Biography Essay

Adrienne 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 Younger Poets prize for A Change of World (1951). Ever since, Rich's work, both her poetry and her prose, has reflected a deep commitment to changing existing power relations in the world. Her sense of urgency for change has led her to see her writing as "the graph of a process still going on" and "a continuing exploration," as she states in her foreword to Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (1975). In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986) she further informs her readers that from 1956 on, she dated her poems because

I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; I knew...