Adrienne Rich
National Book Award
1974
Bollingen Prize
2003
2010
Adrienne Cecile Rich (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", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read more about Adrienne Rich: Selected Awards and Honors
Famous quotes by adrienne rich:
“We who were loved will never
unlive that crippling fever.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write, on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too ‘political,’ ‘merely’ oral and thus unreliable.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world: I first began
a small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The word ‘revolution’ itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the ‘revolution’ of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the ‘revolving door’ of a politics which has ‘liberated’ women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“This luxury of the precocious child,
Time’s precious chronic invalid,—
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us—
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)