Rich, Adrienne (1929-2012), was one of the leading American poets of her generation, as well as a major voice in the women’s movement. Rich attacked what she saw as the male-dominated structure of society. Rich blamed this system for women’s oppression, as well as other forms of injustice and violence. She advocated replacing the male-dominated structure with a set of values derived from the experiences and insights of women. In her later work, Rich also increasingly addressed issues of race, class, and ethnic background. She wrote several poems in which she reflected on her own Jewish background.
Rich anchored her larger political concerns in individual lives, her own and those of other women. Rich’s poetry reflects her willingness to admit and wrestle with contradictions—for example, her awareness that anger can be both destructive and creative. Such contradictions often give her poems a charged, dramatic quality, as though the poet were struggling to make up her mind before our eyes. She began writing in rhyme and meter in the 1950’s but gradually developed a looser, more flexible style.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. The best introduction to her work is The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001 (2002). Later collections include The School Among the Ruins (2004), Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007), Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (2011), and Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012 (2012). Rich also wrote several important prose books. They include Of Woman Born (1976), Arts of the Possible (2002), and Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry (published in 2018, after her death). Rich died on March 27, 2012.
