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Adrienne Rich (16 May 1929 – 27 March 2012 / Baltimore, Maryland)
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."
Life and Career
Early Life
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the older of two sisters. Her father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother, Helen Jones Rich, was a concert pianist until she married. Her father was Jewish and her mother was a Southern Protestant; the girls were raised as Christians. Adrienne Rich's early poetic influence stemmed from her father who encouraged her to... more »
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Popular Poems
- A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
- Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
- Burning Oneself Out
- Cartographies of Silence
- Diving Into the Wreck
- Final Notions
- For the Dead
- For the Record
- From a Survivor
- From an Atlas of the Difficult World
- Implosions
- In a Classroom
- In Those Years
- Integrity
Quotations
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs s...
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Of Woman Born, ch. 8 (1976).
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My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blis...
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Of Woman Born, ch. 1 (1976).
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The mother's battle for her child—with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life—needs to become a common human battle, wa...
Adrienne Rich (20th century), U.S. author. Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976).
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It is ... crucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the ...
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, foreword (1980).
i need critical analysis of implosions