Biography of adrienne rich poet
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Adrienne Rich
American poet, essayist and feminist (1929–2012)
Adrienne Cecile Rich (AD-ree-ən; May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",[1][2] and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse".[3] Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.[4]
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by icon W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden went on to write the introduction to the book. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts to protest House SpeakerNewt Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Early life and education
[edit]Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929,[5] the elder of two sisters. Her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her mother, Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich,[6] was
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It was the summer of 1958—the end of “the tranquilized Fifties,” in the words of Robert Lowell—and the poet Adrienne Rich was desperate. Her body was rebelling. The first signs of rheumatoid arthritis had appeared seven years earlier, when she was twenty-two. She had two young children, and while pregnant with the first she had developed a rash, later diagnosed as an allergic reaction to the pregnancy itself. And now, despite her contraception, she was pregnant again, to her dismay.
Years later, looking back on this time, Rich would characterize herself as “sleepwalking.” Most days, she was up at dawn with a child before turning to endless domestic tasks: cooking, cleaning, supervising the kids. She had little time to write and even less motivation. “When I receive a letter soliciting mss., or someone alludes to my ‘career,’ I have a strong sense of wanting to deny all responsibility for and interest in that person who writes—or who wrote,” she recorded in her journal in 1956. She was alienated from her former self—the prodigy who had delighted her domineering father and stunned teachers at her high school, the Radcliffe undergraduate who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets’ Prize, the Guggenheim Fellow who had infiltrated the all-male Merton College at Oxford. Sudde
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