Baltimore native, former Roland Park Country School student and pioneering American poet, Adrienne Rich, died on Tuesday in her home in California. She was 82.

The recipient of many awards and honors, widely anthologized, taught and read, Rich wrote in the tradition of Walt Whitman and from her roots in Baltimore.

Hers was a singular and important American literary voice.

Rich grew up in a pre-civil rights-era Baltimore with its clearly demarcated boundaries of race, class and gender propriety. With a father who was a renowned physician and professor the John Hopkins School of Medicine and a mother who was a concert pianist, Rich attended one the city’s elite private schools and went off to Radcliffe College carrying with her great family expectation. Here was a personal narrative of American privilege and possibility.

Yet, Rich’s complex, morally and politically charged oeuvre can be read as less a repudiation of the world that that Baltimore represented, and more as a profound examination of what democracy in America, in a place like Baltimore, had yet to achieve.

More than its governing institutions and explicit forms of discrimination, American culture was still deeply bound up in making whole categories of citizens and human experience invisible.

Both praised and dismissed as a women’s poet, lesbian poet, or a Jewish poet, Rich insisted on her voice as simply “poet,” without qualifier. And to her, the poet was that global citizen charged with telling the truth about place and people and politics. America, Rich also insisted, did not make much room for the poet.

She talked about the low status of the poet, in America, in a 1994 interview in The Progressive magazine.

“When you think about, almost any other country, any other culture, it’s been taken for granted that poets would take part in the government, that they would be sent here and there as ambassadors by the state proudly, that their being poets was part of why they were considered valuable citizens – Yeats in Ireland, Neruda in Chile, St.-John Perse in France.

“At the same time, poets like Hikmet in Turkey, Mandelstam in the Soviet Union, Ritsos in Greece, and hundreds of others have been severely penalized for their writings, severely penalized for a single poem.

“But here it’s the censorship of ‘who wants to listen to you, anyway?’ – of carrying on this art in a country where it is perceived as so elite or effete or marginal that it has nothing to do with the hard core of things. That goes hand in hand with an attitude about politics, which is that the average citizen, the regular American, can’t understand poetry and also can’t understand politics, that both are somehow the realms of experts, that we are spectators of politics, rather than active subjects. I don’t believe either is true.”

Of course, Rich tried to express this idea in here poetry. Here is an excerpt from her 1991 “An Atlas of the Difficult World”:

Here is a map of our country:
here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt
This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin
we dare not taste its water
This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms
This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms
This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy
This is the cemetery of the poor
who died for democracy This is a battlefield
from a nineteenth century war the shrine is famous
This is a sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets
went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier
processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares
These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit
here are the forests primeval the copper the silver lodes
These are the suburbs of acquiescence silence rising fumelike
from the streets
This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires
flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling
whose children are drifting blind alleys pent
between coiled rolls of razor wire
I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural
then yes let it be these are small distinctions
where do we see it from is the question

Another example is the title of 2003 collection, “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics,” taken, actually from a stanza of William Carlos Williams:

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack/of what is found there.”

In America, in Baltimore, we are still in need of what is found in the work of Adrienne Rich.