Adrienne Rich
Relevant Background
- Adrienne Rich was born into a well-off, professional family in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A.
- Adrienne was the elder of two daughters. Her father was a medical doctor and pathology professor and her mother was a music composer and pianist.
- She grew up with an awareness of tension at home between the religious and cultural heritage of her father's Jewish background and her mother's southern Protestant background.
- Rich recalls being dominated by her father while growing up. He taught Rich to write poetry, but there were growing tensions as he expected her to conform to his formal and traditional ideas of poetry.
- Eventually Rich broke free of her father’s influence and composed poems that reflected on the domestic and everyday reality of her life. She refused to believe that poetry could be divorced from daily life.
- Rich has published over twenty volumes of poems and essays, edited influential lesbian-feminist journals, and lived a lifetime of campaigning for issues.
- In 1951, Rich graduated from university and also won the much esteemed Yale Younger Poet’s Prize for her first volume of poetry: ‘A Change of World’. The poet, W. H. Auden, the judge of the award, praised Rich's elegant technique, traditional and formal approach, and restrained emotional content.
- Rich's early poems showed the influence of great male poets: Frost, Yeats, Stevens and Auden. Ironically this contributed to her early renown as a poet.
- Rich gradually developed a distinctive poetic voice, reflecting on her experience as a woman feeling oppressed by inequality.
- While certain poetic movements have concentrated on the isolated inner self, or on the exquisite delight of exercising the craft of poetry, in isolation from worldly concerns, Adrienne Rich has always written poems on great public themes. Her voice is consciously public, as a witness, commentator and advocate for change.
- Before evolving her more challenging social ideas and experimental methods, Rich as a young poet mocked the notion of private Art in ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’.
- Rich’s creative instinct was issue driven as much as it was poetic.
- She mocked meaningless art for art’s sake in ‘Living in Sin’. Here she humorously depicted an artist living a bohemian life style, as he mass-produced pretty but stale still life paintings. Rich contrasted her idea of light delineating a realistic still life of the squalor of his apartment with his quickly conjured and pretty efforts. Thus she mocked so-called art that stuck to a trusted formula.
- In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Massachusetts, where she gave birth to three sons in the next five years.
- She became troubled by a conflict between her role of mother and being a poet. She experienced tensions over what was expected of her sexually and over her desire for a creative role through art.
- Around 1960 these were not yet publicly recognised or named issues. As a result she admitted she felt "monstrous" over her inability to conform.
- Rich's third book Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), was a watershed in her poetic development. Her language and style were freer, as evidenced by ‘The Roofwalker’. Her poetic voice became more intimate and she chose the male way of constructing a world as her context for writing in. Rich began to express feelings and create images around the themes of how language shapes us, limitations, struggle, escape, and choice: ‘A life I didn't choose/chose me’ [The Roofwalker].
- Around this time the emerging debates and rebellions of the 1960s including the civil rights movements, the antiwar movement and the women's movement mirrored and addressed Rich’s feelings of personal conflict, sexual alienation, and cultural oppression.
- Rich’s writings contributed considerably to this revolutionary ferment.
- In 1966, Rich taught in an English program for poor, black, and emigrant students. This experience opened her mind to the connection between language and power.
- Rich fell under the influence of radical writers like Simone De Beauvoir and James Baldwin.
- She actively campaigned for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and for the progressive Jewish movement.
- Rich’s poetry focused with an increasingly critical eye on militarism, homophobia and sexual identity, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, the use of language as a means of power and thought, various other ways of exercising of power and women's role within and beyond marriage. The latter three themes are found in abundance within the syllabus selection.
- As a result of her poetry, essays, campaigning and lecturing, Adrienne Rich has had a huge influence on the women's movement in America for the last half century. A poem like ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’ is a good illustration of Rich the pioneering feminist. This experimental form of poem uses her private life and her husband’s trouble with her new expectations to create a feminist parable. The voice in the poem, like in many of her creations, is choric, publicly singing out a description of a situation and urging her comments on the listener.
- Her rhythms and images grew more informal and contemporary as her career progressed. She tried to imitate the cinematic techniques of jump cuts and collage, as illustrated in her poem ‘Power’. This method gave rise to what some have written about as her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique.
- Rich, by her own admission, set out ‘to write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience.’
- In the poem ‘Tear Gas’, not on the course, Rich claims: ‘The will to change begins in the body not in the mind/My politics is in my body.’
- Rich’s poetic vision is full of commitment. The speaker in most of her poems is herself as poet where she gives witness to her experience of life.
- As a positive resume of her life, one could claim her mission is to speak for the powerless, especially to overcome denial and inequality in women’s lives.
- A darker resume might murmur that Rich writes like she is the first poet laureate of her self-styled post-gender era: ‘I am she: I am he’—Diving Into The Wreck.
- Her poetry has been honored with the National Book Award in 1974 for ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (which she accepted jointlywith two other poets in the name of all women who are silenced).
- Rich once refused to accept a Presidential medal as a protest against cutting funding to the arts for minorities.
- She has recieved two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry.