Research Guide to American Literature

Jones Rich, a concert pianist who set aside her career to be a wife and mother,
and Arnold Rice Rich, a professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine. Hers was a white, middle-class upbringing, privileged but
marked by her father’s denial of his Jewish identity, which led her to feel “split
at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew.” She “was sent to the Episcopal church,”
although neither of her parents belonged to it, and when she was applying for
college, her Protestant mother advised her to “put down ‘Episcopalian’ rather than
‘none’” on application forms (“Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,”
included in the volume edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi).
Encouraged by her parents to pursue intellectual and artistic interests, she began
writing poems at an early age and read widely in her father’s library, where she
gravitated toward poetry. She attended Radcliffe College, where she continued to
develop her craft while reading John Donne, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W.
B. Yeats, and W. H. Auden. In 1951 Auden chose Rich’s first collection of poetry,
A Change of World, for the esteemed Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 1953 Rich
married Alfred Conrad, an economist at Harvard College, and, in what she has
called a “radicalizing experience,” gave birth to three sons in four years. Her sec-
ond collection, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, was published in 1955, the
year her first son was born; it was eight years before her next book, Snapshots of
a Daughter-in Law: Poems, 1954–1962, appeared. Reflecting Rich’s early educa-
tion, her first two collections are formally conservative, elegant, and emotionally
repressed. Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law reveals Rich’s experimentation with “a
looser line” and “new subject matter” (Claire Keyes), paving the way for her later
experimentation with style and more-explicit interest in female identity, qualities
that would define her later work.
In 1966 Rich moved with her family to New York City, where she became
an instructor in SEEK, a basic-writing program at City College for open-
admissions students who were mostly blacks, Asians, and Latinos from low-
income neighborhoods. Rich also became involved in the Civil Rights, antiwar,
and women’s-liberation movements, launching a lifelong commitment to
social justice and activism. In 1970 her husband committed suicide; she writes
indirectly of his death in “From a Survivor” (1973) and “Sources” (1986). The
earlier poem appears in Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (1973), the
best known of Rich’s many collections and the one that established her place
as a major American poet. In the title poem the androgynous speaker dives
into the sea to explore the wreck of a ship; this image is a metaphor for the
need for oppressed individuals, especially women, to reject the lies society tells
about them. The speaker must undertake this dangerous journey to discover a
more truthful account of her life, history, and the political machinations of the
world.
“Diving into the Wreck” marks Rich’s first explicit and extended rejection
of patriarchal traditions in terms of theme and form while also modeling the
act of “re-visioning,” whereby women reclaim agency over their lives, bodies,
and language by searching through the “wreck” of social myths, primarily those
about gender (a process she had earlier described in the essay “When We Dead
Awaken,” 1972). Diving into the Wreck won the National Book Award in 1974;
Rich initially refused the award as an individual but accepted it later along with

Adrienne Rich 1