Adrienne Rich, 1929–2012

In her senior year of college, in 1951, the young Adrienne Rich published a first book of poems, in conventional rhyme and meter, that earned her the Yale Younger Poets award and caught the eye of a master. Her poems, said W.H. Auden, “speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.” He couldn’t foresee that her poetic skill would eventually give form to an eloquent anger, and that her life’s work would confront her male elders and the patriarchal world they had fashioned.

Rich was born in Baltimore to an Episcopalian mother and a Jewish father, said the San Francisco Chronicle. She attended Radcliffe College, married Harvard economist Alfred Conrad, and had three sons before she was 30. The family moved to New York City in the 1960s, and Rich became more attuned to “the violent effects of society’s oppression of women.” In her 1963 poem “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” she described a married woman’s mind “mouldering like wedding-cake” and “crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge / of mere fact.”

As Rich became more politically active and began writing about being a lesbian, her marriage became untenable, said the Los Angeles Times. In 1970 she left her husband, who committed suicide later that year. “She threw herself into the women’s movement and anti-war protests,” and won a National Book Award for her collection Diving Into the Wreck, one of her most acclaimed books. The title poem casts the writer as a diver, among those “who find our way / back to the scene / carrying a knife, a camera / a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear.”

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Rich kept to her political guns, refusing the National Medal of Arts in 1997 to protest the government’s “cynical” treatment of art, which she said “means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.” But she “was at bottom a writer of poems,” said The New York Times, and however much she burned with rage, “her poetry constantly rises from its own ashes.”