Adrienne Rich, who died at the age of 82 on April 3 at her home in Santa Cruz, California, is considered “a poet of great reputation and great anger” and “one of America’s best-known public intellectuals.” Through her poetry, she was able to bring out the emotions and feelings of lesbians and oppressed women. She had to her credit more than two dozen volumes of poetry and half a dozen of prose and almost all of her writing revolved around the feminist movement. A report by WW Norton & Company, her publisher, says that to date more than 800,000 copies of her poetry have been sold.

Adrienne Rich was Jewish and a lesbian and argued vehemently through her poetry for an end to male disenfranchisement. Many critics considered her poetry controversial. Another group of critics called her verse surprisingly colloquial. But, no one could argue with the intensity of the sight of her.

It was in the early 1950s that Mrs. Rich began to become popular as a senior at Radcliffe. Since then, she has won many accolades and awards, including a 1994 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and a 1974 National Book Award for poetry for “Diving Into the Wreck.” The latter is still considered her masterpiece. The poem that gives title to this work delves into the experience of women:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
black streams, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently over the wreck
we plunged into the cellar…
We are, I am, you are
for cowardice or courage
the one who finds our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Mrs. Rich was not naive in believing that her poetry could change social institutions. In one of her acceptance speeches, she said: “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. It is also not a blueprint, or an instruction manual, or a billboard.” But she firmly believed that her poetry could be “a beacon to illuminate the conscience of women.”

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, was Jewish and her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, was Christian. Her father was a doctor and tuberculosis expert and her mother was a pianist-composer. It was her father who groomed her to be a literary genius. She started reading and writing poetry even at a very young age. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English in 1951 from Radcliffe. It was WH Auden who chose her first collection of poems called “A Change of World” for her publication in the Yale Younger Poets series. Almost all critics praised this collection of poems for its impeccable mastery of form.

In 1963, she released her third collection called “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” and it was during the same year that “The Feminine Mystique” was also published. This last job enhanced Mrs. Rich’s national reputation. The poem that gives title to this work goes like this:

You, once beautiful in Shreveport,
with henna-dyed hair, skin like a peach blossom,
they still have their dresses copied from that time…
Your mind now, rotting like a wedding cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the razor’s edge
indeed mother.

Ms. Rich married Harvard economist Alfred Haskell Conrad in 1953. Mr. Conrad died in 1970 and Ms. Rich came out as a lesbian in 1976. Her later works also dealt with the Holocaust and the struggles of black women.

The poems he wrote were “The dream of a common language”, “A wild patience has brought me here”, “The fact of a door frame”, “A difficult world atlas” and “Poetry will not do tonight”. “. His prose included “On Lies, Secrets and Silence”, “Blood, Bread and Poetry”, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” and “Of Born Woman”.

In 1997, Ms. Rich turned down the National Medal of Arts, which is the highest award given to artists by the United States government. She said “amid the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice” that the government had chosen to honor “some symbolic artists while people in general are so disgraced”. She also added: “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the table of power that holds you hostage.” She summed up her entire life as a struggle to achieve “the creation of a society without domination.”