The World of Adrienne Rich

An influential and much-decorated poet, Adrienne Rich was above all a dissident, who had no interest in softening her feminist, antiracist, and antiwar sentiments to comfort the powerful. Her politics developed over many years because she came by them as an artist—which may be what allowed her to become, unusually, both more self-questioning and more combative as she aged. In her work and in her life, she had begun by upholding conventions with such aplomb that she knew them intimately—every connection, every contradiction—by the time she was eventually ready to reject them.