Adrienne Rich, the great feminist icon and author has died. Author of 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence' and 'Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution,' her writing has been celebrated in virtually every women's studies course on the planet. She will be sorely missed: Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.
Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich 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; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front.
"I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included. "
New York Times: Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012 - A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism
The Guardian: Adrienne Rich obituary: Radical poet revered by feminists and literary critics alike
The Harvard Crimson: Feminist Poet Adrienne Rich ’51 Dies at 82
NPR: Adrienne Rich On The Powerful, Powerless Mother / Hear The 1989 Interview
LA Times: Poet Adrienne Rich, 82, has died
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