ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Adrienne Rich, a feminist thinker. Celebrated as one of the most influential poets of her generation, Adrienne Rich's almost century-long life made the slogan "the personal is political" into a sustaining mantra, emblematic of the way poetics and poetry connected to a wide social and political praxis. The Civil Rights Movement further shaped her writing and was shaped by it in the 1970s, a period when she widened her thinking, connecting feminist aims with a larger cultural awareness, one that highlighted local dynamics of oppression as they fed global expression. Building then on Rich's method of excavation and truth-telling eroticism, she sought an ethics of connectivity. The Dream of a Common Language linked her to a poetic past, following Wordsworth, Whitman, even Eliot, in their claims that poetry must remain tuned to the language of one's time.
