Universities, and she has received numerous awards and fellowships, among them
Guggenheim Fellowships (1952–1953 and 1961–1962), a Bollingen Foundation
Fellowship (1962), the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship (1962–1963), the Fund
for Human Dignity Award (1981), a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), a Brandeis
Creative Arts Medal (1987), the Common Wealth Award in Literature (1991),
the Lenore Marshall /Nation Award (1992), and a MacArthur Foundation
“genius award.” She has also received honorary doctorates from (among others)
Smith College, the College of Wooster, Harvard University, Swarthmore College,
and Brandeis University.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- A good deal of scholarship addresses the early and middle periods of Adri-
enne Rich’s poetry, while not as much critical work exists at the moment for
her work from the mid 1990s to the present. Rich’s poetic oeuvre is one of
great change, fluidity, and openness; readers of Rich’s work can notice even in
cursory glances dramatic shifts in thinking and form throughout her career. If
the early work, poems such as “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” from A Change of World
(1951) and “The Roofwalker” from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963),
look conservative, they are so formally and only so politically when com-
pared to the more-radical work of Rich’s middle and later periods. Students
interested in investigating changes in Rich’s style and thematic focus over the
course of her career will do well to consult Cheri Colby Langdell’s book. - In “Trying to Save the Skein,” a review of Diving into the Wreck included in the
collection edited by Jane Roberta Cooper, Cheryl Walker called the title work
“one of the most beautiful poems to come out of the feminist movement....
The poem is utterly personal but there is nothing in it which draws away into
private life.” Walker’s observations serve as a starting point for understand-
ing how Rich’s work, this poem in particular, manifests the feminist dictum
“the personal is political.” Students might consider analyzing the ways Rich
removes the division between what is happening to a person behind closed
doors and what is happening to her in the outside world. How do this poem
and others show that the personal and political are linked absolutely, shaping
and reinforcing one another constantly? - Rich’s prose is a source of interpretation of her poetry and is an excellent start-
ing place for students interested in analyzing her work. Pinpointing an idea
from her essays, students can begin to examine how the same or a similar idea
is explored and elaborated in her poetry. For example, in “Split at the Root:
An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982) Rich explores her multiple, and often
contradictory, personal and social identities. How do poems like “Sources,”
“Yom Kippur 1984,” and “Eastern War Time” foreshadow or continue her
observations? Another example would be to show how Rich extends in poetry
the examination of the myth “the self-denying, self-annihilative role of the
Good Mother” expressed in Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience and
Institution, and its connection to “the ‘death’ of the woman or girl who once
had hopes, expectations, fantasies for herself—especially when those hopes