As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies.… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“the phantom of the man-who-would-understand, the lost brother, the twin --- for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words,… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“but from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening -from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties” — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize.… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
“Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrotea letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!' — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution… — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free. — Adrienne Rich Copy Share Image
