adrienne rich poetry essay

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Unlearning “Compulsory Heterosexuality”: The Evolution of Adrienne Rich’s Poetry

• May 20, 2021

Angel Chaisson

            Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet and essayist, best known for her contributions to the radical feminist movement. She notably popularized the term “compulsory heterosexuality” in the 1980’s through her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience,” which brought her to the forefront of feminist and lesbian discourse. Her article delves deeply into men’s power over women’s expression of sexuality, and how the expectation of heterosexuality further oppresses lesbian women. My purpose is not to question Rich’s assessment of sexuality and oppression, but rather to examine how the institution of heterosexuality as depicted in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience” impacted her life and career.  Before elaborating on Rich’s argument, it is important to clarify her definition of compulsory heterosexuality as sexuality that is “both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women” (“Compulsory” 24). One of the defining arguments of the essay is that heterosexuality is a tool of the oppressors, playing into politics, economics, and cultural propaganda— that sexuality has always been weaponized against women to perpetuate the inequality of the sexes (“Compulsory” 32). The foundation of Rich’s argument is Kathleen Gough’s “The Origin of the Family,” in which Gough attributes men’s power over women to various acts of repression, such as denying or forcing sexuality onto women, commanding or exploiting their labor, controlling reproductive rights, physically confining or restricting women’s movements, using women as transactional objects, depriving them of creativity, and barring them from the academic and professional sphere (“Compulsory” 9). Although Gough only describes such oppression in relation to inequality, Rich believes these behaviors are a direct result of institutionalized heterosexuality; her determination to dismantle said institution drives the anger and passion present in both her essays and her poetry.

As stated before, Gough mentions that a method of male control is stifling women’s creativity and hindering their professional success. Part of the control stems from the heavy scrutiny on female professionals such as Rich, who explains that men force women into limiting boxes: “women [. . .] learn to behave in a complaisantly and ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because they discover this is their true qualification for employment” (“Compulsory” 13).Women writers, for example, would be more likely to receive praise from male critics for corroborating a positive portrayal of marriage instead of depicting real and serious struggles faced by wives. In fact, it is not difficult to find intense criticism of Rich’s feminist ideals by men who sought to silence her. In the essay “Snapshots of a Feminist Poet,” Meredith Benjamin states that Rich faced the typical backlash that other feminist poets did— her writing was “too personal, too close to the female body, not universal, and privileged politics at the expense of aesthetic and literary merit” (633). The personalization of her poetry was heavily scrutinized, even by her own father, Arnold Rich. He found her writing “too private and personal for public consumption” and rejected her casual exploration of the female body, or in his words, the “wombs of ordure and nausea” (Benjamin 6). The intensity of such criticisms further support Gough’s notion of men suppressing female creativity, fueling Rich’s fire.

Lesbian women suffer even further beneath this heteronormative structure— heterosexist prejudice, in Rich’s terms— because of their sexuality and gender expression. Lesbians must fall within the typical expression of femininity and cannot be “out” on the job; they must remain closeted for the sake of their personal safety and the possibility of success. Although she does not make the connection herself within her essay on the topic, Rich’s personal and professional life centered around maintaining outward heterosexuality. Her experiences fit well within her own descriptions of lesbian suffering; having to “[deny] the truth of her outside relationships or private life” while “pretending to be not merely heterosexual but a heterosexual woman” (“Compulsory” 13). During her seventeen-year marriage to Alfred Conrad (1953-1970), she reluctantly filled the roles of mother and wife, her experience with both drastically changing her poetic approach. It was not until six years after Conrad’s death that Rich established herself as a lesbian through the release of Twenty-One Love Poems in 1976 and her public relationship with writer Michelle Cliff the same year. Rich’s deeply personal style of writing allows one to construct a distinct line of growth and development through her poetic work, which was fully intentional on her part. In his essay “Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics,” Craig Werner quotes Rich on her decision to include dates at the end of every poem by 1956, viewing each finished piece as a “single, encapsulated event” that showed her life changing through a “long, continuous process” ( Werner ). Over the years, Rich’s struggles were documented and immortalized through her ever-changing poetic voice and style. I will examine the timeline of Adrienne Rich’s poetry from 1958 to 1976 to determine how Rich’s work evolved from the beginning of her marriage all the way to her divorce and eventual coming out. Each poem offers a unique glimpse into Rich’s inner conflict with compulsory heterosexuality and the institution of marriage. Each poem mentioned in this essay can be found in Barbara and Albert Gelpi’s 1995 publication, Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose.

Pre-Divorce Poetry (1953-1970)

            The first collection of poetry published after Adrienne Rich’s marriage to Alfred Conrad was The Diamond Cutters: and Other Poems , released in 1953. According to Ed Pavlic’s essay “‘Outward in Larger Terms / A Mind Inhaling Exigency’: Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems,” the collection is largely ignored, likely because Rich herself “disavow[ed]” the work as “derivative” (9). The poems largely reflected the formalist tradition of poetry, much different than the poetry Rich would write in the late 1950’s and beyond. Regardless, it is worth examining some of the work from that time to establish a foundation for Rich’s growth as a writer; there are already inklings of dissatisfaction with the heteronormative framework of love. Here are the opening lines from “Living in Sin”:

               She had thought the studio would keep itself;

               no dust upon the furniture of love.

               Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

               the panes relieved of grime. (Rich et al. 6).

The speaker of the poem seems to be assessing her belief that the “furniture of love” would maintain itself. Describing love as furniture conjures up the image of something solid and fixed in place. Without careful attention, furniture collects dust and dirt over time and becomes a tarnished version of what it once was. She acknowledges this later in the poem when the speaker dusts the tabletops and cleans the house, declaring that she is “back in love again” by the evening, “though not so wholly” (Rich et al. 6, lines 23-24). The progression of events shows that the doubt the speaker feels is persistent; the dust will always return, no matter how often it is swept aside. The poem calls into question the expectations she had of her recent marriage: did she expect her relationship to survive without nurturing? Was she hoping that she could still thrive as a woman and a writer under the strict heterosexual constraints of marriage? In “Friction of the Mind: The Early Poetry of Adrienne Rich,” Mary Slowik cites this early poetry as the breeding ground for Rich’s anger: “Rich makes an uncompromising examination of the secure world she must leave behind and an even more painful inquiry into the disorderly and isolated world she must enter” (143) .The new life Rich enters is dominated by a heterosexual framework— it would only take a few more years for her experiences as a wife and mother to radicalize her feminism and transform her poetry.

“Snapshot of a Daughter-in-Law” (dated 1958-1960) is featured in a collection of the same name and is arguably one of Rich’s most prominent earlier works. Although the poem barely scratches the surface of her steadily growing anger, it represents “early attempts at understanding a world of deep displacements, painful isolation and underlying violence” (Slowik 148). The collection received much attention due to its innovative form and feminist themes; it contrasted starkly with Rich’s previous collection and potentially the “reinvention” of her career (Pavlic 9). The poem itself is divided into ten numbered sections, each one with an ambiguous female voice. The pronouns cycle through “I,” “you,” and “she.” Although the speaker seems to change throughout the poem, one cannot ignore that each voice seems to offer some observation or criticism about domestic life, or the role women must play in relation to men. Slowik states that behind each pretty line of verse is a “grotesque, vicious, and unexpected violence” (154). Section 2, particularly the last two stanzas, perhaps receives the most observation due to the portrayal of a housewife committing subtle acts of self-harm:

… Sometimes she’s let the tap stream scald her arm,

a match burn to her thumbnail

or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her anymore, except

each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes. (Rich et al. 9, lines 20-25)

The woman that Rich portrays in this section is one who has become numb to her way of life. The only stimulus that elicits any feeling is the pain of waking up each morning in the same unfulfilling role. In fact, each of the various voices seems to be dealing with some sort of displeasure or pain, such as being “Poised, trembling, and unsatisfied,” stuck singing a song that is not her own (lines 54-60). These women exemplify the pitfalls of institutionalized heterosexuality, forced to maintain a certain image of womanhood and femininity at their own expense. Furthermore, Benjamin asserts that the sections are indeed “snapshots” as the title suggests, implying that they all refer to “ a daughter-in-law, if perhaps not the same one” (632). Regardless, Rich joins them all together in the final line of the poem, which is simply the word “ours” (line 122). The cargo mentioned in line 118 suddenly belongs to every voice in the poem, joining them under a shared weight— a similar baggage. It hardly matters if Rich is depicting various aspects of herself, relating her woes to those of other women, or creating characters entirely for the sake of the poem; the brewing dissatisfaction within her is clear through her carefully chosen words.

            “A Marriage in the ‘Sixties,” written in 1961, is a bittersweet account of romance between a couple who is holding onto the passionate past while living in a much less passionate present. The connection the speaker has with her husband feels superficial; the only outright compliment paid to him is in stanza 3, when she commends how well time has treated his appearance. She remembers how she felt reading his old letters, but in the present, they are “two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock” (Rich et al. 15, line 33). The image of the rock implies that the speaker feels stranded with her husband, even if they feel a spark every now and again. In the end, they are still strangers with differing intentions. The speaker poses the question: “Will nothing ever be the same” (line 39). The question comes across as genuine concern. Will the couple remain strangers forever? Returning to the notion of compulsive heterosexuality and marriage, the speaker does not outright consider removing herself from the situation; marriage was often viewed as being a life-long commitment. Rich’s own concerns seem to shine through here, eight years into her own marriage, as she depicts an emotionally distant couple. A poem written two years later in 1963 titled “Like This Together, which is addressed to A.H.C— Alfred H. Conrad — stands out among the others because it is distinctly in Rich’s voice, a direct message to her husband. Lines 8-13 evoke a similar emotion to conflict within “A Marriage in the ‘Sixties”:

            A year, ten years from now

            I’ll remember this—

            this sitting like drugged birds

            in a glass case—

            not why, only that we

            were like this together.

The imagery of drugged birds in a glass case is not pleasant: two creatures, in a stupor, on display for the world to see. Rich stating that she will remember this moment for years to come still feels like reminiscing. Perhaps she is conscious that the couple is “drugged,” going through the motions, but appreciates the time they spent together—perhaps more akin to friendship than romance. Both “A Marriage in the ‘Sixties” and “Like This Together” feature a sort of emotional tug of war; one moment, the speaker feels comforted by their marriage, but in the next moment, she feels isolated or betrayed. Rich portrays that in stanza 4 of “Like This Together” with the metaphor of her husband being a cave, sheltering her. She finds comfort in him, but she is “making him” her cave, “crawling against” him, as if she must force that intimate connection (Rich et al. 23, lines 44-46). Compulsory heterosexuality is at work within this poem, once again showing how the institution of marriage can make a woman feel trapped. Rich is doing everything she can to make something out of nothing, even though their love has been “picked clean at last” (line 54).

            Rich’s examination of the heterosexual relationship dynamic continues in the 1968 poem “I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus,” a feminist reading of the ancient mythological tale.  The speaker wanting to become the death of Orpheus implies a role switch, perhaps turning the patriarchal structure on its head— what if Orpheus’s fate had been in Eurydice’s hands? Lines 2-4 corroborate a feminist lens: “I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers/ and those powers severely limited/ by authorities whose faces I rarely see” (Rich et al. 43, lines 2-4). While the mention of Orpheus may once again aim to criticize marriage or the husband, the overall tone of the poem seems to be a broader rejection of the strict heterosexual lifestyle forced on women. In the essay “The Emergence of a Feminizing Ethos in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry,” Jeane Harris cites this poem as a drastic shift in Rich’s poetry, that “the [feminizing] ethos began to take its measure” with a “a deeply self-scrutinizing attitude” (134). Harris’s interpretation forces readers to revisit the poem; as much as Rich is damning the patriarchy, she is also damning herself. She recognizes her own power, but it is a power she cannot use. She has “nerves of a panther,” but she is still wasting the prime of her life filling a role she does not want to fill. Perhaps Rich is criticizing herself for being stuck in the heterosexual sphere for too long, knowing that she is missing out on valuable time.

                                                            Post-Divorce Poetry

            “Re-forming the Crystal” was written in 1973, three years after Adrienne Rich’s divorce from Alfred Conrad and his subsequent suicide. Despite the poem’s target being deceased, Rich does not hold back—the verse is raw, scathing, and honest. Therefore, “Re-forming the Crystal” deserves extensive analysis regarding both Rich’s personal development (sexuality, identity) and artistic development (poetic style and content). The poem itself has a striking format, incorporating both stanzas and blocks of prose poetry; once again, Rich is disrupting the formalist poetic tradition in favor of something more authentic to her own style, breaking free from the constraints that had limited her for so long during her career. The break from traditional form surely fits the theme of the poem: denouncing the heterosexual institution of marriage and facing her feelings about her ex-husband.

The first stanza and the third stanza, when paired together, reveal the speaker’s resentment for the subject. The poem begins with “I am trying to imagine/ how it feels to you/ to want a woman,” as the speaker attempts to place herself in the subject’s shoes (Rich et al. 61, lines 1-3). Stanza 3 heightens the tension, almost sounding accusatory: “desire without discrimination/ to want a woman like a fix” (Rich et al. 61, lines 8-9). The speaker wants to know how it feels to desire without limits; a man is allowed and even encouraged to want women within the heterosexual framework, but a woman is forbidden to want another woman. In the block of prose poetry following the first three stanzas, the speaker hammers in her resentment toward the subject. She says her excitement was never directed toward him; “you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine” (lines 14-15). From here on, it can be said with near certainty that Rich is talking directly to Conrad, as she did in previous poems. Although the husband figure is described as a stranger in both “A Marriage in the 60’s” and “Re-forming the Crystal,” Rich expresses uncertainty regarding her relationship in the former that is no longer present in the latter. The emotions felt toward her ex-husband beforehand are no longer up for debate as romantic love. She goes on to say that she is also a stranger to herself: she is the person she sees in pictures, and “the name on the marriage-contract” does not belong to her (line 28). The poem, then, is about Rich rediscovering her sense of self. She is not just denouncing her marriage, but also the person she became during those years. Having to play the part of a heterosexual woman compromised Rich’s politics, art, and identity, all of which she must reevaluate after her divorce. The final point of reconciliation for Rich is understanding the role her relationship with Conrad played in the oppression she experienced: “I want to understand my fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents” (lines 33-36). Perhaps Rich means for her frustrations not to be directed fully at Conrad, but on a broader scale, heterosexuality as an institution—the “machine.” The marriage itself may have been a result of the heterosexual institution, but the relationship formed between Rich and Conrad is the accident she refers to, a mere coincidence that may have happened with or without outside factors. The distinction is important, as it saves Conrad from being the sole oppressor and object of her anger.

Rich’s first blatantly lesbian work, Twenty-One Love Poems, came out in 1976. The collection was arguably the biggest risk Rich had taken with her poetry up until that point. Although she had always been criticized for her techniques and feminist themes, she was now directly rejecting the heterosexual framework she had placed herself in publicly for her entire career. Harris also comments on this risk when identifying the emergence of Rich’s feminizing ethos: “Perhaps the most costly and potentially damaging position taken in Rich’s poetry is that of lesbianism. Unable to exist in the world ruled by the patriarchy, Rich must create a place for a lesbian ethos to exist” (Harris 136). Twenty-One Love Poems is a result of Rich trying to create that lesbian space, an attempt to radicalize her art along with her politics. As is true with many of Rich’s defining works, the collection incorporates a distinctive form—each poem is numbered from I-XXI (except for “The Floating Poem,” which appears between XIV and XV); and together, the poems tell a cohesive narrative. The overarching story is the growth and decay of an intimate relationship between two women, without the resentment present in Rich’s past poetry. The following paragraphs will analyze the collection based on which poems best exhibit Rich’s personal and artistic growth, prioritizing discussion based on content rather than numerical order.

            Poem I establishes the basis for the collection with one simple line: “No one has imagined us” (line 13). Rich is treading on new ground by depicting lesbian romance, likely creating an image of women that others may have failed to consider—existing separate from men, loving each other, experiencing nuanced passion and lust. She is also entering a territory unknown to herself, describing love in a manner that completely clashes with the dynamic created within her past writings. In poem II, she writes:

…You’ve kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple. (lines 9-16)

Already, Rich has presented a level of intimacy that was virtually absent from her older works—her love for her partner is genuine and giddy. The poem metaphor perhaps serves two purposes: to show that she is experiencing a new kind of love, and that her poetry is changing as a result. However, she is facing a roadblock that comes with this new way of life. She wants to show her partner off to everyone she loves; but due to the stigma around lesbian relationships, it is impossible to express that level of joy. In “Compulsory Sexuality and the Lesbian Experience,”Rich states that lesbianism is often regarded as a conscious choice made by women who are “acting-out of bitterness toward men” (3); aside from the societal bias against homosexuality, Rich faced the risk of people invalidating her expression of love because of the public falling out she had with her husband. Although she was no longer directly oppressed by her marriage, she was not free from the effects of institutionalized heterosexuality. Rich brings institutional oppression up again in poem IV: “And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds/ break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly/ and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms (lines 19-21). Rich uses strong words to describe her anguish— “incurable,” “unmendable,” “helplessly”—all indicating that her emotions are a symptom of the patriarchal system and cannot be erased. Considering previous works in which Rich harps on her resilient nerves or impenetrable will (rebelling against notions of softness and weakness), the vulnerability shown in this poem is interesting as well as refreshing. Escaping the stereotype of the frail, dependent heterosexual woman only comes with more stigma—lesbians were considered hardened and bitter. The poem is not the “meaningless rant of a ‘manhater’” that Rich discusses in her essay, but rather one meant to humanize the lesbian struggle (“Compulsory” 23).

            Rich further elaborates on the differences between her experiences with heterosexuality and lesbianism based on the way her relationships have affected her. In poem III, she acknowledges that she is no longer young, yet she feels more alive than ever: “Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty / my limbs streaming with a purer joy?” (lines 4-5). She spends every possible moment making up for the time she lost as a careless young adult, living in the heterosexual framework. More importantly, she accepts that even though this relationship is blissful, it will not be completely perfect: “and somehow, each of us will help the other live/ and somewhere, each of us must help the other die” (lines 15-16). The tug-of-war described in poem III is starkly different than the one described previously in poems such as “Like This Together” or “Marriage in the 60’s”; instead of woefully predicting a bitter end to their relationship, Rich’s close connection to her partner allows her to accept the possibility of splitting up. “The Floating Poem” also supports this notion with the phrase, “Whatever happens to us, your body/ will haunt mine—tender, delicate” (lines 1-2). “Tender” and “delicate” throw off the typically negative connotation that “haunt” has. Rich knows that her partner has changed her forever, and she fully accepts whatever fate has in store for them. Another interesting disparity between the heterosexual relationship(s) depicted in past works and the relationship depicted in Twenty-One Love Poems is the notion of the partners being too different. In past works, Rich referred to her husband (or the representation of a male partner) as a stranger on multiple occasions, the relationship crumbling because their minds were too dissimilar. Poem XIII, however, celebrates differences. Rich and her partner are from different worlds, have different voices, all while having “bodies, so alike…yet so different” (line 11). All that matters to Rich is what ties the women together: “[they] were two lovers of one gender/ [they] were two lovers of one generation” (line 16-17). Regardless of their differing pasts, experiences, and ways of life, they are a part of a new, shared future.

Twenty-one Love Poems serves yet another purpose outside of exploring and documenting sexuality—establishing Rich’s renewed relationship with writing. Rich was known for her anger, and her continuous suffering was the muse for her art and career. She conceptualizes her pain in poem XX: “a woman/ I loved drowning in secrets, fear wound her throat” (lines 6-7). Rich seems to be discussing someone else, but she reveals that she was “talking to her own soul” (“XX,” line 11). The woman Rich used to be was stuck between a public lie and a personal truth, dealing with the constant agony of performative womanhood. However, in poem VIII, she declares that she will “go on from here with [her lover]/ fighting the temptation to make a career out of pain” (lines 13-14). Although heterosexuality as an institution constricted Rich’s freedom and creativity, her work seemed to thrive there; her entire career at that point was spent occupying a different persona altogether. Suffering, in other words, was familiar, comfortable, and reliable. Poem VIII is Rich’s vow to prioritize her own happiness over that reliability. “The woman who cherished/her suffering is dead,” she writes, “I am her descendant” (“VIII,” lines 10-11). She accepts the strength of the person she was before, and all the sacrifices she made, but recognizes that it is time to let go. Poem XXI, the last poem of the collection, is the process of Rich doing just that— finally moving on from the mind’s temptation of pain and loneliness with the phrase, “I choose to walk here” (line 15). She is establishing her effort to break through the heterosexual framework and establish her own path in life.  Twenty-One Love Poems marks a monumental shift in Rich’s life and writing, no longer embracing her own suffering as the main avenue for her work.

Between her unfulfilling marriage and the start of a new life with a female partner, Adrienne Rich’s poetry experienced a drastic transformation from subtle feminist criticism to outright expressing her displeasure with the heterosexual life she was living. Her anger with the world became the core of her art, which trapped Rich into a corner: Could she successfully liberate herself from the confines of the heterosexual framework and continue her career? With every new publication, Rich continued to take risks and push boundaries until she reached a breakthrough—fully embracing her feminist politics and identity. Between The Diamond Cutter and Twenty-One Love Poems, Rich’s poetic and political motivations merge into one cohesive unit; she no longer feared the backlash she would face as an outspoken, radical woman. This groundbreaking confidence would be the defining trait of Rich’s work; nothing, not even the looming influence of the patriarchy, could force her into silence again.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Meredith. “Snapshots of a Feminist Poet: Adrienne Rich and the Poetics of the Archive.” Women’s Studies , vol. 46, no. 7, Oct. 2017, pp. 628–645. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/00497878.2017.1337415.

Harris, Jeane. “The Emergence of a Feminizing Ethos in Adrienne Rich’s Poetry.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly , vol. 18, no. 2, 1988, pp. 133–140. JSTOR , 

www.jstor.org/stable/3885865.

Pavlic, Ed. “‘Outward in Larger Terms / A Mind Inhaling Exigency’: Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems: 1950-2012: Part One.” The American Poetry Review , vol. 45, no. 4, July 2016, pp. 9-14. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie,url,uid&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.456674446&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Rich, Adrienne, et al . Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews and Criticism .

W.W. Norton, 1993.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs , vol. 5, no. 4, 1980,

pp. 631–660. JSTOR , www.jstor.org/stable/3173834.

Slowik, Mary. “The Friction of the Mind: The Early Poetry of Adrienne Rich.” The

Massachusetts Review , vol. 25, no. 1, 1984, pp. 142–160. JSTOR ,

www.jstor.org/stable/25089526.

Werner, Craig. “Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics.” Contemporary Literary Criticism , edited by Thomas Votteler and Elizabeth P. Henry, vol. 73, Gale, 1993. Gale Literature Resource Center, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1100001540/LitRC?u=lln_ansu&sid=LitRC&xid=96381f70.  Originally published in Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics , by Craig Werner, American Library Association, 1988.

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10 of the Best Adrienne Rich Poems Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The American poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) once remarked that poems are ‘like dreams’ because ‘in them you put what you don’t know you know’. Into her own poetry, Rich would put her own experiences, as well as the experiences of other women (when she won the 1974 National Book Award, she accepted the honour on behalf of all women).

And her poetry, which can be described as ‘feminist’ only if we also accept the insufficiency of this label to describe accurately what her poetry does, underwent an interesting evolution, from the rather traditional early poems written in received forms to the more experimental and innovative works of her maturity. As Rich herself put it, her poems stopped being about experiences and became experiences themselves.

For Adrienne Rich, ‘Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.’ Below, we select and introduce ten of her finest poems, spanning her long career, each one overcoming a silence that had to be broken.

1. ‘ Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers ’.

This was Rich’s first great poem, published in her first poetry collection, A Change of World , which appeared when the precocious Rich was still in her early twenties. In the poem, the speaker describes her aunt’s embroidery, which features tigers who prance proudly and unafraid, in contrast to the aunt’s own meek, oppressive life and marriage.

In an early collection of her essays, Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979), Adrienne Rich observed that throughout history, ‘women’s struggle for self-determination’ had been ‘muffled in silence’. This poem bears this out. However, although she is silent about her struggles, Aunt Jennifer’s embroidery is a quiet act of self-determination.

2. ‘ Living in Sin ’.

This 1955 poem is another early piece from Rich, when she was still largely using established forms; although here, the blank-verse ground plan of her poem is occasionally broken by shorter lines.

The poem explores the idea of an unmarried woman cohabiting with her male lover in the 1950s, when social disapproval would have been rife. The woman in the poem has second thoughts about her life of dusting and cleaning (is she, a kept woman, as good as married after all, but without the stamp of approval from society?), and the final image, of morning coming like a milkman up the stairs, is memorable.

3. ‘ A Valediction Forbidding Mourning ’.

The title of this 1970 poem is the same as one by the metaphysical poet John Donne, inviting us to put the two poems into a dialogue across the centuries.

But Rich’s poem is somewhat different from Donne’s. For among the things she is bidding farewell to is the heterosexual love that Donne’s poem celebrated: Rich, a lesbian, needs to find a new language, a new grammar even, to talk about her experiences.

4. ‘ A Mark of Resistance ’.

This short poem from 1957 provides a nice ‘way in’ to Adrienne Rich’s work, for the newcomer to her poetry. In the poem, a speaker piles up stones for some unspecified purpose, although it appears to be some sort of flood-barrier.

Of course, the poem invites to be read as metaphorical: this speaker, probably female, is shoring up some defences against the troubles that life will bring. The pile of stones is itself an ‘assertion’, a ‘cairn of my intention’: as so often in Rich’s poetry, the concrete is rendered into the abstract.

5. ‘ Power ’.

Drawing on (pseudo)science and technology for its imagery and subject-matter, ‘Power’ is full of enigmatic imagery and statements. The poem concludes with Marie Curie ‘denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power’: Curie, who discovered several radioactive elements, died of radiation poisoning.

6. ‘ Orion ’.

Adrienne Rich’s metaphors are often surprising, even illogical (at least at first). ‘Orion’ is a good example. In the poem, she addresses the constellation as her half-brother, although the poem is really a reflection of the poet’s own self. Once a ‘dead child born in the dark’, she is now able to face the starlight which Orion casts down at her, and meet his gaze.

7. ‘ Tonight No Poetry Will Serve ’.

This is a late Adrienne Rich poem, from 2007, and included in the collection of the same name which appeared in 2011, gathering together new poems from 2007-10. Beginning with a romantic, even sensual encounter, the poem then turns – as ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’ had done – to grammar, and the world of the abstract.

8. ‘ What Kind of Times Are These ’.

This 1991 poem explores the connection between the poetic and the political. It’s also playfully self-referential (‘this isn’t a Russian poem’, don’t worry, the speaker assures us), but the poem’s imagery – especially the dense mesh of woods into which the speaker ventures – is laden with political symbolism.

9. ‘ Planetarium ’.

In one of her best-known poems, Rich salutes the achievements of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), the astronomer who has been eclipsed by her brother William (who discovered the planet Uranus).

Rich is interested in exploring what it would have been like for a gifted woman like Caroline, working in what was very much a male-dominate sphere at the time. Rich deftly weaves together the astronomical world of Caroline’s scientific discoveries with her female biology: ‘the moon ruled’ her, as it does all women, Rich tells us. And indeed, with its talk of the ‘Heartbeat’ of pulsars, the poem views the night sky as a curious biological entity.

10. ‘ Diving into the Wreck ’.

Let’s conclude this list with one of Adrienne Rich’s best-known poems, from 1973. It’s another poem about a journey of discovery, although this time, rather than venturing into the ‘dread’ of the woods, we find ourselves going underwater to examine the ‘wreck’ which is both ‘treasure’ and ‘damage’.

Most critics regard the shipwreck as a symbol for women’s struggle for liberation, although the imagery of the poem is cryptic and ambiguous. But in leaving behind the book of ‘myths’ at the beginning of the poem and donning the various paraphernalia required to go down and examine the wreck herself, the speaker issues a rallying cry for self-determination and action.

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Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929. She attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1951, and was selected by  W. H. Auden  for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for  A Change of World  (Yale University Press, 1951) that same year.

In 1953, Rich married Harvard University economist Alfred H. Conrad. Two years later, she published her second volume of poetry,  The Diamond Cutters  (Harper & Brothers, 1955), of which  Randall Jarrell  wrote: “The poet [behind these poems] cannot help seeming to us a sort of princess in a fairy tale.”

After having three sons before the age of thirty, Rich gradually changed both her life and her poetry. Throughout the 1960s, she wrote several collections, including  Leaflets  (W. W. Norton, 1969) and  Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law  (Harper & Row, 1963). The content of her work became increasingly confrontational—exploring such themes as women’s roles in society, racism, and the Vietnam War. The style of these poems also revealed a shift from careful metric patterns to free verse . In 1970, Rich left her husband, who committed suicide later that year.

It was in 1973, in the midst of the feminist and Civil Rights movements, the Vietnam War, and her own personal distress, that Rich wrote  Diving into the Wreck  (W. W. Norton), a collection of exploratory and often angry poems, which garnered her the National Book Award in 1974. Rich accepted the award on behalf of all women and shared it with her fellow nominees, Alice Walker and  Audre Lorde .

Rich went on to publish numerous poetry collections, including  Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010  (W. W. Norton & Co., 2010);  The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004  (W. W. Norton, 2004), which won the Book Critics Circle Award;  Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970  (W. W. Norton, 1993);  An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991  (W. W. Norton, 1991), a finalist for the National Book Award; and  The Dream of a Common Language  (W. W. Norton, 1978).

In addition to her poetry, Rich wrote several books of nonfiction prose, including  Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations  (W. W. Norton, 2001) and  What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics  (W. W. Norton, 1993).

About Rich’s work, the poet  W. S. Merwin  has said,

All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful.

Rich received the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the  Academy of American Poets Fellowship , the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the  Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize , the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship; she was also a former  Chancellor  of the Academy of American Poets. In 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts, stating that “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” She went on to say: “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.” In the same year, Rich was awarded the Academy of American Poets’  Wallace Stevens Award  for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

Adrienne Rich died on March 27, 2012, at the age of eighty-two.

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Adrienne Rich’s Poetic Transformations

By Claudia Rankine

In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?,” Adrienne Rich once answered:

Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. . . . In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.

There are many great poets, but not all of them alter the ways in which we understand the world we live in; not all of them suggest that words can be held responsible. Remarkably, Adrienne Rich did this, and continues to do this, for generations of readers.

Rich’s desire for a transformative writing that would invent new ways to be, to see, and to speak drew me to her work in the early nineteen-eighties, while I was a student at Williams College. Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” from 1962, and two collections by Rich, her 1969 “Leaflets” and her 1971–1972 “Diving into the Wreck.” In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following:

Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.

Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my introduction to her work. “Leaflets,” “Diving into the Wreck,” and “The Dream of a Common Language,” from 1978_,_ were all examples of this, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems, in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life. . . . Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.

In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

Rich claimed, in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,” from 1984, that Baldwin was the “first writer I read who suggested that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people.” It was Rich who suggested to me that silence, too, was poisonous and destructive to our social interactions and self-knowledge. Her understanding that the ethicacy of our personal relationships was dependent on the ethics of our political and cultural systems was demonstrated not only in her poetry but also in her essays, her interviews, and in conversations like the extended one she conducted with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde.

Despite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. As self-identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities. Stunningly, they showed us that, if you listen closely enough, language “is no longer personal,” as Rich writes in “Meditations for a Savage Child,” but stains and is stained by the political.

In the poem “Hunger” (1974–1975), which is dedicated to Audre Lorde, Rich writes, “I’m wondering / whether we even have what we think we have / . . . even our intimacies are rigged with terror. / Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open, / I stand convicted by all my convictions—you, too . . .” And as if in the form of an answer Lorde wrote, in “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” an essay published in 1981, “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

By my late twenties, in the early nineteen-nineties, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold, but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term “ethical loneliness” would come to me years later, from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, “abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.”

Perhaps because of its pithy, if riddling, directness, the opening stanza of “Final Notations_,_” the last poem in “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” willed its way into my memory like a popular song. This shadow sonnet, with its intricate and entangled complexity, seemed to have come a far distance from the tidiness of the often anthologized “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that appeared in her first collection. The open-ended pronoun “it” seemed as likely to land in “change” as in “poetry” or “life” or “childbirth”:

It will not be simple, it will not be long it will take little time, it will take all your thought it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath it will be short, it will not be simple

As readers, when we are lucky, we can experience a poet’s changes through language over a lifetime. For me, these lines enacted Rich’s statement, in “Images for Godard” (1970), that “the moment of change is the only poem.” Rich’s own transformations brought her closer to the ethical lives of her readers even as she wrote poems that at times lost patience with our culture’s inability to change alongside her.

Arriving at Radcliffe, the daughter of a Southern Protestant pianist mother and a Jewish doctor father, Rich initially excelled at being exceptional in accepted ways. Often working in traditional form in her early writing, she, even in these nascent poems, was already addressing the frustration of being constrained by forces that traditionally were not inclusive. Consequently, Rich was never primarily invested in traditional meter and form, though she employed them early on. Some of her earliest poems suggest she was already grasping toward what could not yet be described as “liberative language.” Her poems often found ways to critique existing expectations for one’s femininity and sexuality, and a decorum that did not include speaking her truth to power.

Rich began her public poetic career as the 1951 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which was awarded for her first collection, “A Change of World.” W. H. Auden selected Rich’s volume and brought to the world’s attention Rich’s first thorny questions, embedded in lyrics, addressing a culture’s disengagement with its embattled selves. A poem like “A Clock in the Square,” published in that volume, finds its inspiration in a “handless clock” that refuses, rather than is unable, “to acknowledge the hour”:

This handless clock stares blindly from its tower, Refusing to acknowledge any hour, But what can one clock do to stop the game When others go on striking just the same? Whatever mite of truth the gesture held, Time may be silenced but will not be stilled, Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing From all the restless ways we must be going And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled, Whether around a clockface or a world.

The clock appears initially to be broken, but its handlessness proves an ineffective strategy against the “game.” Silence as a form of rebellion proves inadequate to the moment.

Auden praised “A Change of World” for, among other things, its “detachment from the self and its emotions,” as is demonstrated in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that has always been coupled in my mind with Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther.” “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” projects freedom onto the image of the tigers that the poem’s protagonist stitches into her needlework. This is in contrast to Rilke’s portrayal of the panther as imprisoned and behind bars. Rilke depicts the panther’s very will as having been paralyzed:

The padding gait of flexibly strong strides, that in the very smallest circle turns, is like a dance of strength around a center in which stupefied a great will stands.

Rich’s dialectical use of the tigers to contrast with the paralysis intrinsic to Aunt Jennifer’s domestic life speaks gently to her early “absolutist approach to the universe,” as she herself observed in a 1964 essay. She would come to understand society’s limits as touching all our lives. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” ends with a quatrain:

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Those “terrified hands,” “ringed” and “mastered,” also could imagine and create a fantastical reflection of life, those tigers , which remain “proud and unafraid.”

Rich came of age in a postwar America where civil rights and antiwar movements were either getting started or were on the horizon. Poets like Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, and LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), among others, were abandoning the illusionary position of objectivity and finding their way to the use of the first person, gaining access to their emotional as well as political lives on the page. Rich’s reach for objectivity would be similarly short-lived.

She joined poets engaged in political-poetic resistance to the Vietnam War, as can be seen in “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1968), which includes lines like “Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s.” She began to elide traditions in order to speak from a more integrated history. “Even before I called myself a feminist or a lesbian,” Rich wrote in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” “I felt driven—for my own sanity—to bring together in my poems the political world ‘out there’—the world of children dynamited or napalmed, of the urban ghetto and militarist violence—and the supposedly private, lyrical world of sex and of male/female relationships.”

With Rich came the formulation of an alternate poetic tradition that distrusted and questioned paternalistic, heteronormative, and hierarchical notions of what it meant to have a voice, especially for female writers. All of culture found its way into Rich’s poems, and as her work evolved she made it almost impossible for any writers mentored by her poetry and essays to experience their own work as “sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own,” to quote from her foreword to her 1979 book “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.”

A dozen years after “A Change of World” was published, Rich would look back on her earlier work—which includes her second volume, “The Diamond Cutters,” and its metrical and imagistic tidiness—and admit that “in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order.” This understanding that disruption seen and negotiated inside the poem might be closer to her actual experience of the world changed the content, form, and voice of her poetics. In her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (1963), a restlessness settles into the poems that explore marriage and child rearing. It’s here the exasperation of a “thinking woman” begins the fight “with what she partly understood. / Few men about her would or could do more, / hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore,” as Rich writes in the title poem.

The nineteen-seventies saw the publication of some of Rich’s most memorable and powerful poems. She developed in her writing the appearance of the unadorned simplicity of a mind in rigorous thought. In a 1971 conversation with the poet Stanley Plumly, Rich said she was “interested in the possibilities of the ‘plainest statement’ at times, the kind of things that people say to each other at moments of stress.” In poems like the groundbreaking “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich clearly chooses reality over myth in order to create room within the poems to confront what was broken in our common lives:

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster

When “Diving into the Wreck” won the National Book Award, in 1974, Rich accepted the prize in solidarity with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde:

The statement I am going to read was prepared by three of the women nominated for the National Book Award for poetry, with the agreement that it would be read by whichever of us, if any, was chosen.

We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. We believe that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other; and that poetry—if it is poetry—exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically join together here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women. We appreciate the good faith of the judges for this award, but none of us could accept this money for herself, nor could she let go unquestioned the terms on which poets are given or denied honor and livelihood in this world, especially when they are women. We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teen-ager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet; the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.

Over twenty years later, in 1997, Rich declined the National Medal for the Arts, this country’s highest artistic honor, because she believed that “the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” In her July 3rd letter to the Clinton Administration and Jane Alexander, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she wrote,

I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal. Anyone familiar with my work from the early sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Positioned as a teacher, as I often am now, at the front of a classroom, I was struck by reading a line in “Draft #2006,” from “Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.” The line—“Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.         Maybe it was too soon.”—reminded me that this urgency, apprehension, and questioning has characterized all of Rich’s poems. Still, it seems she responds in time, as she will always be once and future, and her work always relevant.

They asked me, is this time worse than another.

I said for whom?

Wanted to show them something.                  While I wrote on the chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.

Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.               Maybe it was too soon.

In her “Collected Poems 1950_–_2012” we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self, to refer back to Baldwin. As the poet Marilyn Hacker as written,

Rich’s body of work establishes, among other things, an intellectual autobiography, which is interesting not as the narrative of one life (which it’s not) and still less as intimate divulgence, but as the evolution and revolutions of an exceptional mind, with all its curiosity, outreaching, exasperation and even its errors.

One of our best minds writes her way through the changes that have brought us here, in all the places that continue to entangle our liberties in the twenty-first century. And here is not “somewhere else but here,” Rich writes. We remain in “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own way of making people disappear.”

What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary to talk about trees.

This essay was drawn from the introduction to “Collected Poems 1950–2012,” by Adrienne Rich, which is out June 21st from W. W. Norton & Company.

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‘Essential Essays’ Show Adrienne Rich’s Vulnerable, Conflicted Sides

By Parul Sehgal

• Sept. 10, 2018
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“What does a woman need to know?”

In 1979, Adrienne Rich delivered one of history’s spicier commencement speeches, at Smith College, opening with this question.

Her answer: How could you possibly decide? Four years at Smith won’t have helped you. “There is no women’s college today which is providing young women with the education they need for survival.” Colleges exist to groom women to conform as best they can to institutions rigged against them, to subsist on fantasies of exceptionalism, she said. Colleges exist to produce tokens. Congratulations, graduates .

The speech still heats the blood. Smith College may not have been up to the task of creating liberated women in 1979, but the school of Adrienne Rich was grandly, manifestly in session.

Over the course of 50 years, Rich, who died at 82 in 2012 , produced two dozen books of poetry and six volumes of prose — less a body of work than a bank of knowledge on gender and power, obedience and eros, the politics of motherhood. She wrote indelibly about the racial consciousness of white women, and of her own childhood:

“I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.”

“Essential Essays” brings together a sampling of Rich’s influential criticism, personal accounts and public statements, including her speech at Smith. “To reread and to rethink Rich’s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual: responsible, self-questioning and morally passionate,” the book’s editor, Sandra M. Gilbert, writes.

Most of the pieces here are canonical: “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”; “Split at the Root,” in which she reckons with her Jewishness and her father’s drive to assimilation; selections from “Of Woman Born,” her landmark study of the evolution of motherhood as an institution and ideology “more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism.”

The book reveals how private reckonings bloomed into public stances. Included is Rich’s statement upon refusing the National Medal for the Arts from President Clinton. “The very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration,” she wrote. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

That word keeps cropping up: “token.” It’s talismanic to Rich (other words she loves include “drenched” and “sleepwalking”). Although she writes powerfully of her Jewishness and her experience of motherhood, this aspect of her identity — of being the exceptional woman, of being establishment-approved — provokes her most fluent and furious prose. It was, after all, the story of her childhood.

Rich was born on the cusp of the Great Depression, to a former concert pianist and a doctor, who took a fanatical interest in her development as a poet. Her father, she said, fancied himself a “Papa Brontë,” with “geniuses for children.” Her early work had the gloss of the clever, dutiful daughter, the reserve, as she wrote of Virginia Woolf, of a woman accustomed to being overheard and evaluated by men. She was only an undergraduate when her collection “A Change of World” won the Yale Younger Poets prize in 1950. W.H. Auden supplied a legendarily patronizing foreword: The poems, he wrote, 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.”

Rich married and bore three children before the age of 30. Motherhood radicalized her. “I began at this point to feel that politics was not something ‘out there’ but something ‘in here’ and of the essence of my condition.” She became troubled by the ways she “suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order” in her early work. The next book, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” — “jotted in fragments during children’s naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3 a.m. after rising with a wakeful child” — was a departure in style and subject, written with free meter and bared teeth.

Rich left her husband and flung herself into antiwar and antiracist activism. She began a lifelong relationship with the Jamaican-born novelist and poet Michelle Cliff. In her transformation, some saw the evolution of American women in the 20th century: “from careful traditional obedience to cosmic awareness,” wrote the critic Ruth Whitman.

Others were less enchanted. “I don’t know what happened,” Elizabeth Hardwick tutted. “She got swept too far. She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems.”

This is the usual charge levied at Rich — that she was more polemicist than poet. These essays tell a different story. We see how frequently, and powerfully, she wrote from her divisions, the areas of her life where she felt vulnerable, conflicted and ashamed.

“ I’m not able to do this yet.” “Nothing has trained me for this.” “I feel inadequate.” “My ignorance can be dangerous to me and to others.” All these sentiments appear in one paragraph of “Split at the Root.” But then, Rich gathers herself; she persists: “We can’t wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.” For her, a thinking life, a political commitment, does not mean achieving perfect awareness — call it wokeness or whatever else — but embarking on “a long turbulence.” It is a perpetual “moving into accountability,” never an arrival. “By 1956, I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event,” she wrote. “I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process.”

These essays are as close as we will get to Rich for the time being. Many of her letters are sealed until 2050, and she left instructions to family and friends not to cooperate with any full-length biographies.

It’s not intimacy that these pieces afford; as much as Rich tells us, there is more that she conceals, especially about her private life — the apparent suicide of her husband, the years with Cliff. But it is a peerless pleasure to join her in the “long turbulence,” to think alongside her. I once read that a blue whale’s arteries are so large that an adult human could swim through them. That’s what entering these essays feels like — to flow along with the pulses of Rich’s intelligence, to be enveloped by her capacious heart and mind.

Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal .

Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry By Adrienne Rich Edited and with an introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert 411 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

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Adrienne Rich by Carmen Birkle LAST REVIEWED: 24 April 2019 LAST MODIFIED: 24 April 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190221911-0075

Adrienne Cecile Rich (b. 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, MD; d. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible—an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971). This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952); the National Book Award for Poetry (1974); honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989); several lifetime achievement awards; the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006); and many more. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .” [1976], The Dream of a Common Language [1978], and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1980]) and turned to political activism. Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. To being a woman, a mother, a writer, and a lesbian, she later added her concerns about her own Jewishness. In the 1980s, her poetry and prose became manifestations of her own physical pain and remained true to her idea of the “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978). For Rich, the feminist slogan “the personal is the political” was always true. After 2000 she participated in antiwar movements and continued to write poetry and prose. From 1976 until her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the Jamaican-born writer and editor Michelle Cliff, in California.

Most monographs on Adrienne Rich do not distinguish between her life and her work, thereby remaining true to Rich’s own endeavor to make the private public and to express her personal experience in her poems, essays, and activism. The earliest book-length studies on Rich appeared in the 1970s, with McDaniel 1978 , a feminist analysis of Rich’s poetry and vision, looking back at Rich’s poetry and essay collections published until then. In the 1980s, with Keyes 1986 , Díaz-Diocaretz 1984 , and Díaz-Diocaretz 1985 , she began to be seen as a woman writer with a feminist voice, in reference to the language she used and to a female aesthetics. Werner 1988 considers Rich in relationship to her critics. While the late 1980s and the 1990s saw the publication of a number of comparative studies, with the exception of Templeton 1994 , providing a feminist analysis, and Yorke 1997 , an analysis of Rich’s contribution to feminism, the new millennium brought forth more overviews such as Langdell 2004 , which covers Rich’s entire career until 2004, with an emphasis on Rich’s struggle for change and self-transformation, and Riley 2016 , which serves as the first full-length study of Rich’s life and work from 1951 until her death.

Díaz-Diocaretz, Miriam. The Transforming Power of Language: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich . Utrecht, The Netherlands: HES, 1984.

Provides a short (75-page) analysis in three essays of the language used by Adrienne Rich in her poetry, and focuses on the communicative function of poetry. The author applies Michel Foucault’s theory of authorship as well as Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality.

Díaz-Diocaretz, Miriam. Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich . Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1985.

DOI: 10.1075/ct.2

The author is concerned with the translations of Rich’s work into Spanish and about the ways the transfer of a text from one language to another can change its meaning. Here, the translator becomes a second author of the text. Lesbian and feminist texts are a particular challenge if they are to be translated into the language of a culture that locates these texts on the margins of society.

Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich . Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Keyes traces Rich’s awareness of power and its patriarchal constructedness in her chronological reading of Rich’s poetry from 1951 to 1981, beginning with A Change of World (1951), and ending with A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981). This feminist study sees Rich as a political poet, power as connected to control, and the woman as Other who needs to understand her own power in order to leave this marginalized position.

Langdell, Cheri Colby. Adrienne Rich: The Moment of Change . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

Langdell sets out to trace Rich’s recording of the public voice in her poetry. She is concerned with the author’s self-fashioning, her concepts of nationhood, and the female body in relation to its power and sexuality. She sees change and self-transformation as two of the most important themes in Rich’s writing. Further themes are female roles and womanhood, Rich’s rejection of traditional gender roles, and the use of will and creative intelligence to accomplish global change through political action.

McDaniel, Judith. Reconstituting the World: The Poetry and Vision of Adrienne Rich . Argyle, NY: Spinsters, 1978.

This is one of the earliest full-length and feminist studies of Rich’s poetry and the vision expressed in her earliest works. It traces Rich’s poetic development from her early phase, during which she still seemed to accept traditional female roles, or at least did not openly criticize them, to her later phases, when she began to protest against stifling role prescriptions and came out both as a lesbian and a feminist.

Riley, Jeannette E. Understanding Adrienne Rich . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016.

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctv6sj9dg

Riley draws on decades of research evolving around Rich in an attempt to create a genuine understanding of her work. She divides Rich’s career into three major phases: 1951–1971, 1973–1985, and 1986 until her death in 2012. In the early phase, Rich struggles to find her own (feminist) voice. In the later phases, she focuses on women’s history, repression under patriarchy, and sexuality and politics. Riley also analyzes Rich’s growing political and cultural awareness.

Shima, Alan. Skirting the Subject: Pursuing Language in the Works of Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, and Beverly Dahlen . Uppsala, Sweden: University of Uppsala, 1993.

Inspired by Rich’s essay “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), Shima compiles a detailed study of a changing women’s language, which reflects the efforts put into practice by the three female authors Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, and Beverly Dahlen to change the discourse in order to better reflect female experience. He connects the authors through their common desire to offer new ways of shaping female identity and invoking change in the symbolic discourse.

Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics . Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

Templeton discusses how Adrienne Rich was shaped by feminism, and influenced feminist discourse, through her poetry. She unravels the poetic strategies Rich uses to test her feminist ideas and focuses on “dialogic moments” that facilitate the poet’s and the reader’s cultural participation. The collection Diving into the Wreck (1973) is at the center of this scholarly endeavor.

Werner, Craig Hansen. Adrienne Rich: The Poet and Her Critics . Chicago: American Library Association, 1988.

This study is organized by themes and places Rich in the context of American poetry, particularly in the legacy of Walt Whitman. Werner applies close and formalist readings to Rich’s poetry and analyzes the prosody of the occasional poem. He deals with poetry and process, patriarchy and solipsism, the lesbian vision, and the radical voice, and uses Elaine Showalter’s concept of the “Wild Zone” as an exclusively female space of experience that Rich transforms into poetry.

Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics and the Body . London: SAGE, 1997.

Yorke puts special emphasis on Rich’s struggle to overcome strict cultural norms, such as the often glorified nuclear family, and calls for an extension of the personal experience toward a collective experience. She traces Rich’s feminist beginnings and her historical and cultural contexts and sets them in relation to the larger women’s movement. She explains how Rich worked hard on bridging the gap between white and black female activists and on fighting anti-Semitism.

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Adrienne Rich

The Literary Trust of Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Rich reading from her work — new audio and video

Excellent magnetic-tape video of Adrienne Rich reading on the West Coast recently became available online, among many recordings from the Poetry Center’s American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University. The San Francisco State reading took place in April 1974 (less than a week after Rich accepted the National Book Award for Diving into the…

Now out in a new paperback edition

Of Woman Born was first published in 1976. Adrienne Rich returned to it in 1986 when it came out in a 10th Anniversary edition and wrote a new introduction looking critically at her own earlier choices and omissions as author, and updating footnotes to reflect newer scholarship. This year, W.W. Norton has published a new…

a Portland reading from 2006

Portland’s Literary Arts recently posted a recording of Adrienne Rich reading and speaking at an event in the Poetry Downtown series, from March 2006. The recording includes introductory remarks by Judith Barrington, who also wrote a remembrance of the reading, posted here.

Adrienne Rich reading at Hannuka, 2006

An MP3 of Adrienne Rich in a December 2006 appearance, speaking and reading poetry at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. “Poetry, I believe, doesn’t lie down comfortably with symbols, with ‘this stands for that,’ with the boundedness of symbolic thinking. Poetry’s energy is in metaphor. And in metaphor boundaries are broken, one thing…

Essential Essays: Culture, Politics & the Art of Poetry

Forthcoming prose collection

W.W. Norton has announced an August 2018 pub date for Essential Essays: Culture Politics & the Art of Poetry, a selection of Adrienne Rich’s prose, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. The volume includes excerpts from Of Woman Born, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry & Politics, and essays on Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Muriel Rukeyser, as…

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Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929– March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and radical 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.” Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by renowned poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the published volume. She famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the elder of two sisters. Her father, renowned 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 Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians.

Adrienne Rich’s early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to read but also to write her own 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, 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 began 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 for her—moving into a world in which she was expected to excel.

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Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974, Now Available on Manifold

We are pleased to announce a digital edition of poet Adrienne Rich’s teaching materials from her time at the City College of New York, now freely available online.

View on Manifold: Adrienne Rich: Teaching at CUNY, 1968–1974, Parts I & II

Rich was one of the celebrated poets and writers brought to City College to teach writing in the SEEK program. In 2013, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative published a two-volume chapbook of Rich’s teaching materials, edited by Iemanjá Brown, Stefania Heim, erica kaufman, Kristin Moriah, Conor Tomás Reed, Talia Shalev, Wendy Tronrud, and Ammiel Alcalay:

Drawing on memos, notes, course syllabi, and class exercises, this collection provides insight into Rich’s dedication, passion, and empathy as a teacher completely dedicated to her students as they take a leading role in reshaping access to public higher education. Rich’s characteristic public generosity and courage can be seen, for the first time, in an institutional setting through these materials. Accompanied by essays that contextualize both the pedagogy and the politics, this collection truly breaks new ground in presenting lesser-known aspects of a major poet’s work.

The Adrienne Rich volumes now join those from Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan, whose materials were digitized in 2020, in a collection of freely available Lost & Found texts that shed light on the experimental years of CCNY’s legendary SEEK program as it matured under Mina Shaughnessy.

Rich’s teaching materials are resonant with meaning for CUNY faculty and students today, and can be fruitfully incorporated into a variety of courses (see, for example, Daisy Atterbury and Maxine Krenzel’s use of the archival texts as summarized in 2019 for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy ). We hope that by broadening access to this work, more educators can make use of these texts in their classrooms. Alongside Rich’s archival texts, the volumes include an introduction and critical essays from the editors that help situate the material for readers.

Both volumes are now freely available online in a Manifold edition thanks to open educational resources funding provided to the Mina Rees Library by CUNY’s Office of Library Services. The digital edition was prepared by Dasharah Green, a doctoral candidate in English at the Graduate Center, and Roxanne Shirazi, assistant professor in the library and project director for the CUNY Digital History Archive , as part of an effort to expand access to materials that help bring CUNY’s history into CUNY’s classrooms. We are grateful for the helpful support provided by Robin Miller at Manifold throughout the process.

As today’s headlines are dominated by renewed student activism, encampments, agitation, and police on campuses that seem to evoke spring 1970 and its national student strikes , the City College of New York is once again a focal point here at CUNY. It is fitting, then, that we celebrate a collection that begins with Rich’s memo to her students during those strikes, in which she implores:

Whether or not your classes are meeting as usual, don’t stay away from the campus! There is plenty of political and human education going on there. This is part of what it means to be a college student in our time and is probably one of the most valuable parts of your education even though you don’t get academic credits for it. Come to the campus, talk to people, see what is happening, argue, act.

With students across the country mobilizing on campuses, we hope that reading Adrienne Rich’s reflections and notes will provide inspiration and grounding to educators and students as we finish out our own contentious semester.

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Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose

By adrienne rich, adrienne rich's poetry and prose themes.

Beginning in the 1970s, Rich began to focus more heavily on social issues of gender and sexuality in her poetry and prose. Her more strongly political works like Diving into the Wreck are the ones she is best-known for now. The theme of feminism was evident in most of her works, both poetry and prose; a self-proclaimed radical feminist, Rich used her literary prowess to make statements of activism. The poems in Diving into the Wreck and Dream of A Common Language reflect on a modern society that is, in some sense, “wrecked”: inequality persists at all levels of society, especially gender equality. Rich’s poems call for an interrogation of the history of women’s oppression, as well as poetry that actively centers and promotes women’s stories and experiences as it fights for their equality. She refused to accept the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck by herself, insisting that it be shared between three female entrants (herself, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde).

LGBTQ Advocacy

In the late 1960s, Rich separated from her husband (who later shot himself) and declared her embrace of lesbianism, which she claimed had been latent in her since adolescence. Her poetry and prose shifted to advocating for rights for the LGBTQ community as well. Most famously, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian existence” argues that, for too long, society has assumed heterosexuality is most women’s preference. What if heterosexuality is another function of patriarchal control, Rich asks? What if the search for love and tenderness in both sexes "originally lead[s] toward women?" Perhaps, Rich suggests, lesbian experience is so often erased or ignored because it deeply threatens the patriarchal structures that oppress women. These themes are consistent in her later poems and nonfiction prose, and she remained a steadfast supporter of social justice until her death in 2012.

Collective Action

Many of Rich’s poems suggest that political change is brought about not through individual will alone, but rather through collective action. This theme is evident in the title of Rich’s collection A Dream of a Common Language , which suggests that poetry can be a way for all of mankind to understand one truth. Poetry, Rich suggests, is something that can make one more aware and sensitive to other people’s existence and truth. It can relate personal experience yet still herald a “we” in which the reader feels included. Poems like “Diving into the Wreck” in fact shift from first-person to third-person perspective, a rhetorical tactic that includes the reader in the poet’s process of transformation and self-understanding, often calling them to political action.

The Role of Poetry/Art in Society

Rich’s poetry often suggests that art and poetry are a potent vehicle for social change. In “Someone is Writing a Poem,” she writes that reading a poem is not passive, nor is it the same as observing a spectacle: A poem is not “controlled and designed to manipulate mass opinion,” but something finer and more delicate. A poem creates a space in which the reader can actively engage, figuring out what speaks to them. They thus become active participants in the poem, and with poems like Rich’s that are meant to inspire political praxis, reading a poem may be the first step towards activism.

Received History and Erasure

Essays like “Compulsory Heterosexuality” are not only about LGBTQ rights; more broadly, they ask which kinds of stories are written in history, and which are not. In “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich calls on readers like herself who carry around books “in which our names to not appear.” History, Rich argues, has always been political: it tells the stories of those who are in power, erasing those who they seek to marginalize and oppress. This includes the erased lesbian history referred to in “compulsory heterosexuality,” and the erased women’s history she talks about in “Diving into the Wreck” and other poems. Through her work, Rich’s argues that only by questioning the wisdom of received history and bringing untold histories to light can we fully understand the present.

Rich’s work interrogates the shape of power: the way it has shaped society in the past, and how women and queer people might wield it in the future. In the poem “ In Those Years ,” Rich describes “the dark birds of history” gathering to do damage while individuals avert their eyes. Based on the other themes of her work, we can view these “dark birds” to be not cabals of evil men, but societal forces like patriarchal ideals and capitalist decision-making that forgoes things like human rights and basic decency and instead foregrounds the pursuit of profit and power. Rich seeks to provide ways for those who have historically been victims of power to first recognize how they have been abused, and second to begin to see the sources of their own potential power—in communities and as individuals.

Rich’s work is known for its fierce feminism and interrogation of society. However, Rich is also a love poet, and in her work, love and desire are an important antidote to despair. Her book The Dream of a Common Language features a section entitled “21 Love Poems.” In one of them, the speaker tells her lover, “I dreamed you were a poem,/ I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .” In a world characterized by the misuse of power and the rise of inequality, poems allow intimacy between reader and writer. In doing so, they are thus comparable to a flirtation or love affair—or, rather, a love affair can be viewed as a poem, as a connective experience.

Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

When We Dead Awaken

In this work, Ibsen discusses the struggle between art and life.

The Trees by Adrienne Rich

Check this out:

https://www.gradesaver.com/adrienne-richs-poetry-and-prose/study-guide/summary

What is the beast in Melinda's gut?

Referring to the letter she received from Heather?

Study Guide for Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose

Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose study guide contains a biography of Adrienne Rich, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose
• Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose Summary
• Character List

Essays for Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose

Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose.

• The Love Poems of Rich, Marvell and Campion: Realism vs. Idealization
• Free to Be, You and Me
• "Song of Solemnity"
• Adrienne Rich's Evolution as a Poet
• True Love in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 and Adrienne Rich's "Living in Sin"

Lesson Plan for Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
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• Introduction to Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
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Wikipedia Entries for Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose

• Introduction
• Early life and education
• Early career: 1953–75
• Later life: 1976–2012

Storm Warning By Adrienne Rich | Summary, Analysis & Themes

Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich, published in 1951. Adrienne Rich uses a storm as a metaphor for emotional turmoil. Adrienne Rich explores themes of isolation, and the power of nature in this poem.

Table of Contents

Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich navigates the loud seas of existence through the allegory of a coming storm. Moreover, it skillfully shows wild nature with the unpredictable trials of human life, portraying the inevitability of adversity and the resilience needed to confront it head-on. Text storm warning also contain some figure of speeches as well.

Stanza 1: The Arrival of the Storm

Opening verses of Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich navigates the loud seas of existence through the allegory of a coming storm. resound with an air of inevitability as the speaker warns about the imminent arrival of a storm.

Rich’s descriptive language not only forecasts the storm’s physical destruction. It also alludes to the broader theme of difficult life challenges.

Moreover, the use of phrases like “it will be here,” imbued with certainty, sets an anticipatory tone, foreshadowing the forthcoming disruption that mirrors life’s unforeseen trials.

Stanza 2: The Impact of the Storm

Rich’s adeptness at showing vivid imagery vividly portrays the storm’s impact. The storm is personified, its effect likened to a “laughing jaw,” portraying an image of an uncontrollable, almost evil force.

Moreover, the comparison of the storm’s impact to “gravel stones battering the roof” intensifies the chaos and unpredictability, akin to life’s harsh realities that unexpectedly assail us.

Stanza 3: Coping with the Storm

Amidst the emerging chaos, the stanza shows a message of resilience. The speaker acknowledges the storm’s threatening nature but hints at readiness and encountering it with steady strength.

Additionally, it serves as a poignant reminder of fortitude, urging readers to bravely face life’s trials. Moreover, this stanza shows the essence of resilience in adversity, emphasizing the necessity of facing challenges with bravery.

Stanza 4: The Aftermath

In Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich, as the storm downs, the poem’s focus shifts to the aftermath. The imagery transitions to a tranquil landscape, symbolizing the calm that follows chaos.

In addition, this scene represents the potential for peace and renewal after weathering life’s storms, signifying that growth often emerges from adversity. Moreover, it captures the cyclical nature of trials and subsequent moments of clarity that follow.

This opening stanza of Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich, acts as a harbinger of occurring storm, employing the metaphor of drawing a close storm to reflect existence’s unavoidable demanding situations.

Moreover, Rich’s bright language units the level for the inevitable disruptions that parallel the uncertainties we stumble upon in life.

Moreover, the anticipation created with terms like “it is going to be right here” indicates the upcoming disturbances, echoing the inevitability of trials in our journey.

It signifies that simply as storms arrive unbidden, challenges too are an inherent part of existence.

In this stanza, Rich’s mastery lies in vividly illustrating the hurricane’s chaotic effect through captivating imagery and personification. The storm takes on a threatening, personality with a “laughing jaw,” symbolizing uncontrollable pressure.

In addition, the contrast of the hurricane’s effect to “gravel stones battering the roof” intensifies the experience of chaos, mirroring the abrupt and cruel nature of life’s adversities.

This portrayal emphasizes the overpowering and on occasion relentless nature of adversity, leaving an indelible effect.

Stanza three: Coping with the Storm

Here, the poem deals with the resilience required to confront the storm. While acknowledging the typhoon’s intimidating presence, the stanza tips at readiness and the need to stand in demanding situations with unwavering energy.

In addition, it serves as a poignant reminder to reinforce oneself mentally and emotionally, advocating for a proactive technique to confront lifestyles’s inevitable trials.

This stanza encapsulates the essence of resilience, urging individuals to confront adversities with courage and determination.

As the hurricane subsides, the poem shifts to a tranquil scene, symbolizing the calm after chaos. This imagery represents the aftermath of overcoming lifestyle trials, suggesting the capability for peace and renewal.

Moreover, it underscores the concept that boom frequently emerges from difficulty, signifying moments of readability and calmness that observe difficult times.

The stanza emphasizes the cyclical nature of trials, indicating that when upheaval, there lies a possibility for private boom and rejuvenation.

Themes In Storm Warning

Figure of speeches used in storm warning.

In Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich, various figures of speech contribute to its vivid imagery and profound symbolism. Here are some of the prominent figures of speech used in the poem:

Storm as a Metaphor: Throughout the poem, the storm symbolizes life’s inevitable challenges and adversities. It represents the unpredictability and turbulence of human experiences.

Personification

The personification of the Storm: Throughout the poem, the storm is personified as having a “laughing jaw.” This personification imbues the storm with human-like qualities, emphasizing its menacing and uncontrollable nature.

Visual Imagery: Rich uses descriptive language to create vivid visual imagery, such as “gravel stones battering the roof.” This imagery enhances the reader’s sensory experience, evoking a sense of chaos and tumult.

Storm as a Symbol: Beyond its literal meaning, the storm serves as a powerful symbol. It represents the uncertainty, disruption, and challenges encountered in life’s journey.

Allusion to Life’s Challenges: Moreover, the warnings and anticipation of the storm’s arrival allude to the inevitability of facing hardships in life. This serves as an allusion to the challenges that individuals must confront.

Contradictory Imagery: Moreover, the juxtaposition of calmness after chaos and the storm’s turbulent impact creates an oxymoronic effect, emphasizing the contrast between upheaval and tranquility.

When was Storm Warnings by Adrienne Rich published?

Adrienne Rich’s book “Storm Warnings” was released in 1951. Rich’s interest for the intricacies of the human experience and the emotional upheaval that can result from both internal and external conflicts is reflected in this poem.

Rich addresses issues of vulnerability, solitude, and the force of nature with vivid images and expressive language.

In “Storm Warning,” Adrienne Rich skillfully illustrates the unpredictable nature of life’s obstacles using the metaphor of a storm. She examines themes of resiliency, vulnerability, and the transformational potential of adversity using striking imagery and moving words.

Storm Warning by Adrienne Rich metaphorically explores life’s challenges through the anticipation and impact of a storm.

The metaphorical meaning of “Storm Warning” by Adrienne Rich is that the storm represents the unpredictability and turbulence of human experiences, including emotional turmoil and inner conflict.

The meaning of “storm warning” in the poem is both literal, as a warning of an approaching storm, and metaphorical, as a symbol of the inevitability of adversity in life.

The glass has been falling all afternoon likely refers to a barometer or glass barometer, indicating a drop in atmospheric pressure often associated with approaching stormy weather, suggesting the impending arrival of the storm.

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Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry Paperback – August 20, 2019

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A New York Times Critics’ Pick A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.

Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date August 20, 2019
• Dimensions 5.6 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 0393355136
• ISBN-13 978-0393355130
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (August 20, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393355136
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393355130
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.6 x 1.2 x 8.3 inches
• #2,723 in Essays (Books)
• #3,070 in Literary Criticism & Theory
• #37,383 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Adrienne rich.

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) is an American poet, writer, feminist thinker, and activist in progressive causes. In a career spanning seven decades she wrote and published two dozen volumes of poetry and over a half-dozen of prose. Rich's poetry includes the collections Diving Into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose work includes the collections On Lies, Secrets, & Silence; Blood, Bread, & Poetry; an influential essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," and Of Woman Born, a scholarly examination of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. She received the National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for Diving Into the Wreck, and was a finalist an additional three times, in 1956, 1967, and 1991. Other honors include a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1994, the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award, and the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In 1997 she turned down the National Medal for the Arts to protest the growing concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands, writing to the NEA that "anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art's social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright."

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UC’s rich and thriving poetic tradition goes back 100 years — and will keep you reading all year long

April is a time for poetry to shine across the country as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world, unfolds. Befitting a world-class university, UC has a long poetic tradition, but you might be surprised by exactly how deep it goes.

In fact, UC Berkeley offered the nation’s very first university-level creative writing course, according to Robert Hass, professor emeritus of English at UC Berkeley and former poet laureate of the United States.

“The course was taught in 1918 by Witter Bynner,” Hass explains, “a friend of Wallace Stevens.” Bynner went on to produce one of the first English translations of Chinese literature with fellow UC Berkeley professor Jiang Kanghu, “Jade Mountain” — a book that, 100 years on, has never gone out of print.

UC Berkeley was also home to early figures in the feminist poetic tradition. Josephine Miles, the first woman tenured in the English department at Cal in 1947, taught among her many students Barbara Guest, who became a storied figure in one of poetry’s major 20th century movements, the New York School (despite her having attended UC Berkeley and UCLA — talk about poetic license!).

In the decades since, UC has produced enough poets to fill multiple anthologies — including Ishmael Reed, Thom Gunn and Adrienne Rich — to name a few. But perhaps most excitingly, poetry thrives across the university today.

At UC Berkeley this year, student Carli Torres organized the first Undergraduate Poetry Festival with fellow classmates; speakers included a range of prize-winning poets, among them Shelley Wong , alum and UCSF staffer, whose first book “As She Appears” won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Coming together to celebrate poetry animated them all.

“You’re taken legitimately as a poet, as soon as you walk into class, by these incredible poets and teachers,” Torres said. “It makes it so easy to grow.” Inspired by a workshop taught by English professor Cathy Park Hong, Torres and a few other classmates founded the Creative Writers Association on campus for undergrads and jumped into organizing their own festival. For Wong, once an undergrad in the very same lecture halls, it was a thrill to be back as a featured poet.

“It’s a dream realized to read my debut book in the Maude Fife room, 22 years after graduation, where I’ve seen so many notable poets read,” Wong said. “I’m especially honored to be part of their first undergrad poetry festival and their history of poet alumni including Mai Der Vang, Joseph Rios, Thea Matthews, and Javier Zamora. I loved interacting with the undergraduates and wish I could go back to school, as we are truly living in a time of queer writer of color abundance and community.”

While it may not be possible to go back in time just yet, it is always possible to enjoy the work of poets springing from the page, any time of year. Check out a few of our selections of UC poets from across the system below. And if you’re still not sure if poetry is for you, give Robert Hass a chance to explain why poetry has captivated us for centuries, in this short talk for the UC Berkeley Greater Good Center.

A by no means comprehensive selection for your reading lists (please feel free to write in with your favorites!):

UC Berkeley

Robert Hass  — professor emeritus of English at UC Berkeley, Hass is a former poet laureate of the United States (1995-1997), a National Book Award winner (2007) and Pulitzer Prize winner (2008). Read a selection of his work .

Cathy Park Hong — professor of English and Class of 1936 First Chair in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, Hong is the author of poetry collection “Dance Dance Revolution” and “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist (2020) and National Book Critics Circle Award winner (2020) for autobiography. Read a selection of her work .

Solmaz Sharif — assistant professor of English and author of “Look,” a National Book Award finalist, Sharif’s work grapples with Iranian-American identity and the language of war and the state. Read a selection of her work .

Esther Belin — an Institute of American Indian Arts and UC Berkeley alum and author of “From the Belly of My Beauty,” winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Read a selection of her work .

Noah Warren — a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for his first collection, “The Destroyer in the Glass,” Warren helps coordinate the long-running Lunch Poems series, founded by Robert Hass, which you can watch on Youtube . Read a selection of his work .

Ishmael Reed — a professor at UC Berkeley for 35 years, now retired, Reed’s art extends from music to the novel and beyond, and his poetry collections have been nominated for National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. Read a selection of his work .

June Jordan — professor of English and holder of the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship, Jordan was an important figure in civil rights and feminist movements and widely honored for her poetry, activism, essays and criticism. She passed away in 2002. Read a selection of her work .

Robert Duncan — a UC Berkeley alum, Duncan won the National Poetry Award for his book, “Ground Work I: Before the War.” His 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society” was a landmark declaration of gay experience published well before the emergence of an organized gay rights movement. He passed away in 1988. Read a selection of his work .

Thom Gunn — a British-born poet widely hailed for capturing postwar San Francisco gay life in traditional poetic forms, Gunn taught at UC Berkeley. He passed away in 2004. Read a selection of his work .

Lyn Hejinian — a professor of poetics and contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, Hejinian’s work “My Life” is considered a major avant-garde text of the so-called Language movement. Her work was widely celebrated. She passed away in 2024. Read the UC Berkeley remembrance and a selection of her work .

Czeslaw Milosz — Polish-American poet and recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Milosz was a professor of English at UC Berkeley. His fellow Berkeley professor, Robert Hass, translated his work. He passed away in 2004. Read a selection of his work .

Gary Snyder — professor emeritus of English at UC Davis and UC Berkeley educated, Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for his poems, which frequently embrace ecological themes. Read a selection of his work here .

Joe Wenderoth — a professor of creative writing at UC Davis, Wenderoth’s work is widely anthologized and includes “Letters to Wendy’s,” a novel/serial poem written on restaurant comment cards. Read a selection of his work .

Katie Peterson — professor and director of the UC Davis graduate creative writing program, Peterson has published seven books, earning wide acclaim. Read a selection of her work here .

Sandra Gilbert — professor emerita of English at UC Davis, Gilbert is a leading feminist critic in addition to her American Book Award-winning work as a poet. Read a selection of her work .

Monica Youn — a professor of creative writing in the MFA program at UC Irvine, Youn’s poems have won acclaim and awards from many corners, including the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America for “Blackacre.” Read a selection of her work .

Amy Gerstler — a professor of creative writing in the MFA program, Gerstler is a National Book Critics Circle Award-winner whose works mix humor with serious themes. Read a selection of her work .

Yusef Komunyakaa — a graduate of the UC Irvine MFA program, Komunyakaa is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, “Neon Vernacular.” His work touches on themes from his upbringing in the South as a Black man before the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam war. Read a selection of his work .

Harryette Mullen — a professor of English at UCLA (and a UC Santa Cruz alum), Mullen’s poems explore cultural critique and code-switching in making meaning. Her collection “Sleeping with the Dictionary” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Read a selection of her work .

Kay Ryan — a double UCLA alum known for her dry, compressed lyrics, Ryan is a Pulitzer Prize winner and was the poet laureate of the United States from 2008-2010. Read a selection of her work .

Vanesha Pravin — a professor in the writing department, Pravin’s first book, “Disorder,” was awarded the prestigious May Sarton Prize for Poetry by The American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Read about the award .

Samantha Tetangco   — a professor in the Global Arts, Media, & Writing Studies department (and a UC Berkeley alum), Tetangco’s forthcoming collection, “Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light,” was a finalist for the 2023 National Poetry Series. Read a selection of her work .

UC Riverside

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke — distinguished professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, Hedge Coke’s acclaimed corpus addresses Indigenous history, injustice and the environment, among other themes. Her first book, “Dog Road Woman,” won the American Book Award. Read a selection of her work .

Frank Bidart — a UC Riverside alum whose life changed when he discovered English literature on campus, Bidart won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his collection, “Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016.” Read a selection of his work .

Billy Collins — a UC Riverside alum, member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and one of the most widely read poets in America, Collins served as the poet laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. Collins was named a “Literary Lion” by the New York Public Library and won the National Poetry Series prize for “Questions About Angels.” Read a selection of his work .

Juan Felipe Herrera — former Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair at UC Riverside’s creative writing department (now professor emeritus), and a UCLA alum, Herrera was the poet laureate of the United States from 2015-2017. Son of a family of farmworkers and once a farmworker himself, Herrera is a foundational voice in Chicano poetry. Read a selection of his work .

Jasmine Elizabeth Smith — a recent alum of UC Riverside’s MFA program (‘19), Smith is a Cave Canem fellow whose first book, “South Flight,” won the Georgia Poetry Prize. Read a profile of her here and a selection of her work here .

UC San Diego

Jason Magabo Perez — poet laureate of the city of San Diego, Perez earned three degrees from UC San Diego (’03, MA ’13, PhD ’16) and champions immigrants and the working class in his poems. Read a selection of his work .

Eileen Myles — professor emeritus of fiction at UC San Diego, Myles is best known for their dry but moving poems that touch on political themes and daily life. Myles’ work has been widely recognized. Read a selection of their work .

Rae Armantrout — professor emerita of writing at UC San Diego, Armantrout is one of the most widely celebrated contemporary American poets along with being a UC Berkeley-educated native Californian. Her collection, “Versed,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. Read a selection of her work.

UC Santa Barbara

Shirley Geok-lin Lim — a professor emerita of English and two-time American Book Award winner, Lim is known for her poems as well as her scholarship on Asian and Asian American literature. Read a selection of her work .

Caleb Luna — a professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara and a UC Berkeley alum, Luna’s first collection, “Revenge Body,” was widely praised for its engagement with tropes and discourses regarding race, size, sexuality and disability in media and culture. Luna was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral fellow and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral fellow. Read a profile  and learn more about their work .

Cherríe Moraga — a distinguished professor of English, Moraga is a longtime lesbian Xicana feminist activist and poet whose work has won widespread critical acclaim. Read more about her work .

Barry Spacks — a longtime professor of English whose poems were widely recognized, Spacks was also the first poet laureate of Santa Barbara. He passed away in 2014. Read a selection of his work .

Vickie Vértiz — a UC Santa Barbara lecturer in the writing program and a UC Riverside MFA alum, Vértiz’s second book of poems, “Auto/Body” — inspired by her experiences living in South East Los Angeles and its unique car culture — received the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry. Her first book, “Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut,” won a 2018 PEN America literary prize. Read a profile and  a selection of her work .

UC Santa Cruz

Gloria E. Anzaldúa — UC Santa Cruz educated (her Ph.D. was awarded posthumously), Anzaldúa was a hugely influential queer Chicana poet and scholar who collaborated with UC Santa Barbara’s Cherríe Moraga on the groundbreaking anthology, “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.” She passed away in 2004. Read a selection of her work .

Farnaz Fatemi — a UC Santa Cruz alum whose works engage with her Iranian-American identity, Fatemi is the poet laureate of Santa Cruz County whose work “Sister Tongue” won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, selected by Tracy K. Smith. Read a profile on Fatemi here and a selection of her work .

fahimi ife — a UC Santa Cruz professor of Global African Aesthetics, ife writes works exploring intimacy, sensuality, and beauty as it relates to natural life and metaphysics. Their debut, “Maroon Cheoreography,” received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. They have performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Library of Congress. Read a selection from their work .

Nathaniel Mackey — a long-time UC Santa Cruz professor, now emeritus, Mackey has won the National Book Award three times for his innovative work, which is sometimes compared to jazz. His poems explore sound, memory, history and the mythology and experiences of the African diaspora. Read a selection of his work .

Adrienne Rich — legendary feminist, activist and poet, Rich taught at UC Santa Cruz later in her career and earned prizes for her poems including being selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for her first collection and the National Book Award for “Diving into the Wreck.” She passed away in 2012. Read a selection of her work .

Cole Swensen — a UC Santa Cruz alum, Swensen’s books have been selected for the National Poetry Series. “Goest” was a National Book Award finalist. Her work is sometimes linked to that of her recently passed friend and UC Berkeley professor Lyn Hejinian. Read a selection of her work .

Gary Young — professor of English at UC Santa Cruz, an alum of UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz, Young is a leading American poet whose work has won, among other prizes, the William Carlos Williams award from the Poetry Society of America. Read a selection of his work .

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