The Many Lives of Adrienne Rich

Praised by W. H. Auden as neat and modest, she vowed to be passionate and radical instead.

- Stephanie Burt

In 1952, in her native Baltimore, Adrienne Rich delivered her first public lecture, “Some Influences of Poetry Upon the Course of History.” She was 23. Over the next 59 years, Rich (1929–2012) would herself alter both poetry and history. As an author, a teacher, and an editor, she helped define American feminism. As a poet, she left a stack of books that are animated by anger, by self-reproach, by deep knowledge of the poetic traditions she often rejected, and by her fierce desire to be understood. She created, and illuminated, divisions—within her readers as much as among them—as she reversed and revised her life’s goals.

The simplest story about those goals—and it’s not wrong—presents an obedient daughter and a young mother, rewarded early for talent, radicalized in middle age. Adrienne’s father, Arnold, was a prestigious pathologist at Johns Hopkins University and a WASP-passing Jewish man. An “absolute authority” in his own home, as Rich wrote, Arnold required his wife, Helen, to wear the black crepe dress he designed for her, day after day, year after year. Helen, a trained pianist and composer, threw herself into Adrienne’s music lessons (she was playing Mozart by age 4); Arnold, into her literary education, neglecting her younger sister, Cynthia. When Arnold died in 1968, Hilary Holladay writes in her capacious, generous biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich, Rich had “spent her life becoming the accomplished poet he wanted her to be.” She had also “hated him for a long time.”