Her long essay Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) has become her most frequently discussed work, in which she distinguishes between motherhood as a personal experience and motherhood as an institution that controls women. In the course of the 1970s, she came out as a lesbian (see “It Is the Lesbian in US . . .”, The Dream of a Common Language, and “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” ) and turned to political activism. The year 1970 was a turning point in her life and career, with the divorce from her husband and his subsequent suicide and the publication of poetry that inaugurated her rise as a leading feminist figure. In the late 1960s, she joined Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde on the faculty of the City College of New York and, thus, took her first steps into the African American and, to some extent, lesbian community. She received a number of prestigious awards, prizes, and fellowships, among them the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1950, for her first collection of poems, A Change of World (1951) a Guggenheim Fellowship (1952) the National Book Award for Poetry (1974) honorary doctorates from Smith College (1979) and Harvard University (1989) several lifetime achievement awards the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2006) and many more. This self-exploration and yearning to understand how she herself might fit into a male-dominated world shaped Rich’s poetry and prose, accompanied by a strong sense of social criticism. In most of her poems and essays, Rich focused on her own and, thus, a woman’s relationship to a world that she described as patriarchal, with predetermined and fixed gender roles that made being a successful poet, having a family, and being a mother and wife incompatible-an experience depicted in “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971).

She gave hundreds of interviews, and the scholarly studies on her work are too numerous to be counted. She published about twenty-six volumes of poetry, six collections of essays, and quite a number of individual essays in numerous journals or as single volumes. 27 March 2012 in Santa Cruz, CA) is one of the best-known feminist poets, essayists, and activists from the 1950s onward into the 21st century.

The dream of a common language poem