Adrienne Rich

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Standard Name: Rich, Adrienne
Birth Name: Adrienne Cecile Rich
Married Name: Adrienne Cecile Conrad
AR ranks as one of the most influential figures in the twentieth-century feminist movement, and as one of the most influential contemporary American poets (though her political activism impeded the usual workings of the canonisation process, producing a counter-flow against the voices raised in praise of her work). Like other great poets she has produced a body of theorising and critical prose that goes hand-in-hand with her poetry, and that has been almost equally clarifying and liberating for women seeking to understand the dynamics of history.
Black and white head-shot of Adrienne Rich. She has jaw-length hair with short bangs, and she wears a collared shirt.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Mary Wollstonecraft
Virginia Woolf celebrated Wollstonecraft's immortality in 1929; Marjorie Bowen wrote of her critically in 1937 yet entitled her work This Shining Woman. The future anthropologist Ruth Benedict , with her own career yet to...
Reception Alice Walker
When this volume was nominated for a National Book Award, three of the four female nominees (among eleven) agreed that they would not compete with each other, but would accept the award (if it was...
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Stevenson
As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan , her models included the suave, disciplined, informal, very accessible
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press.
122
early poems of her near-contemporary Adrienne Rich . She wrote two stage works that were performed...
Friends, Associates Anne Sexton
AS made many friends among her fellow poets: Kumin , Soter , William DeWitt Snodgrass , Sylvia Plath (whose death affected her deeply), George Starbuck and James Wright (who were also her lovers), and Anthony Hecht
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Carol Rumens
She discusses the poetry of Philip Larkin , Derek Mahon , and a range of women poets (including Adrienne Rich , Marilyn Hacker , and Ruth Padel ), especially their forms, music, and metres.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Carol Rumens
According to a reviewer, CR rings the changes on poetic form: lyric, sonnet, pantoume (a stanza form with lines repeated in different places according to a fixed pattern), sestina (six six-line stanzas and a three-line...
Reception Sylvia Plath
Other recipients of this award include Denise Levertov (1960), Adrienne Rich (1963), Erica Jong (1971), and Margaret Atwood (1974).
Modern Poetry Association,. Poetry. http://www.poetrymagazine.org.
Textual Features Ruth Padel
RP takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Textual Production Tillie Olsen
The four successive Tillie Olsen's Reading Lists of then almost unknown women writers, published by the Feminist Press in their Spectrum: Women's Studies Newsletter in 1972-3, were, according to Adrienne Rich , the beginning of...
Intertextuality and Influence Deborah Levy
This book has four sections, each titled from a reason for writing, Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. The first and last describe a period of near-breakdown that...
Friends, Associates Denise Levertov
In the USA, DL soon became friends with Robert Creeley and Kenneth Rexroth . From October 1951 she corresponded with William Carlos Williams , to whom she remained close until the end of his life...
Reception Caroline Herschel
In the beginning CH 's reputation was usually judged more as that of a woman and a sister than as that of a scientist. Frances Burney 's admiration and delight was directed at her as...
Intertextuality and Influence Carol Ann Duffy
Poet and critic Deryn Rees-Jones sees in these poems the influence of surrealism and in the title a reference to Adrienne Rich 's Twenty-One Love Poems in A Dream of a Common Language, 1978.
Rees-Jones, Deryn. Carol Ann Duffy. Northcote House.
5
Literary responses Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich has offered this reading of ED 's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Cultural formation Elizabeth Carter
EC was without doubt woman-identified: as Hester Chapone observed, you carry your partiality to your own sex farther than I do.
Lanser, Susan Sniader. “Bluestocking Sapphism and the Economies of Desire”. Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edited by Nicole Pohl and Betty Schellenberg, Huntington Library, pp. 257-75.
273
This in itself gives her a position in Adrienne Rich 's lesbian continuum...

Timeline

By mid-October 1983: Ursula Owen, editor of Virago Press, published...

Women writers item

By mid-October 1983

Ursula Owen , editor of Virago Press , published with them an anthology of essays: Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.

Texts

Rich, Adrienne, and W. H. Auden. A Change of World. Yale University Press, 1951.
Rich, Adrienne. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. Norton, 1981.
Rich, Adrienne. An Atlas of the Difficult World. Norton, 1991.
Rich, Adrienne. Ariadne. J. H. Furst, 1939.
Rich, Adrienne. Arts of the Possible. Norton, 2001.
Rich, Adrienne. Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Norton, 1986.
Rich, Adrienne. Collected Poems 1950-2012. Editor Rankine, Claudia, W. W. Norton and Company, 2016.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol.
5
, No. 4, pp. 631-60.
Rich, Adrienne. Dark Fields of the Republic. Norton, 1995.
Rich, Adrienne. Diving into the Wreck. Norton, 1973.
Rich, Adrienne. Esssential Essays. Editor Gilbert, Susan M., Norton, 2018.
Rich, Adrienne. Fox. Norton, 2001.
Rich, Adrienne. Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971-2012. W. W. Norton, 2013.
Rich, Adrienne. Leaflets. Norton, 1969.
Rich, Adrienne. Midnight Salvage. Norton, 1999.
Rich, Adrienne. Necessities of Life. Norton, 1966.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born. Norton, 1976.
Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Norton, 1979.
Rich, Adrienne. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. Harper and Row, 1963.
Rich, Adrienne. Sources. Heyeck Press, 1983.
Rich, Adrienne. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, Poems 2004-2006. Norton, 2007.
Rich, Adrienne, editor. The Best American Poetry 1996. Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996.
Rich, Adrienne. The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems. Harper, 1955.
Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language. Norton, 1978.
Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe. Norton, 1984.