In 1953, Rich broke with her father because she married Harvard economist Alfred Haskell Conrad. Ostensibly domesticated, she served as faculty wife and mother to sons David, Paul, and Jacob, all born in a span of four years. As family demands shaped and defined her, she limited literary activity to The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), a muted, asexual effort that imitates the themes and forms of Yeats and Auden. She broke away from imitation with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954–1962 (1963), a dramatic pre-feminist drubbing of motherhood, sexual dominance, and suppressed anger. These hard-handed themes echo her discontent, which had smoldered for a decade as she mastered the techniques of sexual politics. In a darker mood, she followed with Necessities of Life (1966), the introduction to a series of poems on alienation and despair.
When her husband took a post at City College of New York in 1966, Rich instructed poor nonwhite students for SEEK, a remedial English program geared to open admissions. She echoed the idiom and dynamism of protests against patriarchy and the Vietnam War by publishing Selected Poems (1967), Leaflet: Poems 1965–1968 (1969), and The Will to Change: Poems 1969–1970 (1971), published a year after her marriage ended and her husband committed suicide. Freed from tight metrics, she produced Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (1973), which revisits the mythic parameters of the male-female relationship.
