The pews of the First Church in Cambridge overflowed with poets, feminists, scholars and literary enthusiasts alike Nov. 6, when renowned poet Adrienne Rich '51 read selections from her work as part of the Radcliffe Institute Inaugural Lecture Series. Rich has become one of the most influential writers of the contemporary women's movement, with volumes of poetry and prose that penetrate issues of politics, oppression, sexuality and race.

She shared her work as the third speaker in the series, which premiered April 28 with a lecture by Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. With auspicious support from the institution formerly known as Radcliffe College, the Lecture Series celebrates Radcliffe's new mission as an Institute for Advanced Study.

Acting Dean of the Institute Mary Maples Dunn introduced Rich's reading by asserting that the lecture series represents the "breadth and depth of what the new Radcliffe Institute will maintain." The series aims to feature writers, scholars and professionals from a wide range of fields in the arts and sciences.

Rich, though perhaps unintentionally, proved to be the perfect poster girl for the revamped institution. Reflecting on her First year of 1947, Rich recalls a "lack of caring about the minds that inhabit a woman's body." It was an era during which, as Rich recalls, a woman scholar was a second-class citizen. She, however, emerged from the postwar university epoch as a distinguished scholar, graduating from Radcliffe with the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award.

Since then, Rich has published 19 volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction prose, accumulating a list of accolades including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1952 and 1961), a MacArthur Prize, a National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck (1974; she accepted with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker in the name of all women who are silenced), the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force (1981), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986) and, in 1996, the Academy of American Poets' Tanning Prize.

Rich's radical views and trailblazing courage were exemplified in 1997, when Rich turned down the National Medal for the Arts offered to her by President Clinton. In a letter printed in The New York Times, Rich wrote that "art..means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage... A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while people at large are so dishonored."

Such ideals, linked with her activism, outspoken feminism and writing talent distinguish Rich as both an author and historical figure. From a poem entitled "Greenwood," Rich's unwavering voice expressed her poetic ideals to her audience: "Poetry isn't revolution, but a way of knowing why it must come," she read.

Such notions of activist poetry evolved with a tumultuous life, marked with grave personal, artistic and political decisions. Rich's early poetry, though elegant, is politically lackluster, drawing thematically and stylistically on the works of poets like Yeats, Frost and Auden. Her "angrier" later works emerged from a vibrant background of marriage, family, 1960's civil rights activism, anti-Vietnam War protests, an emergent women's movement and personal decisions about sexuality and liberation.