Adrienne Rich had immense formal skill as a poet. Combined with her wonderful ear for language, it gave her a rare ability to write poetry that is both beautiful and furious. Her lines at times hum with an anger so forceful it seems to generate static, as if the words are throwing sparks off the page.

It would be hard to overstate the influence this American poet and essayist has had on feminist thought—and on women writers and readers. In the title poem of her 1973 collection “Diving into the Wreck,” she portrays herself as a Cousteau searching for the submerged truth of women’s experience:

I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth

When she wrote “Of Woman Born” (1976), an exploration of motherhood and its distortion under patriarchy, Rich said, “The question But what was it like for women? was always in my mind.”

Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore. Her father, a university professor, expected greatness from his precocious daughter: he insisted that she show him her writing daily, then “criticized my poems for faulty technique and gave me books on rhyme and meter and form,” she recalled. For many years she struggled with his controlling influence. Yet his teaching paid off: in the year she graduated from Radcliffe, 1951, her first book was chosen by W.H. Auden for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets series. She subsequently married Alfred Conrad, a divorced economist, in opposition to her parents’ wishes, and in 1955 had the first of her three children.

For the next several years, as a mother of infant sons, she often felt trapped. In 1958, the poet Robert Lowell wrote that she was “having a third baby—one that defied all preventative science—and…reading Simone de Beauvoir and bursting with benzedrine and emancipation.” De Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex,” Rich later said, “talked about things that I had been half thinking but feeling no confirmation for.”

In 1961-62 she spent a year in Rotterdam, where her husband worked as an economist and she had a grant to study Dutch poetry. She translated Martinus Nijhoff, Leo Vroman, and Gerrit Achterberg, the latter with the help of the young poet Judith Herzberg. Herzberg recalls that Rich was full of life, impressively well-read, but also warm and convivial. In “To Judith, Taking Leave” (1962), Rich describes her pleasure in their conversation.

The two poets maintained a lifelong friendship—though years later, when they saw each other again, Herzberg worried that she would not be able to live up to Rich’s fierce convictions. But she recalls that her friend reassured her, saying, “You know, feminism can mean so many different things.”

In 1963 Rich published “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” (translated into Dutch by Maaike Meijer), the first hint of her frustration with her housewife’s existence:

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
she hears the angels chiding, and looks out
past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.
Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.
Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Along with other poets in her circle—Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—she was beginning to put her own experience into her work. By the late sixties she and her husband had become radicalized and were holding anti-Vietnam fundraisers in their New York apartment. The couple separated in 1970. A few months later, Conrad committed suicide.

In 1976 Rich came out as a lesbian. At that time she began a relationship with the Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff, one that lasted until her death.

In the Dutch women’s movement, it was her feminist essays that had the most impact. “Of Woman Born” was widely discussed and highly influential. More controversial was her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in which she argued for lesbian love as an act of resistance against patriarchy.

In the 1980s she moved to Santa Cruz, California, in hopes that the warmer climate would improve her rheumatoid arthritis, which eventually left her barely able to walk. In her poetry and her life, her social conscience remained unswerving. In 1997 she refused to accept the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest arts award, from President Clinton. She wrote that it was wrong, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” for the government to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

She never quite lost the Dutch she had learned, and in the 1980s could still write a sweetly ungrammatical letter to her editors at the feminist publisher Sara. The Dutch feminist Anja Meulenbelt quotes from it on her website: “Ik verheug mij op kennis te maken met u. Maar omdat ik moet van Holland naar London vertrekken op 5 juni, het spijt me dat ik kan niet uw uitnodiging voor het avond 4 juni aannemen. (…) Ik probeer nog steeds een beetje Hollands te schreven, vergeef mijn fouten, alstublieft!” (“I look forward to make your acquaintance. But because I from Holland to London must leave on June 5, I apologize that cannot I accept your invitation for the evening June 4. (…) I’m trying to wrote a little Dutch still, please forgive my mistakes!”)

In 1971 Rich wrote that writers, especially women writers, had ahead of them “the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored.” She made of her poetry maps to find the way.

Rich died in Santa Cruz on March 27, from complications of rheumatoid arthritis.

Trouw, April 2, 2012.