Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet, essayist, and activist. Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and was home-schooled until the age of 10 by her father, who sparked her passion for poetry. She attended Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studied poetry and writing. During her senior year, her first book of poems, A Change of World, was published and subsequently awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award by the acclaimed author W. H. Auden.

After graduating in 1951, Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study abroad at Oxford. When she returned from Europe, Rich married Alfred Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University whom she met during her undergraduate studies. They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had three sons together. Conrad often traveled for work, leaving Rich alone to care for their children. Rich credited the experience of motherhood with “radicalizing” her and fueling her involvement in feminism (Rich, Adrienne. “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity.” Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, edited by Evelyn Torton Beck, Persephone Press, 1982, pp. 67-84).

During the 1950s, Rich published her second poetry volume, The Diamond Cutters (1955), though later she claimed she regretted publishing the book. During the 1960s, her writing transformed as she began to write about her female identity and reflect upon her experiences as a wife and mother. Rich also grew more involved in political activism, particularly the anti-war, civil rights, and women’s liberation movements. Throughout the 1960s, she taught at various colleges in the Northeast, where she befriended other feminist writers and activists, such as June Jordan and Audre Lorde.

In 1970, Rich divorced her husband and began working on her most explicitly political poetry collection to date, Diving into the Wreck (1973), which received the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry. Famously, Rich declined to accept this award individually and invited two other feminist poets who were nominated, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, to join her in accepting the award. During the 1970s, Rich also came out as lesbian and published a book called Twenty-one Love Poems (1976), which was inspired by her first relationship with a woman. In 1976, Rich began a romantic relationship with the Jamaican American author Michelle Cliff that would last until Rich’s death. During the 1980s, Rich managed a lesbian literary journal alongside Cliff and published a theoretical framework for examining the spectrum of lesbian existence.

In 1997, the Clinton administration awarded Rich the National Medal for the Arts. She refused the award and published her letter to the administration, in which she argued that art’s purpose is to challenge rather than accede to power. Rich continued to write and fervently advocate for social and political change up until her death in 2012.

Rich is herself a “character” in “Vesuvius at Home,” which begins with Rich narrating her journey to Dickinson’s Amherst residence. This foregrounding of the essay writer is unusual for a critical work but reflects Rich’s deep sense of connection to Dickinson as a fellow female poet. Rich’s depiction of herself is somewhat self-effacing; she refers to herself as an insect peering into Dickinson’s life and recedes from view as the essay progresses, the first person appearing less and less. While this on the one hand underscores Rich’s humility in the face of a literary great, it also suggests a subtle parallel with Dickinson, whom Rich describes as engaging in “self-diminutivization” in her correspondence. Rich’s portrayal of herself thus hints at some of psychological pressures that she argues female writers face.