Adrienne Rich Twenty One Love Poem

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American Poet and feminist born May 16, 1929 died March 27th 2012, was born in Baltimore, Maryland and the oldest of two sisters from a middle class family, Rich was educated by her parents until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951, the same year her first book of poems, A Change of World, appeared. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist. Adrienne was known to be one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century",and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse. Rich 's poetics depends on a reader 's experience of her poetry. It is an event of cultural engagement in which the poems, resonating with and against each other, urges the reader to test various hermeneutic and ideological stances, and it requires the dialogic interaction among poet, poem, reader, and cultural context. For these reasons, the reader is indispensable to Rich 's feminist poetics. I believe the readers are the ones to perceive the personification in her poetry. Through his/her perception the images can be understood or retranslated into several different possibilities. Such freedom conceded to the reader can be interpreted as a demonstration of the persona’s disengagement from a given ideology. "The publication of Twenty-One Love Poems in 1976 in effect marked Rich 's coming out as a lesbian. "The rules break like a thermometer,/ quicksilver spills across the charted systems/ we 're out in a country that has no language/ ...whatever we do together is pure invention/ the maps they gave us were out of date/ by years...", were all things she wrote that pronounced that she was coming out. In 1970 Rich separated from her husband, with whom she had