Quote by Adrienne Rich: “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Artistic and creative expression is not decoration or entertainment — it is how human beings make sense of their inner lives, process suffering, and communicate what cannot be said in plain language. Treating it as a luxury is a way of dismissing the inner life as unimportant.

Rich wrote this in her essay 'Poetry as Survival,' published in the late 1970s, a period when American feminism was fighting to have women's creative and intellectual contributions taken seriously. The cultural mainstream still widely treated poetry and art as peripheral luxuries rather than essential human activities.

American poet and essayist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century feminist and political poetry. Her 1973 collection Diving into the Wreck and her essays in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence shaped feminist literary theory for generations.