was a pianist and composer. Rich attended Rad-
cliffe College, graduating in 1951 with an AB
(cum laude). That same year she published her
first book of poetry,A Change of World, for
which she was awarded the Yale Younger Poets
Prize. Two years later, Rich married Alfred Con-
rad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts. The couple had three
sons over the next five years.
Rich found her true poetic voice in the
1960s, beginning in 1963 with the publication
ofSnapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, her third
book of poetry, in which she first expressed her
emerging feminist ideas. Rich and her family
moved to New York in 1966, where she taught
a remedial English program at City College. This
was during the period when the feminist, civil
rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements were
growing in strength, and Rich became deeply
engaged in these social issues. Her beliefs were
reflected in her books,Necessities of Life(1966),
Leaflets(1969), andWill to Change(1971). In
1969 she separated from her husband, who com-
mitted suicide a year later.
‘‘Diving into the Wreck’’ was first published
as the title poem in her 1973 collection.Diving
into the Wreckreceived lavish praise from critics
and won the National Book Award for Poetry,
but Rich refused to accept the award for herself.
Instead, she joined with two other female poets
and accepted it on behalf of all women whose
voices had been silenced.
Many other poetry volumes followed,
including Twenty-One Love Poems (1976), A
Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far(1981),
The Fact of a Doorframe(1984),Your Native
Land, Your Life(1986),Time’s Power(1989),
An Atlas of the Difficult World(1991),Dark
Fields of the Republic(1995),Midnight Salvage
(1999), andFox(2000). Her collectionThe School
among the Ruins: Poems, 2000–2004(2004), won
the National Book Critics Circle Award. This
was one of many literary awards Rich has
received, including the first Ruth Lilly Poetry
Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the
Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead
Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the
National Poetry Association Award for Distin-
guished Service to the Art of Poetry. In 1997 Rich
refused the National Medal of Arts because she
disagreed with the policies of the Clinton admin-
istration. Rich has also written many volumes of
prose, includingOf Woman Born: Motherhood as
Experience and Institution (1976), On Lies,
Secrets, and Silence(1979),Blood, Bread, and
Poetry(1986),What Is Found There: Notebooks
on Poetry and Politics(1993), andArts of the
Possible: Essays and Conversations(2001).
Rich has taught at many colleges and uni-
versities, including Swarthmore, Columbia,
Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State, and
Stanford University. She was a professor of Eng-
lish and feminist studies at Stanford University
from 1986 to 1992. Since 1976, Rich has lived
with Michelle Cliff, her partner, a writer and
editor.Poem Summary
Stanzas 1–3
At the literal level of the poem, the speaker of
‘‘Diving into the Wreck,’’ who could be either
male or female, is in a schooner out at sea, pre-
paring to dive into the ocean in search of a wreck.
The journey she (assuming a female speaker) is
about to take is both external and internal, since
she is also journeying into the depths of her own
psyche and, symbolically, into history and soci-
ety. Taking with her a camera and a knife, sheAdrienne Rich(AP Images)
Diving into the Wreck