"Lying is done with words and also with silence."
-Adrienne Rich
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Adrienne Rich is a renowned poet known by many as the most influential figure in
the Feminist Poetry Movement. Rich lived in a hotbed of America’s history, and the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Movement, and Women ’s Rights Movement influenced her writing. Her writing could be very political and controversial at times with themes of Lesbian/Gay rights, Racism, Anti-War etc., but she also wrote some poetry that was just universal and insightful. She was truly a talented poet. Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 to Arnold and Helen Rich in Baltimore Maryland. Her father was the Chairman of Pathology at The John Hopkins Medical School and her mother was a composer and concert pianist. Having two very smart and talented parents, Rich was exposed to many educational things and she quickly took to reading poetry from her father’s extensive library. Her first favorite poets were Tennyson and Keats. Fast-forwarding, Rich is at Radcliffe College, Harvard, and she is accepting her diploma. Famous poet W.H. Auden chose Rich for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her first collection of poetry, A Change of World. This was the beginning of many awards that she would accept including the National Book Award for Poetry, which was awarded to her for her angry and controversial collection of poems titled Diving Into the Wreck, for which she is most known for. Rich refused individually to accept the National Book Award and instead accepted it with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women. Rich was married with three kids for a big part of her life until she divorced Alfred Conrad who then committed suicide a few years later. Rich moved in with her lifelong partner Michelle Cliff who was a writer from Jamaica. They were happy together all the way up until Rich’s death in 2012. Adrienne Rich had many other noted collections of poetry published including: Snapshots of a Daughter in Law (1963), Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), On Lies Secrets and Silence, Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979), An Atlas of a Difficult World (1991) The School Among the Ruins (2004). |