The daughter of noted Columbia University classicist Moses Hadas and Latin teacher Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas, Hadas grew up in Morningside Heights, New York City. She received a baccalaureate at Radcliffe College in classics, a Master of Arts (1977) at Johns Hopkins University in poetry, and a doctorate at Princeton University in comparative literature (1982).Marrying a man from the island of Samos and living in Greece after her undergraduate work at Radcliffe, Hadas became an intimate of poets James Merrill and Alan Ansen, both of whom strongly influenced her early work, as did Cavafy, whose work she translated, and Seferis.

She is often associated with the New Formalism school of poetry, and her work was included in landmark collections of New Formalism including Rebel Angels and A Formal Feeling Comes. Her subject matter ranges from her roots in the classics through the intimately personal, with memory a recurring theme throughout her work.

During the height of the AIDS crisis, she led poetry workshops for those afflicted, and edited a number of their works with Charles Barber, experiences that informed her subsequent work. Her translations of writers including Tibillus, Baudelaire, and the Greek poet Konstantine Karyotakis, have been published to much acclaim. She has taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University since 1981, where, as of 2006, she is the Board of Governors Professor of English. She is married to composer George Edwards and lives with him and their son in Manhattan.

Full-Length Poetry Collections

• The Ache of Appetite (Copper Beech Press, 2010)
• River of Forgetfulness (WordTech Communications, 2006)
• Laws (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)
• Indelible (Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
• Halfway Down the Hall (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
• The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (Faber & Faber, 1995)
• The Empty Bed (Wesleyan University Press, 1995)
• Mirrors of Astonishment (Rutgers University Press, 1992)
• Living in Time (Rutgers University Pres, 1990)
• Pass It On (Princeton University Press, 1989)
• A Son from Sleep (Wesleyan University Press, 1987)
• Slow Transparency (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

Chapbooks

• Starting from Troy (David R. Godine, 1975)

Essay Collections

• Classics: Essays (Textos Books, 2007)
• Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams (University of Michigan Press, 2000)
• Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost & George Seferis (Bucknell University Press, 1985)

Selected Translations

• Other Worlds Than This (Rutger University Press, 1994)

Anthologies Edited

• The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (W.W. Norton, 2010; Eds., Peter Constantine, Rachel Hadas, Edmund Keeley, Karen Van Dyck)
• Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (Ed. with Charles Barber, Faber & Faber, 1991)

Anthology Publications

• Best American Poetry 2006 (Billy Collins, series ed.)