Rich, Adrienne (1929–)

There is perhaps no writer of comparable influence and achievement in the contemporary women's movement as Adrienne Rich. In her writing, she asks how change comes about at this particular time; her answer is that there can be no change that does not involve leadership by women. Although Rich is one of the most provocative voices on the politics of language and power, critics dismissed her earlier poetry as angry, bitter, and “merely” political. Cultural codes of [Page 1219]expression and the relationship of language to power are issues that consistently occur in Rich's work. Her voice remains aggressive and uncompromising and goes far beyond women's issues.

In 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe and won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, A Change of World. In 1953, she married and struggled with conflicts over the prescribed roles for a woman, which tensions made her feel guilty, even monstrous, as they did many women. But Rich's feelings of anger and cultural oppression found articulation in the broader sociopolitical movements that gathered force in the 1960s. She saw her personal confusion and struggle reflected in the social and cultural rebellions that were taking place: feminism and the anti-war (Vietnam) and civil rights protests. Thus, it is impossible to escape the social and political in Rich's poetry because it is her life. For her, there is no separation between art and the artist's life.

In What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, she portrays the United States as being in a clinical mental depression and as a place of stagnation of the will. And in An Atlas of the Difficult World, Rich deals with loving her country, yet hating how national interest is defined for people by corporate and governmental entities: They control the media—and they lie. Indeed, her interest in language in a social context raises the question of how lying disrupts internal balance and how difficult it is to construct an honorable life in the midst of this lying. So her poetry brims with the tension between inner and outer life. It takes something out of the reader and challenges the reader's thinking, because poetry is a communal art, an art that requires participation by the reader. Otherwise, why does a writer write?

Sometimes, she says, she feels like a stranger in her own country, not able to speak the official language because, in America, the problem is censorship by way of “Who wants to listen to you, anyway?” Rich believes this is a reaction to feeling—and people aren't exposed to a lot of actual feeling. She challenges the given assumptions about what is and what isn't, questioning the very life we are living right now. By posing questions people would rather not confront, she wakes up her readers.

Adrienne Rich refused the 1997 National Medal for the Arts because she could not compromise her values by accepting an award from a lying government. It would have been hypocritical.