Adrienne Rich

As a young woman, Rich wrote elegantly crafted, tightly rhymed, prize-winning poetry. By her mid-twenties she had published A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond Cutters (1955), which received high praise from W. H. Auden and Randall Jarrell. Married at twenty-four, with three children by the time she was thirty, Adrienne Rich discovered that cooking, cleaning, shopping, caring for the children, and entertaining her husband's colleagues left her little time to write. Overwhelmed by frustration and anger about the disparity between her professional accomplishments and aspirations and the reality of traditional domestic life, she feared that she would be deprived of selfhood altogether.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Adrienne Rich experienced extraordinary conflict between her need for love and her desire to write. While she was loathe to become a "devouring ego," traditionally the prerogative of the male artist, she was nevertheless deeply disturbed by the antithetical demands of traditional domesticity and the imagination. "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1958-60) was the first of her many poems to explore the conundrum of the female artist in a society that defines self-denial as synonymous with true womanhood. In this poem, Rich finds a connection between her own conflicts and frustrations and the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir. Like these women writers, Adrienne Rich has committed herself to the understanding of the relationship between gender and culture and to creating positive, public images of women.

Adrienne Rich has tried to create a poetic web that can sustain the weight of changed consciousness and a changed life. Influenced by the open-ended writing of such poets as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Denise Levertov as well as the confessional mode of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman, Rich has evolved a dynamic style. She weaves a tightly woven mesh of lyrical assonance, consonance, slant rhyme, and onomatopoeia with political slogans of the antiwar and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, literal quotations from women's diaries, letters, and essays, and startlingly discordant diction from conversation and internal monologue that captures the anger of women whose abilities have been trivialized or denied in a patriarchal society.

Although the cultural and emotional tapestry of Adrienne Rich's poetry is sometimes uneven, her work is provocative and original. Certain strands of feeling persist throughout - a commitment to lucidity, communication, community, and social change. In later volumes, the threads of revolutionary anger and political conviction have become more distinct. This unusual combination of aesthetics and activism has won her considerable praise, including the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck, as well as censure from those critics who are distressed by the political urgency of her poetry. But for Rich, poetry is not simply an aesthetic rendering of experience, but it is also a way of changing the world.

Adrienne Rich is a political poet whose ideology is rooted in early American experience. Her prophecy of the community of women and of female energy free from patriarchal repression parallels the Puritan vision of the city on a hill triumphant over Old World corruption. In many respects Adrienne Rich's life recapitulates the lives of Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson; initially, like Bradstreet, she lived within society's framework; then, like Dickinson, she set herself apart in order to define her own emotional and social territory; finally, she has struggled to overcome her historical context in an effort to change society itself. Unlike Anne Bradstreet, who ultimately capitulated to a higher authority, or Emily Dickinson, who held her own ground, Adrienne Rich has insisted on openly challenging the current social order.