Adrienne Rich
-
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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
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, 2003, pp. 257 - 75. 273 |
Family and Intimate relationships | Caroline Blackwood | Blackwood felt appropriated; Elizabeth Hardwick
too was outraged to find that Lowell had drawn heavily on words by her. Elizabeth Bishop thought the poetry magnificent but reproved Lowell for the potentially infinite harm he did... |
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 |
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... |
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, 1998. 122 |
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, 1999. 5 |
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... |
Literary responses | Eavan Boland | The reception of this volume sealed EB
's reputation; but reviewers continued to define her by comparison with other, better-known poets like Adrienne Rich
and Seamus Heaney
. Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Norton, 1994. jacket |
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... |
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... |
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... |
Reception | Charlotte Brontë | Most major shifts in second-wave feminist literary criticism have been marked by influential rereadings of Jane Eyre: Ellen Moers
(1976) and Elaine Showalter
(1977) in the assertion of a female literary tradition; the Marxist-Feminist Literature Collective |
Reception | Mona Caird | Where literary historian Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. |
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... |
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. |
Timeline
By mid-October 1983
Ursula Owen
, editor of Virago Press
, published with them an anthology of essays: Fathers: Reflections by Daughters.