American poet, essayist, and feminist theorist — the most politically consequential American poet of the second half of the 20th century. Rich's first book, A Change of World (1951), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize with a foreword by W. H. Auden praising the poems for being "neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble." The subsequent fifty years were a sustained repudiation of that description.
The hinge volumes are Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Leaflets (1969), and Diving into the Wreck (1973, National Book Award — which she accepted with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker "on behalf of all women"). The Dream of a Common Language (1978), with its Twenty-One Love Poems including the "Floating Poem, Unnumbered," is the great lesbian lyric sequence of American poetry. An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) is the major late book of public witness.
Rich's essays, collected in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), What Is Found There (1993), and Arts of the Possible (2001), are among the essential documents of late-20th-century American feminism. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980), in particular, reframed a generation of feminist theory. She refused the National Medal of Arts from the Clinton administration in 1997, on the grounds that "the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration."