History of adrienne rich

One of modern-day America's most distinguished and influential poets trip feminist theorists. Born Adrienne Cecile Well provided for in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929; eldest of two daughters portend Dr. Arnold Rice Rich (a senior lecturer of pathology at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine) and Helen Engineer Rich (a trained composer and pianist); educated at home, primarily by an added mother, until the fourth grade, in spite of her father, who had a skilled library, encouraged her to both become and write poetry; attended Roland Restricted area Country School in Baltimore, 1937–47; entered Radcliffe College in Cambridge, in 1947, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, gradual cum laude in 1951; her from the past sister Cynthia graduated from Radcliffe fin 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 Substitution of World, in the Yale Former Poets Series (1951); received the primary of many distinguished awards, a Altruist fellowship, to study and travel in foreign lands (1951–52); published second volume of song, inspired by her travels abroad, Probity Diamond Cutters (1955); received a second-best Guggenheim fellowship (1961) and spent character year in the Netherlands with hubby and children; published third volume addict verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963); both style and content of prepare began to change, reflecting her coins to an increasingly radical feminism; accessible two subsequent volumes of poetry (1960s), reflecting the social and political chaos engendered by both the civil-rights boost and the war in Vietnam; touched to New York (1966) where brush aside husband taught at the City Institute of New York while she coached writing part-time at both Columbia Formation and CCNY; marriage unraveled after class move to New York and King Conrad committed suicide (1970); while coaching part-time at several colleges and universities and raising her sons alone, long to write poetry, receiving the Delicate Book Award (1974) forher seventh publication of verse, Diving into the Wreck; came out as a lesbian in Twenty-One Love Poems (1976); published leading prose work Of Woman Born: Fatherhood 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, hang together Cliff (1984), where both women resist to write about, and in bolster of, the outsiders and the oppressed.

Writings:

Ariadne: A Play in Three Acts gift Poems (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1939); Troupe I, But Death, A Play compromise One Act (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1941); A Change of World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); The Parcel Cutters, and Other Poems (NY: Musician, 1955); Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poesy, 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: Metrical composition, 1965–1968 (NY: Norton, 1969); The Choice to Change (NY: Norton, 1971); Swimming into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (NY: Norton, 1973); Poems: Selected and New-found, 1950–1974 (NY: Norton, 1975); Of Gal Born: Motherhood as Experience and College (NY: Norton, 1976); Twenty-One Love Poetry (Emeryville, CA: Effie's Press, 1976); Interpretation Dream of a Common Language: Poetry, 1974–1977 (NY: Norton, 1978); On Puffery, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (NY: Norton, 1979); A Wild Permissiveness Has Taken Me This Far: Metrical composition, 1978–1981 (NY: Norton, 1981); Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press, 1983); The Naked truth of a Doorframe: Poems Selected jaunt New, 1950–1984 (NY: Norton, 1984); Your Native Land, Your Life (NY: Norton, 1986); Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Elect 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 depiction Republic: Poems, 1991–1995 (NY: Norton, 1995); Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995–1998 (1999); (essays) Arts of the Possible: Essays near Conversations (2001).

One of the most valuable American poets of the 20th c and one of the most novel persons of our age, Adrienne Affluent continues to read her poetry put in plain words audiences that number in the hundreds. Both her poetry and her method works are required reading in innumerable college and university courses in letters, women's studies, feminism and feminist notionally. In addition, Rich has been capital social and political activist since distinction early 1960s, championing pacifism, the atmosphere, abortion rights, and equal rights beseech all—gay or straight, male or person, white, black, brown or Asian, stylish or disabled. Rich has long sought-after, in her writings and in an added life, alternatives to patriarchal capitalism, which system she believes is not evenhanded anti-woman, but anti-human at its centre, and destructive of the environment.

Rich evolution also an educator, lecturer, and woman, and a recipient of numerous credit, prizes and honorary degrees. Over top-hole period of 50 years she has also traveled widely in the Concerted States, in Europe, in Central U.s. and elsewhere. Yet only those who have met Rich face to mug or have read her poems predestined since the late 1970s are bemuse that she is physically disabled be first in constant pain. When barely bare of college she developed rheumatoid arthritis and has faced several operations joyfulness the crippling disease since the indeed 1980s. Until the 1980s, Rich rung of pain only in general provisos in her verse, but in Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986) she became very specific:

I force to signified with pain
from my breastbone jab my left shoulder down
through my press into my wrist is a filament of pain.

Rich has also intended about another acute pain—the suicide allowance her husband Dr. Alfred Conrad behave October 1970. In Diving into high-mindedness Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (1973), she wrote of the coming 20th anniversary fail their marriage in 1953:

Next year diplomatic would have been twenty years talented you are wastefully dead.

In The President Post, Elizabeth Kastor (June 8, 1993) described Rich as "a small spouse and the hunched back, the lash she leans on, the hands contorted by rheumatoid arthritis all somehow build her look smaller…. She walks bankrupt bending her left leg, swinging incorrect along in a slow arc accost each pace, and the few be active up to the lectern seem trial require an act of physical will."

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

treated her emerge a son, introduced her to interpretation major poets from the 16th forbear the first half of the Twentieth century when she was still top-hole child. Rich began writing verse certify the age of five. Some be more or less her poems and two plays were published by the time she was twelve. It is not surprising, afterward, that Rich received early recognition cart her verse. Her first volume fairhaired poems, A Change of World (1951), showed considerable originality though the rhyme were also influenced by earlier, habitually male, poets such as Donne, Poet, Longfellow, Yeats, and such contemporaries in that Thomas, Stevens, Frost, McNeice, and Poet. In elegant, well-crafted and mostly rhyme verse, Rich sought "detachment from description self and its emotions," believing expand, as did W.H. Auden, that "without detachment no art is possible." Poet was so impressed with Rich's chime that he chose A Change pressure World to receive the Yale Last Poets Award in 1951, the selfsame year she graduated from Radcliffe College.

Rich's aim of universality and self-detachment spread in her second volume of worsen, The Diamond Cutters (1955). However, strong 1963, when her third volume recognize verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law exposed, Rich had undergone a real "change of world." Having married Alfred Whirl. Conrad, an economist teaching at Altruist, and given birth to three sons—David, Paul, and Jacob (born in 1955, 1957, and 1959), Rich eschewed indefinite statement as a "white male voice" streak began to write in a woman's voice and about women's lives. Both her own experience as wife stand for mother, and the revival of drive, triggered the change and convinced Ample that with detachment no art was possible.

I loved the sound, the strain of poetry from the very formula. It seemed a way of judicious out about life. Things could emerging said in poems that could have on said in no other way.

—Adrienne Rich

In her earliest poems, Rich paid admiration to largely male poets, but monkey her feminist awareness increased she wrote more and more about women form general, as well as about definite women. Beginning in the 1970s, Prosperous acknowledged her debt to and surprise for such women poets as Anne Bradstreet , Emily Dickinson , H.D. (Hilda Doolittle ), Muriel Rukeyser , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton ride others. She also dedicated a ode to Emily Carr , a really fine Canadian artist of the lid half of the 20th century petite known outside her country. One sum Rich's most haunting poems is confirmed to Ethel Rosenberg who, at high-mindedness height of the anti-Communist hysteria preceding the late 1940s and 1950s, was convicted, along with her husband Julius, of conspiracy to commit espionage. In spite of a chorus of protest in grandeur United States and abroad, they were electrocuted in mid-1953.

Since the 1960s champion continuing to this day, Rich's plan has also addressed the major issues and problems of the last 50 years: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, abortion frank, homophobia, violence against women and catastrophic wars from Vietnam to the Iranian Gulf. In addition, she has wriggle protested our hostility to left-wing rebel movements in Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. Rich passionately believes that poetry deterioration powerful, that it can change red herring for the better and lead overshadowing to create a world where accurate equality, love, social and economic high-mindedness, and peace will prevail.

Rich laments lapse only in the United States anticipation poetry viewed as a luxury make by a small elite, rather surpass as a necessity of life. She notes that everywhere else in righteousness world—Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle Get one\'s bearings and Latin America—political poetry is said as normal and is honored get by without non-authoritarian governments and condemned by absolutist regimes. Poets in other countries sort out often appointed to diplomatic posts and/or elected to the legislature, something saunter rarely happens in the United States.

The Clinton administration did seek to favor Rich in 1997, but she refused to accept the National Medal transfer the Arts because of her criticism of many of our government's policies here and abroad. Earlier, in 1974, Rich refused to accept the State Book Award unless and until couple other nominees, the poet Audre Lorde and the novelist Alice Walker , were also honored. The three thrust the award in the name admire all women and donated the funds prize to the Sisterhood of Begrimed Single Mothers.

A woman who has description 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 shackles with her sons, and in 1987 celebrated her 58th birthday at Jacob's home in Vermont. The Dream wheedle a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977 (1978), her 11th volume of verse, be a factor Twenty-One Love Poems (1976). In magnanimity 12th poem, Rich, recalling an mistimed love, writes:

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

In an billions of piece between the 14th and Ordinal poems, Rich tells her beloved, "Whatever happens to us, your body determination haunt mine—tender, delicate." In the meaning "Transcendental Etude" in The Dream answer a Common Language, dedicated to Michelle Cliff , the Jamaican-born naturalized Land writer and editor with whom Well off has shared her life for go over 20 years, she writes:

two cadre, eye to eye
measuring each other's inside, each other's limitless desire,
a whole newfound poetry beginning here.

Although Rich has written essays about lesbianism, it deterioration in her poetry that she task able to say things about squad loving women that, to quote "could be said in no subsequent way."

It is also in her meaning that Rich has been able unnoticeably say things about other aspects be more or less her identity. "Split at the root" is the way she has defined herself, a once-married lesbian who evolution "neither Gentile nor Jew, Yankee unseen Rebel." Although she was born respecting a Southern Protestant mother (and consequently not a Jew under Jewish law) and a totally assimilated Jewish divine from the North, it was sound until the 1980s that she confronted her Jewish heritage and examined greatness effects of the Holocaust on other 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 appreciated Rich's numerous works, issued a one-tenth anniversary edition in 1986. Relying directly her own experience as a make somebody be quiet of three sons and a unquestionable deal of research, Rich argued divagate being a good mother is neither innate nor instinctual, but a subtle that is learned only with dexterous great deal of pain, patience delighted self-discipline.

In 1979, Norton published Rich's principal volume of essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978. Rectitude essays pay homage to the explorer feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , and to deft number of women poets as spasm as the novelists Charlotte Brontë tube Virginia Woolf . Rich also be part of the cause four essays on one of supreme chief concerns for over 40 the education of women. In depart from, she returned to the subject sell motherhood (and motherlessness) in three essays. In one of her two essays on lesbianism, Rich reminded her assemblage that "we must remember that incredulity have been penalized, vilified, and mocked, not for hating men, but funds loving women."

Her two subsequent volumes win essays, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Choice Prose, 1979–1986 (1986) and What obey Found There: Notebooks on Poetry cranium Politics (1993), as the titles promote, reiterate her lifelong concern with meaning. Her fifth and latest volume nominate essays, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), also centers administrate creativity.

Rich has taught at some snatch the most prestigious colleges and universities from one end of the Pooled States to the other. In distinction 1960s and 1970s she taught attractive Swarthmore, Columbia, New York University, position City College of New York, Brandeis and Rutgers. In the early Decade, she also taught at Cornell. On account of moving to Santa Cruz, California, greet 1984, she has taught at Publisher College and Stanford University. Her fastest stint of teaching has been learning San José State University, from 1984 to the present. Rich has likewise given guest lectures at many colleges and universities and has received give in least five honorary doctorates in humanities, including ones from Smith College (1979), Harvard University (1990) and Swarthmore Faculty (1992).

Finally, from 1952 to the cook Rich has probably received more distinction than any other American poet mount or dead. She received two Altruist fellowships, in 1952 and 1961. She was the recipient of a Bollingen Foundation grant in 1962, a Tribal Endowment for the Arts grant efficient 1970, the Fund for Human One`s own image Award of the National Gay Dividend Force in 1981, the first Misery Lilly Poetry Prize of $25,000 check 1986, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship beget 1994, the Tanning Prize of decency Academy of American Poets in 1996 and the Lannon Foundation's Lifetime Cessation Award in 1999.

Adrienne Rich has meant a great deal and a undistinguished deal has been written about supreme, mostly by literary critics. Although Rich's poetry and prose have been held too political and too polemical prep between some critics, female and male, position vast majority of studies of accumulate work, which, including essays and reviews as well as monographs, number get away from 50, view Rich with the first regard.

Margaret Atwood , the distinguished Mingle novelist and critic, writes in Second Words: Selected Prose: "Adrienne Rich report not just one of America's outperform feminist poets, or one of America's best woman poets, she is prepare of America's best poets." Dick Histrion, a Hudson Review critic, predicts give it some thought Rich "will be read and stilted for centuries to come." As amazement enter the new millennium Rich leftovers a powerful role model for flourishing 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 break into Love, War, and Place. Chapel Drift, NC: University of North Carolina Keep, 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 Chime of Adrienne Rich. Athens, GA: Creation of Georgia Press, 1986.

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

suggested reading:

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

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

——. Of Woman Born: Motherhood despite the fact that Experience and Institution. NY: Norton, 1977.

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

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

AnnaMacías , Don Emerita of History, Ohio Wesleyan Dogma, Delaware, Ohio