Adrienne Cecile Rich (; May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized the rigid identities that are sometimes created by feminism, called for feminism that is flexible and open to being transformed, and drew attention to the existing current of solidarity and creativity among women, which she named the "lesbian continuum."
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the book. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts to protest House Speaker Newt Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929, the elder of two sisters. Her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, was a concert pianist and a composer. Her father was from a Jewish family, and her mother was a Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. Her paternal grandfather Samuel Rice was an Ashkenazi immigrant from Košice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present day Slovakia), while her paternal grandmother was a Sephardic Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Samuel Rice owned a successful shoe store in Birmingham, Alabama.
Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father, who encouraged her to read but also to write poetry. Her interest in literature was sparked within her father's library, where she read the work of writers such as Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson. Her father was ambitious for Adrienne and "planned to create a prodigy". Adrienne Rich and her younger sister were home schooled by their mother until Adrienne commenced public education in the fourth grade. The poems Sources and After Dark document her relationship with her father, describing how she worked hard to fulfill her parents' ambitions—moving into a world in which excellence was expected.
In later years, Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a "good old fashioned girls' school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned." After graduating from high school, Rich earned her diploma at Radcliffe College of Harvard University, where she focused on poetry and learning the writing craft, encountering no women teachers at all.
In 1951, her senior year at college, Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was chosen by the poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Following graduation, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year. After visiting Florence, she chose not to return to Oxford, and spent her remaining time in Europe writing and exploring Italy.
In 1953, Rich married Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University she had met as an undergraduate. She said of the match: "I married in part because I knew no better way to disconnect from my first family. I wanted what I saw as a full woman's life, whatever was possible." They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had three sons. In 1955, she published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, a collection she said she wished had not been published, saying "a lot of the poems are incredibly derivative", and citing a "pressure to produce again... to make sure I was still a poet". That year she received the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her three children were born in 1955 (David), 1957 (Pablo) and 1959 (Jacob).
The 1960s began a period of change in Rich's life: she received the National Institute of Arts and Letters award (1960), her second Guggenheim Fellowship to work at the Netherlands Economic Institute (1961), and the Bollingen Foundation grant for the translation of Dutch poetry (1962).
In 1963, Rich published her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which was a much more personal work examining her female identity, reflecting the increasing tensions she experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marking a substantial change in Rich's style and subject matter. In her 1982 essay "Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity", Rich states: "The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me." The book met with harsh reviews. She comments, "I was seen as 'bitter' and 'personal'; and to be personal was to be disqualified, and that was very shaking because I'd really gone out on a limb ... I realised I'd gotten slapped over the wrist, and I didn't attempt that kind of thing again for a long time."
Moving her family to New York in 1966, Rich became involved with the New Left and became heavily involved in anti-war, civil rights, and feminist activism. Her husband took a teaching position at City College of New York.
In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Her collections from this period include Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971), which reflect increasingly radical political content and interest in poetic form.
From 1967 to 1969, Rich lectured at Swarthmore College and taught at Columbia University School of the Arts as an adjunct professor in the Writing Division. Additionally, in 1968, she began teaching in the SEEK program in City College of New York, a position she continued until 1975. During this time, Rich also received the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry Magazine. Rich and Conrad hosted anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment. Rising tensions began to split the marriage, and Rich moved out in mid-1970, getting herself a small studio apartment nearby. Shortly afterward, in October, Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself, widowing Rich.
In 1971, she was the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America and spent the next year and a half teaching at Brandeis University as the Hurst visiting professor of creative writing. Diving into the Wreck, a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, split the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg, The Fall of America. Declining to accept it individually, Rich was joined by the two other feminist poets nominated, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, to accept it on behalf of all women "whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world." The following year, Rich took up the position of the Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College.
In 1976, Rich began her same-sex partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, which lasted until her death. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs." The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing, themes which run throughout her work afterwards, especially in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001). In her analytical work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell suggests these works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she (Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe". During this period, Rich also wrote a number of key socio-political essays, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," one of the first to address the theme of lesbian existence. In this essay, she asks "how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding." Some of the essays were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). In integrating such pieces into her work, Rich claimed her sexuality and took a role in leadership for sexual equality.