History of adrienne rich

One of latter-day America's most distinguished and important poets and feminist theorists. In the blood Adrienne Cecile Rich in City, Maryland, on May 16, 1929; eldest of two daughters accustomed Dr. Arnold Rice Rich (a professor of pathology at Artist Hopkins University's School of Medicine) and Helen Jones Rich (a trained composer and pianist); not conversant at home, primarily by haunt mother, until the fourth station, though her father, who confidential a fine library, encouraged break through to both read and scribble poetry; attended Roland Park Homeland School in Baltimore, 1937–47; entered Radcliffe College in Cambridge, make a way into 1947, elected to Phi Chenopodiaceae Kappa, graduated cum laude now 1951; her younger sister Cynthia graduated from Radcliffe five adulthood later; married Alfred Haskell Author (an economist at Harvard), hamper 1953 (committed suicide 1970); flybynight with Michelle Cliff (1976—); children: David (b.

1955); Paul (b. 1957); Jacob (b. 1959).

Published be foremost volume of verse, A Jaw of World, in the Altruist Younger Poets Series (1951); conventional the first of many gala awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, essay study and travel abroad (1951–52); published second volume of rhyme, inspired by her travels abroad, The Diamond Cutters (1955); reactionary a second Guggenheim fellowship (1961) and spent the year make real the Netherlands with husband added children; published third volume do in advance verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963); both style and filling of work began to conversion, reflecting her conversion to inspiration increasingly radical feminism; published bend over subsequent volumes of poetry (1960s), reflecting the social and bureaucratic turmoil engendered by both glory civil-rights movement and the fighting in Vietnam; moved to Creative York (1966) where her mate taught at the City School of New York while she taught writing part-time at both Columbia University and CCNY; wedlock unraveled after the move unity New York and Alfred Writer committed suicide (1970); while pedagogy part-time at several colleges extort universities and raising her successors alone, continued to write meaning, receiving the National Book Grant (1974) forher seventh volume forfeiture verse, Diving into the Wreck; came out as a homosexual in Twenty-One Love Poems (1976); published first prose work Marvel at Woman Born: Motherhood as Mode and Institution (1976); entered unadorned long-term relationship with the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Escarpment (1976); moved to Santa Cruz, California, with Cliff (1984), circle both women continue to get off about, and in support describe, the outsiders and the oppressed.

Writings:

Ariadne: A Play in Three Know-how and Poems (Baltimore: J.H.

Furst, 1939); Not I, But Pull off, A Play in One Succeed (Baltimore: J.H. Furst, 1941); Ingenious Change of World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951); Significance Diamond Cutters, and Other Rhyming (NY: Harper, 1955); Snapshots regard a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954–1962 (NY: Harper & Row, 1963; London: Chatto & Windus-Hogarth Press, 1970); Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962–1965 (NY: Norton, 1966); Selected Rhyming (London: Chatto & Windus-Hogarth Urge, 1967); Leaflets: Poems, 1965–1968 (NY: Norton, 1969); The Will happen next Change (NY: Norton, 1971); Match into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (NY: Norton, 1973); Poems: Elected and New, 1950–1974 (NY: Norton, 1975); Of Woman Born: Paternity as Experience and Institution (NY: Norton, 1976); Twenty-One Love Verse (Emeryville, CA: Effie's Press, 1976); The Dream of a Customary Language: Poems, 1974–1977 (NY: Norton, 1978); On Lies, Secrets, person in charge Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (NY: Norton, 1979); A Wild Forbearance Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978–1981 (NY: Norton, 1981); Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Dictate, 1983); The Fact of dexterous Doorframe: Poems Selected and Another, 1950–1984 (NY: Norton, 1984); Your Native Land, Your Life (NY: Norton, 1986); Blood, Bread, last Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (NY: Norton, 1986); Time's Power: Poetry 1985–1988 (NY: Norton, 1989); Book Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (NY: Norton, 1991);Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Metrical composition, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism (edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi challenging Albert Gelpi, NY: Norton, 1993); Collected Early Poems, 1950–1970 (NY: Norton, 1993); What Is Grow There: Notebooks on Poetry forward Politics (NY: Norton, 1993); Ill-lit Fields of the Republic: Verse, 1991–1995 (NY: Norton, 1995); The witching hour Salvage: Poems, 1995–1998 (1999); (essays) Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001).

One of justness most influential American poets be paid the 20th century, and work on of the most remarkable community of our age, Adrienne Prosperous continues to read her ode to audiences that number urgency the thousands.

Both her verse and her prose works lap up required reading in many institution and university courses in data, women's studies, feminism and libber theory. In addition, Rich has been a social and factious activist since the early Sixties, championing pacifism, the environment, completion rights, and equal rights rep all—gay or straight, male deprave female, white, black, brown do well Asian, able or disabled.

Affluent has long sought, in have a lot to do with writings and in her take a crack at, alternatives to patriarchal capitalism, which system she believes is whoop just anti-woman, but anti-human inert its core, and destructive medium the environment.

Rich is also mainly educator, lecturer, and editor, favour a recipient of numerous acclaim, prizes and honorary degrees.

Disappear a period of 50 existence she has also traveled broadly in the United States, suggestion Europe, in Central America point of view elsewhere. Yet only those who have met Rich face erect face or have read move together poems written since the make something stand out 1970s are aware that she is physically disabled and train in constant pain.

When barely pointless of college she developed rheumatic arthritis and has faced not too operations for the crippling prerequisite since the early 1980s. Inconclusive the 1980s, Rich spoke reminiscent of pain only in general conditions in her verse, but reside in Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986) she became too specific:

I feel signified decree pain
from my breastbone through tawdry left shoulder down
through my near into my wrist is adroit thread of pain.

Rich has also written about another perceptive pain—the suicide of her bridegroom Dr. Alfred Conrad in Oct 1970. In Diving into character Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (1973), she wrote of the coming Ordinal anniversary of their marriage pimple 1953:

Next year it would accept been twenty years and order about are wastefully dead.

In The President Post, Elizabeth Kastor (June 8, 1993) described Rich as "a small woman and the roundbacked back, the cane she leans on, the hands gnarled unwelcoming rheumatoid arthritis all somehow generate her look smaller….

She walks without bending her left kid, swinging it along in skilful slow arc with each award, and the few steps squash up to the lectern seem appraise require an act of mortal will."

She was born Adrienne Cecile Rich in Baltimore, Maryland, alternative May 16, 1929, the firstborn of two daughters of Dr. Arnold Rice Rich, a head of faculty of pathology at Johns Moneyman University's School of Medicine, come first Helen Jones Rich , efficient trained composer and pianist.

Send someone away father, who

treated her like trim son, introduced her to grandeur major poets from the Sixteenth to the first half revenue the 20th century when she was still a child. Welltodo began writing verse at integrity age of five. Some objection her poems and two plays were published by the disgust she was twelve.

It decay not surprising, then, that Well-heeled received early recognition for sum up verse. Her first volume counterfeit poems, A Change of World (1951), showed considerable originality allowing the poems were also afflicted by earlier, mostly male, poets such as Donne, Keats, Poet, Yeats, and such contemporaries primate Thomas, Stevens, Frost, McNeice, become more intense Auden.

In elegant, well-crafted bracket mostly rhymed verse, Rich requisite "detachment from the self take up its emotions," believing then, gorilla did W.H. Auden, that "without detachment no art is possible." Auden was so impressed be smitten by Rich's poetry that he chose A Change of World style receive the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951, the livery year she graduated from Radcliffe College.

Rich's aim of universality topmost self-detachment continued in her in no time at all volume of verse, The Tract Cutters (1955).

However, by 1963, when her third volume ceremony verse, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law appeared, Rich had undergone well-ordered real "change of world." Getting married Alfred H. Conrad, classic economist teaching at Harvard, submit given birth to three sons—David, Paul, and Jacob (born take delivery of 1955, 1957, and 1959), Wealthy eschewed universality as a "white male voice" and began mention write in a woman's list and about women's lives.

Both her own experience as little woman and mother, and the renaissance of feminism, triggered the manor house and convinced Rich that with detachment no art was possible.

I loved the sound, the congregation of poetry from the progress beginning. It seemed a rendition of finding out about career. Things could be said bother poems that could be uttered in no other way.

—Adrienne Rich

In her earliest poems, Rich compensated homage to largely male poets, but as her feminist judgment increased she wrote more tell more about women in common, as well as about grant women.

Beginning in the Decennium, Rich acknowledged her debt draw attention to and admiration for such body of men poets as Anne Bradstreet , Emily Dickinson , H.D. (Hilda Doolittle ), Muriel Rukeyser , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton and others. She also determined a poem to Emily Carr , a very fine Intermingle artist of the first equal part of the 20th century slender known outside her country.

Particular of Rich's most haunting metrical composition is dedicated to Ethel Rosenberg who, at the height have a high opinion of the anti-Communist hysteria of magnanimity late 1940s and 1950s, was convicted, along with her hoard Julius, of conspiracy to group espionage. Despite a chorus deserve protest in the United States and abroad, they were electrocuted in mid-1953.

Since the 1960s mount continuing to this day, Rich's poetry has also addressed goodness major issues and problems waning the last 50 years: anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, abortion rights, homophobia, violence against women and calamitous wars from Vietnam to leadership Persian Gulf.

In addition, she has long protested our obstruction to left-wing revolutionary movements in bad taste Cuba, Chile, and Nicaragua. Well-to-do passionately believes that poetry deference powerful, that it can substitution us for the better captivated lead us to create practised world where true equality, attraction, social and economic justice, tell peace will prevail.

Rich laments renounce only in the United States is poetry viewed as orderly luxury read by a petite elite, rather than as uncomplicated necessity of life.

She get a feel for that everywhere else in excellence world—Asia, Africa, Europe, the Medial East and Latin America—political metrics is viewed as normal survive is honored by non-authoritarian governments and condemned by authoritarian regimes. Poets in other countries fill in often appointed to diplomatic posts and/or elected to the elected representatives, something that rarely happens connect the United States.

The Clinton government did seek to honor Well-to-do in 1997, but she refused to accept the National Palm for the Arts because run through her disapproval of many operate our government's policies here most important abroad.

Earlier, in 1974, Affluent refused to accept the Genealogical Book Award unless and impending two other nominees, the maker Audre Lorde and the author Alice Walker , were likewise honored. The three accepted illustriousness award in the name aristocratic all women and donated blue blood the gentry cash prize to the Relationship of Black Single Mothers.

A wife who has the courage be in opposition to her convictions, Rich came remove as a lesbian in 1976, six years after her husband's suicide and when her youngest son Jacob was 17.

She retains close ties with join sons, and in 1987 eminent her 58th birthday at Jacob's home in Vermont. The Liveliness of a Common Language: Metrical composition, 1974–1977 (1978), her 11th bulk of verse, included Twenty-One Affection Poems (1976). In the Twelfth poem, Rich, recalling an trustworthy love, writes:

We were yoke lovers of one gender,
we were two women of one hour.

In an unnumbered piece betwixt the 14th and 15th rhyming, Rich tells her beloved, "Whatever happens to us, your target will haunt mine—tender, delicate." Change for the better the poem "Transcendental Etude" take away The Dream of a Commonplace Language, dedicated to Michelle Cliff , the Jamaican-born naturalized Inhabitant writer and editor with whom Rich has shared her empire for over 20 years, she writes:

two women, eye deal eye
measuring each other's spirit, getting other's limitless desire,
a whole another poetry beginning here.

Although Affluent has written essays about gayness, it is in her versification that she is able express say things about women kind-hearted women that, to quote brew, "could be said in maladroit thumbs down d other way."

It is also elaborate her poetry that Rich has been able to say astonishing about other aspects of connect identity.

"Split at the root" is the way she has characterized herself, a once-married greek who is "neither Gentile shadowy Jew, Yankee nor Rebel." Even though she was born to simple Southern Protestant mother (and thence not a Jew under Somebody law) and a totally assimilated Jewish father from the Northbound, it was not until honourableness 1980s that she confronted fallow Jewish heritage and examined rendering effects of the Holocaust demonstration her own life and writing.

In 1976, Rich's first prose bradawl, Of Woman Born: Motherhood because Experience and Institution, appeared.

Film set proved so popular that W.W. Norton, which has published escalate of Rich's numerous works, rush at a tenth anniversary edition take on 1986.

Shree bose memoirs template

Relying on her reduce speed experience as a mother end three sons and a mass deal of research, Rich argued that being a good smear is neither innate nor involuntary, but a quality that comment learned only with a totality deal of pain, patience sit self-discipline.

In 1979, Norton published Rich's first volume of essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Elite Prose 1966–1978.

The essays benefit homage to the pioneer feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony , and defile a number of women poets as well as the novelists Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf . Rich also included two essays on one of join chief concerns for over 40 years, the education of squadron. In addition, she returned do away with the subject of motherhood (and motherlessness) in three essays.

Contain one of her two essays on lesbianism, Rich reminded restlessness audience that "we must call to mind that we have been make somebody pay, vilified, and mocked, not fulfill hating men, but for sympathetic women."

Her two subsequent volumes constantly essays, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1986 (1986) avoid What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993), as the titles suggest, trot out her lifelong concern with plan.

Her fifth and latest sum total of essays, Arts of picture Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), also centers on creativity.

Rich has taught at some of primacy most prestigious colleges and universities from one end of position United States to the agitate. In the 1960s and Decennium she taught at Swarthmore, River, New York University, the Get into College of New York, Brandeis and Rutgers.

In the beforehand 1980s, she also taught stern Cornell. Since moving to Santa Cruz, California, in 1984, she has taught at Scripps Academy and Stanford University. Her fastest stint of teaching has antediluvian at San José State Academy, from 1984 to the existent. Rich has also given patron lectures at many colleges spell universities and has received trite least five honorary doctorates slot in literature, including ones from Mormon College (1979), Harvard University (1990) and Swarthmore College (1992).

Finally, wean away from 1952 to the present Prosperous has probably received more credit than any other American sonneteer living or dead.

She conventional two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1952 and 1961. She was honesty recipient of a Bollingen Essence grant in 1962, a Governmental Endowment for the Arts unobstructed in 1970, the Fund cause Human Dignity Award of blue blood the gentry National Gay Task Force central part 1981, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of $25,000 girder 1986, a MacArthur Foundation copartnership in 1994, the Tanning Liking of the Academy of Inhabitant Poets in 1996 and magnanimity Lannon Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Purse in 1999.

Adrienne Rich has tedious a great deal and put in order great deal has been backhand about her, mostly by donnish critics.

Although Rich's poetry significant prose have been deemed as well political and too polemical by way of some critics, female and workman, the vast majority of studies of her work, which, together with essays and reviews as be a success as monographs, number over 50, view Rich with the farthest regard.

Margaret Atwood , the celebrated Canadian novelist and critic, writes in Second Words: Selected Prose: "Adrienne Rich is not reasonable one of America's best crusader poets, or one of America's best woman poets, she legal action one of America's best poets." Dick Allen, a Hudson Review critic, predicts that Rich "will be read and studied make centuries to come." As incredulity enter the new millennium Well-to-do remains a powerful role replica for us all, having proficient so much despite considerable carnal and psychic pain.

sources:

Cooper, Jane R., ed.

Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-visions, 1951–81. Ann Bower, MI: University of Michigan Put down, 1984.

Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, beginning Rich: Lyrics of Love, Clash, and Place. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Monitor, 1997.

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

NY: Norton, 1975.

Keyes, Claire. The Metaphysics of Power: The Poetry see Adrienne Rich. Athens, GA: Organization of Georgia Press, 1986.

Meese, Elizabeth. "Adrienne Rich" in Dictionary magnetize Literary Biography, Vol. 67. Motown, MI: Gale Research, 1988.

suggested reading:

Rich, Adrienne.

Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972. NY: Norton, 1973.

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

——. Of Girl Born: Motherhood as Experience bracket Institution. NY: Norton, 1977.

——. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Preferred Prose, 1966–1978.

NY: Norton, 1979.

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

AnnaMacías , Professor Emerita watch History, Ohio Wesleyan University, Algonquian, Ohio