28/10/2025
'In 1997, when the U.S. government offered Adrienne Rich the National Medal of Arts, she turned it down. “Art means nothing,” she wrote to the White House, “if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”' - read the essay in full, below.
Adrienne Rich started out writing poems that pleased her professors. She ended up writing ones that frightened governments.
In the 1950s, she was the model of literary promise, young, brilliant, published early, married to a Harvard economist, mother of three sons. On paper, perfect. But every poem she wrote in those years felt like a mask. She called it “writing as a dutiful daughter.”
Then something cracked. The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the feminist wave — she watched the world burning and her silence felt like complicity. She began to write what she wasn’t supposed to say: about power, patriarchy, motherhood, desire, and the cost of being a woman taught to disappear.
Her marriage crumbled. Her friends recoiled. Critics accused her of betrayal. She kept going. “When a woman tells the truth,” she said, “she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
By the 1970s, her poems read like manifestos. She refused to separate art from activism, or intellect from intimacy. She came out as gay, began teaching women’s studies, and used her pen like a scalpel — dissecting how language itself could be a weapon of control.
In 1997, when the U.S. government offered her the National Medal of Arts, she turned it down. “Art means nothing,” she wrote to the White House, “if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
Adrienne Rich’s story isn’t about poetry. It’s about reclamation of language, of body, of truth.
She didn’t want to be remembered for writing beautifully. She wanted to be remembered for writing honestly, no matter who it made uncomfortable.
And she was.
