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RICH, Adrienne (Cecile)

Born 16 May 1929, Baltimore, Maryland

Daughter of Arnold and Helen Rich; married Alfred H. Conrad,1953 (died 1970); life partner, Michelle Cliff; children: three

Adrienne Rich was brought up in a Southern, Jewish household which she has described as "white and middle-class … full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write." From her father's library Rich read such writers as Rosetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Keats, Blake, Arnold, Carlyle, and Pater, and as a child she was already writing poetry. Neither she nor her younger sister was sent to school until fourth grade: Dr. Rich, a professor of medicine, and Helen Rich, a trained composer and pianist, believed that they could educate their own children in a more enlightened, albeit unorthodox, way. In fact, most of the responsibility fell to the mother; she carried out the practical task of teaching them all their lessons, including music.

Rich's remaining education progressed conventionally enough, and she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951. That same year she enjoyed success with the publication of her first book of poems, A Change of World, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award. Although Auden's tone in the preface has been criticized as condescending, he focused immediately on Rich's careful handling of form and clarity of thought: "The poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs: that for a first volume is a good deal." Indeed, critic after critic has noted Rich's stylistic control and elegance as the hallmark of her early achievement.

This restrained style was to continue through the 1950s and be perfected in her second volume, The Diamond Cutters (1955). In a review of this volume, Randall Jarrell called her not only an "enchanting poet," but "endearing and delightful" as well. But in the early 1960s, Rich startled her critical audience with a shift to more political and feminist themes and an increasingly experimental style. Of her early experience, she has said, "In those years formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up barehanded.…In the late 1950s I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman."

From 1953 to 1966, Rich resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her three sons and her husband. These were years of personal and political growth and crisis. Her teaching career reflected her political commitment as she became involved in the SEEK and Open Admissions Programs of City College in New York City, where she took up residence after 1966. Her husband died tragically in 1970. Rich continued teaching in the New York area until 1979, when she gave up her professorship at Rutgers University and settled in western Massachusetts with "the woman who shares my life."

Rich's early poetry is marked by a detached and objective formalism. The poems from her first two volumes reveal those qualities so dear to the critics: the skillful use of meter and rhyme and the simple and precise phrasing that serves equally abstract thought and concrete description. "The Ultimate Act," a meditative sonnet in octosyllabics, begins in the tones and syntax of Shakespeare, yet concludes with a line that is full of the elegiac ambiguities of Wallace Stevens. Other poems, such as "Pictures by Vuillard" and "The Celebration in the Plaza," captivate the reader by means of the occasional exotic adjective and an evocation of place. There are also poems here anticipating Rich's later commitment to exploring feminine experience.

Rich wrote the title poem of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) "in a longer and looser mode than I'd ever trusted myself with before. It was an extraordinary relief to write that poem." This and other poems here, composed of irregular stanzas, are about madness, anger, waste, and failure in women's lives. "A Marriage in the Sixties" and "End of an Era," as well as "Novella," and "Readings of History" explore the self in relation to society, intimacy, war, violence, and pacifism. In "From Morning-Glory to Petersburg," Rich says, "…Now knowledge finds me out; / in all its risible untidiness / it traces me to each address, / dragging in things I never thought about."

Rich's next three books, Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971) carry her further into this new knowledge. Rich goes beyond the cadences of Frost, Auden, and Yeats, the tones of a mainstream tradition that modulates her voice in the early poems. Instead she draws upon diverse material—translating from Dutch, adapting poems from Yiddish and Russian, and experimenting with the ghazal-like forms inspired by the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib.

In the 1970s, Rich's poetry revealed an urgent and driving tone expressive of her militant feminism. Critics worried politics and ideology were undermining the poetry, but Rich made no such distinction between politics and poetry. Diving into the Wreck (1973) is an attempt to start from the bottom, speaking of matters as yet unspoken in words as yet undefined. There are disturbing poems of pain, anger, and violence. Yet coexistent with this anger is a deep sorrow over our vulnerabilities and our frustrated ideals.

In The Dream of a Common Language (1978), Rich begins to rebuild and to document the difficult process of re-vision. Expanding on an earlier method, she draws some of her material from historical figures: Marie Curie, Clara Westhoff (who married poet Rainer Maria Rilke), and Elvira Shatayev (the leader of a women's mountain-climbing team). But her primary concern seems to be to provide mythic structures to confirm and nourish the vital hopes and experiences of women. Thus in her latest phase Rich has not abandoned form and restraint; rather she is searching for a new poetics defined by and for women.

Rich's concern with myth has also appeared in her prose. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) is a carefully documented attempt to demystify motherhood as a patriarchal institution. She has also published widely on poetry, feminism, and lesbianism.

In the 1980s, Rich became a poet who at times received standing ovations before she read—from audiences sometimes numbering in thousands, not hundreds. By the early 1990s, although some still deplored her work as "polemical," she was acclaimed as both critic and poet, and 40 years after the publication of her first book of poems, she was beginning to be assigned her permanent niche in American literature. Rich is "widely recognized as the preeminent American poet-critic of the post-World War II years," wrote Elaine Showalter. Rich "will be remembered in literary history as one of the first American women to claim a public voice in lyric," wrote Helen H. Vendler. Further, among many living women, Rich came to be held in affectionate esteem as more than poet and critic: "This complex and controversial writer, who began as poet-ingenue, polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother," wrote Carol Muske, "has progressed in life (and in her poems, which remain intimately tied to her life's truth) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader, lesbian separatist and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature—becoming finally a Great Outlaw Mother."

Certainly the honors flowed. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force gave Rich the Fund for Human Dignity Award in 1981. She was a nominee for the 1982 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and made an honorary fellow of the Modern Language Association in 1985. In 1986 Rich won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize of the Modern Poetry Association and American Council for the Arts, in 1987 the Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, in 1989 the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award, and in 1992 the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize for poetry. She received honorary doctor of letters degrees from Brandeis University (1987), City College of New York (1990), and Howard University (1990). Meanwhile, from 1980 to 1984 she coedited Sinister Wisdom with longtime companion Michelle Cliff and served after 1989 as a member of an editorial collective for Bridges, a Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends. She taught, becoming White Professor at Large at Cornell University (1981-85), Clark Lecturer and distinguished visiting professor at Scripps College (1983), visiting professor at San Jose State University (1985-86), Burgess Lecturer at Pacific Oaks College (1986), and beginning in 1986, Professor of English and Feminist Studies at Stanford University.

During the 1980s, Rich published a new volume of selected prose and five books of poetry, including The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (1984). An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 appeared in 1991. As before, a dominant theme in her works is the search for integrity and meaning in her own identity. Echoing an early poem in which she had described herself as "split at the root / neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel" ("Reading of History," 1960) and others such as "The Spirit of Place" (in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far), she asks in "Sources": " From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew? / split at the root.… With whom do you believe your lot is cast?… / I think somehow, somewhere / every poem of mine must repeat those questions."

In "Sources," a long, moving autobiographical poem published first as a chapbook (1983, reprinted in Your Native Land, Your Life, 1986), Rich places her own past under "a powerful, womanly lens," addressing several of the 23 parts of the poem to her father or her husband, both Jews at last seen to be similar. A woman born of a gentile mother and thus not a Jew under Jewish law, yet fully aware Nazi logic would have made her "a Mischling, first-degree—nonexempt from the Final Solution," Rich reflects on her "own ambivalence as a Jew; the daily, mundane anti-Semitisms of [her] entire life." Repeating her key phrase in "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity," Rich increasingly sees herself as fragmented and conflicted: "Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, antiracist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root—that I will never bring them whole" (1982, reprinted in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985, 1986).

In bringing these multiple selves together, Rich has in the last decade developed an extraordinary empathy with others, particularly with the outsiders of the world. She uses her increasingly damaged body (see "The Skier") as a means to understanding: "I'm already living the rest of my life / not under conditions of my choosing / wired into pain… the body pain and the pain on the streets / are not the same but you can learn / from the edges that blur" ("Contradictions: Tracking Poems," Your Native Land). A lesbian who in 1976 came out in print with Twenty-One Love Poems, Rich has continued to demonstrate in her poetry that "Two women sleeping / together have more than their sleep to defend" ("Images," A Wild Patience). In important prose essays—such as "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1979) and "Invisibility in Academe" (1984)—she warns that "invisibility is not just a matter of being told to keep your private life private; it's the attempt to fragment you, to prevent you from integrating love and work and feelings and ideas, with the empowerment that that can bring." A radical feminist, Rich has continued to write about a range of women, identifying passionately with victims and merging with them: "She is carrying my madness.… She walks along I.S. 93 howling / in her barefeet / She is number 6375411 / in a cellblock in Arkansas / She has fallen asleep at least in the battered / women's safe-house and I dread / her dreams that I also dream." Often she extends her empathy to the world, as in the poem "In the Wake of Home": "What if I tell you your home / is this planet of warworn children / women and children standing in line or milling / endlessly calling each other's names" (Your Native Land).

In a major essay, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location" (1984), Rich discusses how she came to experience "whiteness as a point of location for which I needed to take responsibility." Born female in a segregated hospital, she was likewise born into whiteness, "though the implications of white identity were mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the universe." Extending her insight to criticism, Rich challenges those feminists who have formulated a largely "white-centered theory." Moreover, she newly urges a greater understanding of "differences among women, men, places, times, cultures, conditions, classes, movements."

Increasingly, Rich has broadened her sense of what it means to be a poet. Drawing the mantle of public poet more closely about herself in "North American Time" (1983), she acknowledges and accepts responsibility: "One line typed twenty years ago / can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint.… We move but our words stand / become responsible / all you can do is choose them / or choose / to remain silent." In Time's Power (1989), in the short poem "Dreamwood," Rich fashions a "dreammap" for the "last age of her life" by which to "recognize that poetry / isn't revolution but a way of knowing / why it must come."