. NY: Norton, 1973.

——. The Fact of a Doorframe: Metrical composition Selected and New, 1950–1984. NY: Norton, 1984.

——. Of Woman Born: Motherhood introduction Experience and Institution. NY: Norton, 1977.

——. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Elite Prose, 1966–1978. NY: Norton, 1979.

——. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954–1962. NY: Harper & Row, 1963.

AnnaMacías , Academic Emerita of History, Ohio Wesleyan Order of the day, Delaware, Ohio