Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

National Book Award
1974
Bollingen Prize
2003

Griffin Poetry Prize
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:

    They can rule the world while they can persuade us
    our pain belongs in some order.
    Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
    than a life of famine and suicide ... ?
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    A life I didn’t choose
    chose me: even
    my tools are the wrong ones
    for what I have to do.
    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)

    Either you will
    go through this door
    or you will not go through.
    ...
    The door itself
    makes no promises.
    It is only a door.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To ‘see the light’ too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)