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:
“I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“behind dry lips
a loaded gun.”
—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)
“...Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)