Adrienne Rich Analysis

Adrienne Rich’s work has been at the vanguard of the women’s movement in the United States. Her poems and essays explore her own experience and seek to develop a “common language” for women to communicate their values and perceptions. She has received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry (1960), the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1971), and the National Book Award (1974) for Diving into the Wreck. Other recognitions include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), the Northern California Book Award in poetry (1989), the Bill Whitehead Award (1990), Lambda Literary Awards (1991, 1995, 2001), the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1992), the Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1992), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1992), the Frost Medal (1992), a MacArthur Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize (1993), the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement (1994), the Wallace Stevens Award (1996), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation (1999), the Bollingen Prize (2003), and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation (2006). In 2004, The School Among the Ruins earned Rich the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California, and the Poetry Center Book Award. She served as chancellor for the Academy of American Poets from 1999 to 2001.

Adrienne Rich is known primarily for her poetry, but she has produced essays on writing and politics as well: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) is an analysis of the changing meanings of childbirth and motherhood in Anglo-American culture, in which Rich draws on personal experience as well as sources in mythology, sociology, economics, the history of medicine, and literature to develop her analysis. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979) is a collection of essays on women writers (including Anne Bradstreet, Anne Sexton, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Dickinson) and feminism. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (1986) followed with further essays on women writers and feminist criticism. What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993) delivers just what the title promises. For several years Rich also coedited, with Michelle Cliff, the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom.

Compare the more formal style of writing present in Adrienne Rich’s early poetry, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” for example, to the experimental stylistic elements that mark her later works. Does the lack of uniformity in her later works encourage meaning or distract the reader?

Rich’s poetry is said to mimic themes of Emily Dickinson and, at times, her somber tone. What could Rich, as a twentieth century American woman, have in common with a woman born more than one hundred years before her?

One theme that permeates much of Rich’s poetry is where and how one’s private life intersects with one’s public life. Where does this theme emerge in her poetry? Why might Rich be so focused on this relationship?

Rich incorporates the limitations of language into much of her poetry, showing that while words are necessary, they almost always fall short of reflecting emotions accurately. Analyze this theme in the light of her role as a poet. What is to be gained by a writer calling attention to the restrictions of language?

Rich is the mother of three sons. Where in her poetry are images of motherhood? What are Rich’s opinions of motherhood in the light of her feminist rhetoric?