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:
“Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“How people used to meet!
starved, intense, the old
Christmas gifts saved up till spring,
and the old plain words,”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
an unlocked door, that cage of cages,
tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)