Adrienne Rich Essay -- essays research papers fc

The Poetry of Adrienne Rich Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland in the year of 1929. Rich grew up in a household as she describes it as † †¦white, middle-class, full of books, and with a father who encouraged her to write† (Daniel). Her father Arnold Rich was a doctor and a pathology professor and her mother, Helen Jones Rich , was a pianist and a composer. â€Å"Adrienne Rich recalls her growing-up years clearly dominated by the intellectual presence and demands of the male in the family, her father, while correctly marked by the submerged tensions arising from the conflicts between the religious and cultural heritage of the father's Jewish background and her mother's Southern Protestantism† (Pope). In the year of 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe University. During this year, Adrienne Rich also won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, A Change of World. In 1953, Adrienne Rich married Alfred Conrad who was a Harvard economist; during the next five years Rich had three sons. Deborah Pope says that Rich’s journal entries, from these years, state that this was an â€Å"emotionally and artistically difficult period† (Pope). Rich’s poems were mainly influenced by Robert Frost, Yeates, Stevens, and Auden. She became a major influence, through her essays and poetry, in many areas of modern-day women's movements, she had become one of the most provoking voices on the politics of sexuality, race, power, and women‘s culture. Adrienne Rich is a southern Jew who grew up during the forties. Rich lived in a gentle neighborhood and was never taught about her Jewish heritage. She eventually had to deal with conflicts between the religious and cultural heritage of her father’s Jewish background and her mother’s southern Protestantism (Pope). Rich’s father didn’t show any signs of ethnicity in any way. He did this to fit into a society that was against Jewish people. In many of her works, Adrienne Rich talks about being oppressed. In her poem, â€Å"1948: Jews,† Adrienne Rich refers to her college years. At Radcliffe University, she was to stay away from Jews. No matter how much she wanted, she could not unite with them as a group because socially it was less acceptable. She had to avoid her own ethnicity to survive in the American culture. â€Å"A Vision,† is another poem Rich wrote that discusses the issue of... ...s full of sound and fury (Barclay). She has fused politics and poetry and also revitalized the lost American institution of political poetry. Adrienne Rich depicts herself in her early 1980's poem "Sources," "she is a woman with a mission, not to win prizes/but to change the laws of history" (Rothschild). Works Cited â€Å"Adrienne Rich.† Barclay Agency 2004. 31 Oct 2004 . â€Å"Adrienne Rich.† Bedford/St. Martin’s 1999. 27 Oct 2004 . American Literature Web Resources. May 1999. Millikin University. 2 Nov 2004 . Daniel, Meagan. â€Å"Adrienne Rich: To Make the Work Her Life, and Her Life the Work.† Empowerment4Women. 28 Dec 2004 . LITWEB. W.W. Norton & Company. 28 Dec 2004 . Pope, Deborah. â€Å"Rich’s Life and Career.† Modern American Poetry. (2000) 27 Oct 2004 . Pettit, Rhonda. â€Å"Bibliography of Adrienne Rich.† Encyclopedia of American Poetry 2001. Compiled and hyperlinked by Gunnan Bengtsson. AmericanPoems.com. 30 Dec 2004 . â€Å"Rich, Adrienne.† Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. 1, 1991, Vol. 1 P909. Tennessee Electronic Library. 29 Oct 2004 . Rothschild, Matthew. â€Å"Rich 1994 Interview from the Progressive.† Modern American Poetry. (2000) 27 Oct 2004 .