For further reading and study: Rich has made generous selections from her various books of poems in two volumes: Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1975), and, more recently, The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (Norton, 1984). These volumes contain major portions of A Change of World (1951), The Diamond Cutters (1955), Snapshots a Daughter-in-Law (1963), Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973), The Dream of a Common Language (1978), and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981). After those books, she published Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (1989), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Beyond the Map (1995), and Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999). A more modest selection of poems can be found in Adrienne Rich's Poetry, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi (Norton, 1975), which also contains some of Rich's best essays on writing poetry, some excellent interviews with Rich, and a good selection of criticism on Rich. Her Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 was recently issued in paperback by Norton.
Some of the best places to begin a study of Rich are her prose essays; you've read the one on Bradstreet--it is collected, along with her essay on Dickinson, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979). More recent essays are collected in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986) and What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993; this is the book that contains her essay on Whitman and Dickinson). Her remarkable book about motherhood from personal, historical, anthropological, and mythical perspectives is Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976).
There are many good essays about Rich and interviews with her. The book listed above, Adrienne Rich's Poetry, contains some and also has a good bibliography of criticism and interviews. Rich is often studied in the context of other feminist or proto-feminist writers. Wendy Martin wrote a book called An American Triptych (1984), a study of Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich, available in paperback from University of North Carolina Press. Krista Radcliffe looks at Viriginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Rich in Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions (1996); Jeanne Marth Perreault has a good chapter on Rich in Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autobiography (1995); and Margaret Dickie views Rich alongside Gertrude Stein and Elizabeth Bishop, focusing on these writers' "public lyrics," in her City of Words (1997). Jane Roberta Cooper edited Reading Adrienne Rich (1984). Individual books about Rich are just beginning to appear--see Alice Templeton's The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics (1994).
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES:
The Academy of American Poets webpage on Rich contains links to a few good sites about her poetry, with a link to a good biographical source, available here.
Excellent gathering of commentary, biography, links on Rich at the Modern American Poetry website, here.
An excellent bibliography of Rich's work, with links to many online articles and dissertations about Rich, as well as interviews with her; available here.
