Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose Quizzes

Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose Quiz

1 Which of the following is *not* an accurate description of Rich's career?
Her work featured increasingly progressive themes

Her poetry evolved alongside her life experience

She stuck to one style for all of her life

Beginning in the 1970s, her work was recognized for it feminist ideals
2 Which of the following did *not* influence Rich's career?
Her experiences as a wife and mother

Her brother's untimely death

Her identification as a lesbian

Her political activism
3 Which of Rich's volumes won the National Book Award?
A Change of World

Blood, Bread, and Poetry

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Diving into the Wreck
4 Why did Rich decline to accept the National Book Award on her own?
To protest American politics

She was too sick to receive it in person

She disapproved of the other winners

To share it with other female authors
5 Acccording to Rich, what is necessary for political change?
Get-out-the-vote drives

The end of the electoral college

Community and collective action

The removal of dark money from politics
6 What does Rich argue in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" ?
That everyone should be heterosexual

That the gay rights movement has become too inclusive

That heterosexuality is not necessarily most women's sexual preference

That lesbians are too visible
7 How can we interpet the title of "A Dream of a Common Language"?
Rich dreams that poetry might be able to connect and speak to everyone

It refers to a dream Rich had after her ex-husband's death

Rich dreams that everyone begins to speak English

Rich dreams that everyone begins to speak Esperanto
8 Which of the following is not one of Rich's themes?
The Oedipal complex

Power

Feminism

LGBTQ+ rights
9 How does Rich view received history?
Inaccuate, leaving out much of the truth

A conspiracy

A facutal record of the past

The product of careful work by scholars and journalists
10 What does Rich mean in the lines "Tonight I think no poetry will serve"?
Poetry is not a servile art that represents the view of the ruling class

Rich experience a long period of writer's block

Poetry cannot be bent to the poet's will

Poetry cannot accurately convey some emotions, like intense love
11 Why might Rich compare the contemporary world to a shipwreck in "Diving into the Wreck"?
There is pervasive inequality in 20th-century America

She wants to emphasize that people are like ships passing in the night

There's a lot we don't understand, so the world could be seen as "underwater"

She wants to compare contemporary politics to piracy and war
12 From what perspective do most of Rich's poem speak?
Second person

First person

Through dialogue

Third person
13 Which of the following is *not* a formal feature of Rich's poetry?
blank spaces

enjambment

repeating lines, as in pantoums and villanelles

free verse
14 Which of the following symbols does not appear in Rich's poetry?
The colossus

White rooms

Tigers

Radium
15 Why does Rich focus on Marie Curie's research into Radium?
She wishes to shed light on this largely unrecognized female scientist

She wishes to show the dangers of technological progress

It is an anti-nuclearization poem

Radium both gave Curie her power and killed her, reflecting on the nature of power
16 For Rich, what is the role of poetry?
To record historical events

To confess and expunge ugly, self-hating thoughts

To connect people and inspire them to political action

To record the poet's personal life
17 How can we intepret the tigers in "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"?
They are a symbol of the fight against climate change

They are symbols for liberated women

They reveal women's ability to blend in with their surroundings

They show the inherent violence of all men
18 When did Adrienne Rich die?
She is still alive

2019

1912

2012
19 What does Rich mean when she says "No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness"?
Women must work harder to understand the history of Western thought

Institiutions were not built to include women, and still exclude them

Women are not fit to be included in departments that study the history of consciousness

Women can only be insiders if they understand masculine consciousness
20 Why is Rich skeptical of the development of technology?
She had an allergy to electricity

It cuts generations off from one another

She belives poetry should be written with pen and paper

She fears the singularity
21 Describe Rich's religious background
Both her parents were Christian

She espouses atheism as the only logical system of thinking

She was a Buddhist for all her life

She warn born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother
22 Which of the following prizes did Rich reject for political reasons?
A Guggenheim Fellowship

The Pulitzer Prize

National Medal of Arts

The National Book Award
23 Which of the following was not one of Rich's identities?
Feminist

Culturally Jewish

Person of Color

Lesbian
24 With whom does the poet identify in "Diving into the Wreck?"
Jacques Costeau

Marie Curie

A mermaid and merman

Her mother
25 What is the purposes of the blank spaces in Rich's lines of poetry?
To mimic the holes in a corset

To provide the reader room to reflect or to emphasize a gap in meaning

To create the effect of a stutter

To pay homage to Emily Dickinson's dashes