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:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—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)
“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—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)