Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry

by Adrienne Rich (Author), Adrienne Rich (Author), Sandra M. Gilbert (Author)

New
Paperback
2019
$19.69

Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich's essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.

Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich's earliest essays, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse, as evidenced in her 1980 essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.

Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity ; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts ; Poetry and the Forgotten Future ; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich's signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.

Synopsis

Adrienne Rich was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major intellectual voice of her generation. Essential Essays gathers twenty-five of her most renowned essays into one volume, demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice, her prophetic vision, and her revolutionary views on social justice. Rich's essays unite the political, personal, and poetical like no other.

Essential Essays is edited and includes an introduction by leading feminist scholar, literary critic, and poet Sandra M. Gilbert. Emphasizing Rich's lifelong intellectual engagement, the essays selected here range from the 1960s to 2008. The volume contains one of Rich's earliest essays, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, which discusses the need for female self-definition, along with excerpts from her ambitious, ground-breaking Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. As the New York Times wrote, Rich brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse, as evidenced in her 1980 essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.

Also among these insightful and forward-thinking works are: Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity ; excerpts from What Is Found There, about the need to reexamine the literary canon; Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts ; Poetry and the Forgotten Future ; and other writings that profoundly shaped second-wave feminism, each balanced by Rich's signature blend of research, theory, and self-reflection.

$19.69

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 17 Sep 2019
ISBN 10: 0393355136
ISBN 13: 9780393355130

Author Bio

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich's volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award. Sandra M. Gilbert has published numerous volumes of criticism as well as collections of poetry and a memoir. She is coeditor (with Susan Gubar) of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. A Distinguished Professor of English emerita at the University of California, Davis, she lives in Berkeley, California.