Anne Bradstreet, daughter of one governor of the Massachusetts colony (Thomas Dudley) and wife of another (Simon Bradstreet), was the first woman to be widely recognized as an important and accomplished American poet. Educated at home in England and well tutored in the classics, Bradstreet married one of her father's assistants and traveled with Simon Bradstreet and her parents to New England in 1630. The ship, The Arbella, landed only a decade after the first Pilgrims, and Anne Bradstreet admitted to some discomfiture when she first witnessed the deprivation that the New World required. Nonetheless, Bradstreet settled in what would become Massachusetts and reared her eight children there.… A Puritan more concerned with the world of God than with the world of humans, Bradstreet was still aware of the sensual power of language and the sway of familial affections. Her poetry explores this paradox through the employment of elegant, lyrical conceits. Her work also probes the position of women within the patriarchal structure of Puritan society. The Flesh and the Spirit (1678) explores such contradictory impulses, while Dialogue Between Old and New (1650) uses the Old and New Worlds as metaphors through which to decry both political upheaval and the tenuous nature of all relationships. Writing in an era when women's voices were frequently repressed or unrepresented, Bradstreet found a way to be heard; her poetry both reaffirms and reevaluates Puritan values. Bradstreet died in 1672.
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16, 1929. In 1951 she graduated from Radcliffe College and was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize by W.H. Auden. She began teaching for City College of New York in 1968, and was also a lecturer and adjunct professor at Swarthmore College and Columbia University School of the Arts. She taught in CUNY's basic writing program during the early 1970s. In the 1970s, she started to be active in the women's liberation movement. Her work has been characterized as confrontational, treating women's role in society, racism, and the Vietnam War. In addition to many collections of poetry, she has also written several books of… nonfiction prose, such as Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, and Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Her last poetry collection was entitled Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 1986 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1992 Poets' Prize, the 1997 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and the 2006 National Book Foundation Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She has also received the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1974, she refused to receive as an individual the National Book Award for Poetry, instead accepting it on behalf of all silenced women. She also refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." In 2012, she won the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Prize. She died from long-term rheumatoid arthritis on March 27, 2012.