The School Among the Ruins by Adrienne Rich

'A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.' 'The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,' she wrote to the administration. Rich won a MacArthur 'genius' fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships and many top literary awards including the Bollingen Prize, Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award.īut when then-President Clinton awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997, Rich refused to accept it, citing the administration's 'cynical politics.' Rich taught at many colleges and universities, including Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford. 'That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible.' 'For me, socialism represents moral value.the dignity and human rights of all citizens,' she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. Rich believed that art and politics should not be separate and considered herself a socialist. She used her experiences as a mother to write 'Of Woman Born,' her ground-breaking feminist critique of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, published in 1976. She and her husband had three sons before she left him in 1970, just as the women's movement was exploding on the national scene.

Citing the title poem, University of Maryland professor Rudd Fleming wrote in The Washington Post that she 'proves poetically how hard it is to be a woman.

She had first gained national prominence with her third poetry collection, 'Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,' in 1963. In 2004, she won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her collection 'The School Among the Ruins.' She won a National Book Award for her collection of poems 'Diving into the Wreck' in 1974. Rich published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and five collections of nonfiction.

The School Among the Ruins by Adrienne Rich