Rich, Adrienne, 1929–2012, American poet, b. Baltimore, grad. Radcliffe, 1951. From the 1970s her exquisitely wrought verse became looser and more personal as her works increasingly reflected feminist and lesbian themes. Among her two dozen poetry collections are A Change of World (1951), Diving into the Wreck (1973, National Book Award), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power (1989), Dark Fields of the Republic (1996), and Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011). Her volumes of feminist theory and criticism include Of Women Born (1976), an investigation of motherhood, as well as On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979) and Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986). Her prose reflections on the function of poetry are in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993).
See her Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 (1993) and the posthumously published Collected Poems: 1950–2012 (2016, ed. by A. Gelpi et al.); Essential Essays (2018, ed. by S. M. Gilbert); biographies by A. Sickels (2005) and H. Holladay (2020); studies by J. R. Cooper (1984), C. Keyes (1986), C. Werner (1988), A. Templeton (1994), and C. C. Langdell (2004).
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