Adrienne Rich
(1929 -)
American poet, essayist, and critic.
Adrienne Rich: Introduction
Adrienne Rich: Principal Works
Adrienne Rich: Primary Sources
Adrienne Rich: General Commentary
Adrienne Rich: T...
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Biography EssayAdrienne Rich is one of the foremost poets and feminists of modern times. Her work spans more than forty years of her adult life, beginning in 1951 when she won the Yale Series of Young...
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Adrienne Rich (born 1929), perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, crystallized in her work and life the deeply complex, awakening consciousness of modern women.The daughter of Arnold Rich, a p...
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Adrienne Rich has made significant contributions as a critic, a scholar, and a teacher; but she speaks most importantly as a poet. Her work sustains her belief that "Poetry is above all a concentrati...
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Adrienne Rich is one of the foremost feminist theorists of our time. Her work spans more than thirty years of her adult life, beginning in 1951 when she graduated from Radcliffe College and won the Ya...
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Critical Essay by Anne Bernays
[Of Woman Born] is a disturbing book. In a footnote on page 76 the author, a poet and critic, writes: "I never read a child-rearing manual … that raised th...
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Critical Essay by David Kalstone
[Rich] has for a long time been interested in American life as registered and suffered by those not in power, those not directly responsible for it, and especially wom...
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Critical Essay by Myra Stark
A woman in a patriarchal society such as ours, Rich has said, "in which males hold dominant power and determine what part females shall or shall not play," i...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Atwood
"Diving Into the Wreck" … was fueled by an immense pounding energy, a raw power, "raw" in the sense of "wound." It wa...
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Critical Essay by Laura E. Casari
Poet Adrienne Rich, in Of Woman Born, chose the topic of motherhood "because it was a crucial, still relatively unexplored, area for feminist theory."&#...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Yenser
Adrienne Rich's [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977] frustrates oblique approaches and defies moderate responses. Breathtakingly beautiful a...
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Critical Essay by Helen Vendler
[Mixed] motives—to enlarge "feminist theory" and to express a personal experience of a fateful kind—account for the title of Adrienne Rich&#...
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Critical Essay by Susan R. Van Dyne
Despite Rich's current commitment to a poetry of energetically willed process which would generate an irresistible forward momentum, breaking through the old...
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Critical Essay by Ellen Moers
Adrienne Rich's prose moves with force, clarity, energy; and soothes with a poet's grace and elegance. The only bad prose in ["On Lies, Secrets, and ...
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Critical Essay by Joanna Russ
Adrienne Rich notes dryly that "the first verbal attack slung at the woman who demonstrates a primary loyalty to herself and other women is man-hater." ...
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Critical Essay by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
It's an unhappy fact of life and of prose that ideology tends to coarsen, and sometimes to fossilize, the moral imagination; it leaves little room fo...
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Critical Essay by Carol Muske
The goal of all this exploration is not the cultivation of "better women writers," but of women who will begin to write outside of the "law" o...
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Critical Essay by Barbara L. Estrin
The power to choose—the exhilaration and the humiliation of self-determination—is … the subject of Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common...
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In the following essay, McGuirk situates Twenty-one Love Poems in "a context of poetics as ideology," exposing "the ideological limitations of a poetic mode" and theorizing...
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Below, Greenwald explains the effect of Rich's feminist consciousness in her poetry of the Vietnam era, highlighting her empathy with "the Enemy" and her appeal for a subjective v...
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In the following essay, Templeton provides an overview of the major trends and themes of criticism in Rich's poetry.
Adrienne Rich's poetry has always raised important, difficult questio...
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In the essay below, Hammer meditates on various aspects of the relation between "culture" and "AIDS"—between aesthetics and sexuality—by comparing Rich'...
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Below, Flowers ponders the significance of Rich's substitution of the "experiential, subjective, personal" feminine pronoun she for the "analytical, objective, universal&#x...
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In the following glowing review of Dark Fields of the Republic, St. John admires Rich's poetic style for its blending of personal details with broad public concerns.
During the past 40 years as...
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In the review below, Donoghue faults the themes and tone of Dark Fields of the Republic, claiming that "each of the poems is interesting mainly because [Rich wrote it."]
Adrienne Rich pu...
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In the following essay, Henneberg identifies the feminine and masculine positions in the early poem "Autumn Equinox" in terms of the primary concerns of Rich's later poetry: �...
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Adrienne Rich and Paulo Freire have common themes on transformation and society. Both talk about the transforming of society and the relationships between people in their writing. Freire talked ...
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Adrienne Rich's poetry serves a prophetic function by articulating the history and ideals of the feminist struggle. By recalling the ancient chthonic mysteries of blood and birth, by reconnecting daug...
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Rich, Adrienne
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne (Cecile) Rich
