'American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict. ... We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare.'
— Muriel Rukeyser, in The Life of Poetry, 1949

'Now birth as trauma has an important repressive role in our art... [in] our literature in particular. Few of the women writing poetry have made more than a beginning in writing about birth. There is exceptional difficulty in giving form to so crucial a group of meanings and experiences.'
— Muriel Rukeyser, 'A Simple Theme' in Poetry, July 1948

Muriel Rukeyser was born in 1913 and grew up on Manhattan's Riverside Drive in a wealthy, upwardly mobile Jewish family. Her father, a concrete salesman from Wisconsin, was a partner in a sand-and-gravel company. Her mother, a bookkeeper of modest origins, nonetheless claimed as ancestor the 2nd century B.C. poet-scholar-martyr Akiba. Rukeyser went to Vassar College for two years - she left during the Depression when her father went bankrupt.

Her parents were not intellectuals — the only poetry at home, she wrote, was that of Shakespeare and the Bible. Later on, encyclopedias and the bound sets of books that the new middle-class bought as 'furniture' brought her, as by accident, the complete works of Dickens, and of Victor Hugo in translation.

Her parents were not intellectuals — the only poetry at home, she wrote, was that of Shakespeare and the Bible. Later on, encyclopedias and the bound sets of books that the new middle-class bought as 'furniture' brought her, as by accident, the complete works of Dickens, and of Victor Hugo in translation.

She was a child of the city, played with groups of others in the streets, the basements of apartment buildings and the park along the river. She became conscious very early of the vast material differences in the lives of groups of people. The vigorous building and growth of the city around her seemed epitomized by her father's business. She saw the cement mixer trucks moving slowly through the streets and knew that these were material symbols of her father's trade. From early childhood, she was fascinated by technical terms and the details of how things work. She recalled being asked in primary school what 'grit' was, and replying 'number 4 gravel,' when the expected answer was the metaphorical 'courage' — a kind of precision which prefigured the generous exactitude and the inclusion of many vocabularies, trades, people, in her work.

Rukeyser described herself, in a poem, as 'born in the first century of world wars.' She came to consciousness during World War I, was seven when women obtained the right to vote. The trial in 1927 of the immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti for treason, and their subsequent execution, made a deep impression on her. 'Not Sappho, Sacco,' she writes, of her own inspiration, in 'Poem Out of Childhood, written in her teens:

We grow older quickly, watching the father shave
and the splatter of lather hardening on the glass,
playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis,
being victimized by fataller sly things.
'Oh, and you,' he said, scraping his jaw, 'what will you be?'
'Maybe : something : like : Joan : of : Arc...'

The Depression's effect on her father's business forced her at the age of 20 into the adult world as a writer and working journalist. It was as a journalist that she went to Alabama in 1933 to cover the trial of the so-called 'Scottsboro boys' nine young black men accused of having raped two white women, when all the parties involved were riding the boxcars of a train, in search of jobs in another state. Rukeyser was arrested in Alabama. Although the United States Supreme Court overturned the Scottsboro conviction, it was too late to save several of the principals from lynching.

Rukeyser had begun writing poetry in high school and continued to write at Vassar where, with fellow-student Elizabeth Bishop, she began an alternative literary magazine, and where she worked on poems which would be in her first book. When she was 21, her manuscript was selected for the Yale Younger Poets' Series (publication of the first book of a poet under 40). From her earliest published writings, she manifested her desire to develop her own multiple and complex investigations of the contemporary world through poetry. For her, poetry could encompass both science and history, not only of the past, but of the present, from the Depression through the anti-war and civil rights movements in which she would be active later in her career.

Her first book, Theory of Flight, already reflected the poet's concern with the intersecting origins of art and political consciousness, the power of sexuality and the unconscious, and the mental and physical adventure of science and technology. Rukeyser had taken flying lessons herself — the title is from the opening section of her pilot's and flight mechanic's manual. The 26-page title poem ricochets in its explorations from the Renaissance to the present, from the Scottsboro boys' jail cell to Da Vinci's studio, from the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to a pilot's dialogue with his pregnant wife and to the engine of the plane itself. An audacious reach for any poet, an astonishing one for a woman of 20.

The young Rukeyser was an enthusiastic Socialist, and it was through the magazine New Masses that she first read about the tragic situation in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where miners hired to dig tunnels in the mountains were falling ill and dying in large numbers of silicosis. There was considerable evidence that the mine owners knew of the danger, but had failed to provide adequate health protection, and had even widened the scope of the operation, as silica, the disease-producing substance, was a profitable unexpected byproduct of the tunnel operation. In 1936, Rukeyser, now 22, went to West Virginia with a woman photographer friend. She conducted interviews with miners, white and black, with their wives and children, with mine employees. She collected documentary evidence — transcripts of congressional hearings, stock market reports, medical interviews and diagnoses, and the testimony of a social worker who came on a humanitarian mission.

From all of this, Rukeyser composed a book-length poem, the multi-sectioned, multi-voiced 'The Book of the Dead', published in 1938 in her second collection, US 1 (the first, and not last, book of American poems to be named for a highway). Another model of what a poem might be, it represents an unprecedented struggle on the part of an American poet with the contradictions of power and social justice, using and integrating documents, scientific evidence and especially the voices of ordinary people. The poet also incorporates the documentary filmmaker's techniques — film's possibilities always engaged Rukeyser. The unifying 'I' of 'The Book of the Dead' resembles the eye of a camera more than a poet-protagonist.

Camera at the crossing sees the city
a street of wooden walls and empty windows
the doors shut handless in the empty street
and the deserted Negro standing on the corner

. . .
What do you want, a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.
                                   ('Gauley Bridge')

In fact, the community of Gauley Bridge is the protagonist, and the citizens' committee spearheading the investigation, made up of black and white workers and workers' widows, plays both a choral and heroic role. The juxtaposition of stripped fact and lyric, blues stanzas, dramatic monologue and evocation of landscape creates a long poem that is operatic in its orchestration as well as in its memorable arias. In her finale, Rukeyser connects the local present with the larger view of the American continent, and with the histories working beyond and behind it — the reference to the Egyptian Book of the Dead was not incidental.

Rukeyser's experiment touched off a critical debate on both the left and the right concerning poetics, form, documentary conventions, modernist representation, and poetry's audience. The poem's subject — Union Carbide's ruthless mining practices — was controversial enough to capture American national attention. It was front-page news, and covered in journals like Time, The Nation, and Science. The Gauley Bridge story offered a site for Rukeyser's poetic critique of industrial capitalism and equally important, a chance for the poet to address and shape the era's public mind.

Rukeyser, like her contemporaries Gwendolyn Brooks and H.D., was to write innovative work of ambitious scope throughout her life. And, though their politics are opposed, the only other modern American poet who demonstrated an equally wide reach and technical versatility, whose view of the possibilities of poetry was equally generous, was Ezra Pound.

Rukeyser's own life had epic elements. She was present as a journalist at the Scottsboro trial and was arrested, she was in Spain as a journalist at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and she would be arrested again protesting the war in Vietnam.

But her implication in her time was not only as a witness. She had passionate relationships with both men and women. In 1947, she was living alone in San Francisco, teaching workers, pregnant by a man whose name she never revealed. In September, her son was born. 'Nine Poems for the Unborn Child,' was written during her pregnancy. As far as I know, this sonnet sequence is the first poem to claim for these situations (the physical/mental stages and changes of pregnancy; a single woman's decision to bear and raise a child) the stature of poetic subject matter, neither stigmatized, nor sentimentalized — at a time when a pregnant single woman in a novel or play would inevitably miscarry, die, or both. (There's an unmarried mother who doesn't die in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, but she remains an emblematic redeemed 'ruined maiden,' not a protagonist)

'There is no father,' they came and said to me.
I have known fatherless children, the searching, walk
The world, look at all faces for their father's life
Their choice is death or the world.      And they do choose.
Earn their brave set of bone, the seeking marvelous look
Of those who lose and use and know their lives.
                                                          (from poem 'II')

Now the ideas all change to animals
Loping and gay, now all the images
Transform to leaves, now all these screens of leaves
Are flowing into rivers. I am in love
With rivers, these changing waters carry voices,
Carry all children;      carry all delight.
The water-soothed winds move warm above these waves.
The child changes and moves among these waves.
                                                          (from poem 'IV')

In 1947 the war, Hiroshima, and the Shoah were as present in Rukeyser's world-view as the events in her body, as the Cold War began to silence progressive activists. 'Nine Poems' is not a minimalist, domesticated sequence, turning toward the private life in despair or resignation. Here, gestation is a hopeful, chosen antidote to war and repression, in which the conscious woman's mind and body also signify the body politic. Why did Rukeyser compose this poem as a sonnet sequence? The correspondence of pregnancy's discrete 'stages' with the connected but separate poems, the poet's desire to circumnavigate the subject, the inscription of a woman's feelings for her unborn child into the tradition of 'praise of a beloved' which historically informed the sonnet — all may have influenced her choice.

Rukeyser learned English prosody from Shakespeare, from the cadences of the King James Version of the Bible, from her studies at Vassar. But her own distinctive style seems developed from her earliest published work. There was a tradition of politically engaged poetry among American women, from the 19th century Jewish poet Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet is on the base of the Statue of Liberty, and the 19th Century black poet Frances Harper, through Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard and the Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer. But Rukeyser's main poetic antecedent is clearly Walt Whitman. There are few other poets to whom Whitman's famous line, 'I am large, I contain multitudes,' could so appropriately be applied. She shared Whitman's populism, his polymorphous sexuality, his visceral engagement with ordinary people, workers, soldiers, children, mothers, refugees — and also with American history. She shared his penchant for the long poem, the long-breathed line, the headlong rush of metaphor, the braiding and expansion of image.

However, her relationship with the lyric tradition was more nuanced than Whitman's. She often wrote sonnets. Sometimes blank verse suited her purposes, as did rhymed quatrains, syllabic stanzas, and forms of her own invention. There is a directness, a formal and linguistic simplicity in her later poems that contrasts with the baroque complexity of some of the earlier work. There was no one of her generation who wrote like her, in style, in depth or in range. Although there is a distinct resemblance between Allen Ginsberg's Whitmanian line and lamenting outsider's voice in 'Howl' and much of Rukeyser's project (and they were both leftist New York Jews), when the Beat movement arose in the 1960s, Rukeyer's work was not a reference point, or never cited by Ginsberg and his contemporaries as such.

Rukeyser's literary reputation, launched with prizes and acclaim in the 1930s and 40s, waned in the 1950s, victim of Red-baiting and the 'New Criticism' which stated that any attempt to examine the circumstances in which a poem was written, or the context in which its readers would consider it, was to fall prey to 'the personal heresy.' Rukeyser herself published a book of essays, The Life of Poetry, in 1949, which counters this insistence on the poem as a self-contained universe. In it, she explores the possible relationship between poetry and the new techniques of filmmaking, examines the poetry of the blues, of spirituals, of jazz 'scat' singing using the voice as an 'abstract' musical instrument, of the origin of poetry in lullabies, nursery rhymes, and children's games — an origin that goes back to the maternal beginnings of spoken language.

But, in part due to the New Critical insistence upon regarding poems as self-contained, ahistorical entities, and more to the increasing post-war and Cold War distrust of progressive activism, Rukeyser's work of the late 1940s and 1950s was dismissed by many critics and poets as un-rigorous, amorphous, self-indulgent. References to her Jewish origins, stereotypes applied to Jewish women in particular — loud, opinionated, not knowing their place — were frequent. Her social concerns were worse than outdated in a time overshadowed by the McCarthy hearings and black -listing of those suspected of 'un-American activities'.

The FBI kept an active file on her for 40 years, intercepting her correspondence and monitoring her telephone calls. This seems particularly perverse in the case of a poet who, far from being 'un-American,' was profoundly committed to the American ideals of democracy and social justice, who never chose, even during the bleak days of McCarthyism, to live abroad, whose work is rooted in American history and urban life, and who devoted much of her professional life to teaching the love and craft of literature, of American poetry in particular, to American students. (The progressive activist and feminist poet Adrienne Rich, slightly younger than Ginsberg and the Beats, a Yale Younger Poet herself at 21, wrote that she was not able to fully appreciate Rukeyser's work until decades later, after Rukeyser's death, when the work was reissued. Did the critical silence of the 50's and 60's help prevent an earlier encounter?)

In 1964, at the age of 50, Rukeyser suffered a stroke, which impaired her powers of speech. It was in the process of finding her way back to language that she wrote her 1968 collection, The Speed of Darkness, which contains the long meditation on the German pacifist graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, collaging the artist's diaries into the poem, with the often quoted lines 'What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open'.

In 1972, Rukeyser and Denise Levertov flew to North Vietnam with an unofficial peace mission, meeting with Vietnamese writers and civilians. Back in the United States, she participated in an antiwar demonstration on the steps of the US Senate — one of many for her, but at this one she was again arrested and jailed. These experiences figure in her 1973 book, Breaking Open, which brings the war home in poems like 'Despisals' while 'Waking This Morning', celebrates mature sexual love while accurately addressing disability.

Rukeyser was elected president of the American branch of the international writers' association P.E.N in 1975. Upon learning of the imprisonment of the poet Kim Chee Ha by the South Korean government, solely for his writings, she traveled there, spoke to officials, and stood for days — a diabetic stroke survivor — outside the prison gates herself in protest. The title poem of her 1976 book The Gates chronicles this experience. The following section (another sonnet variant) moves from reportage to rhetoric until its matter-of-fact last line: the poem resonates in the decade of the 'PATRIOT Act':

The Cabinet minister speaks of liberation.
'Do you know how the Communists use this word?'
We all use the word.       Liberation.

No but look — these are his diaries,
says the Cabinet minister.
These were found in the house of the poet.
Look, Liberation, Liberation, he is speaking in praise.
He says, this poet, It is not wrong
to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Yes.      He says it in prose speech, he says it in his plays,
he says it in his poems that bind me to him,
that bind his people to mine in these new ways
for the first time past strangeness and despisal.

It also means that you broke into his house and stole his papers.

The Gates was the last individual volume of poems published during Rukeyser's lifetime — though she lived to see her Collected Poems appear in 1978. She died after a third stroke in February 1980.

Her 600-page Collected Poems went out of print soon after her death. For more than a decade her work was unavailable except in feminist anthologies such as No More Masks (whose title is taken from a poem in The Speed of Darkness) and The World Split Open (whose title comes from the Käthe Kollwitz poem in the same book) These brought a new generation of readers to Rukeyser's poems, and eventually led to the publication of collections of her work. Feminism was one of Rukeyser's causes, but far from the only one.

The poet who wrote with chilling prescience in 1947 that 'The economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare', merits an attentive audience today, not as a doom-sayer (she never was that) but as a writer who reminds us of the possibilities of human connection and communication in and through poetry.

(I acknowledge my indebtedness in this essay to the biographical information provided by Jan Heller Levi in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader.)

Poetry London

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Copyright © Poetry London 2004
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Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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Selected books available by Muriel Rukeyser:
A Muriel Rukeyser Reader — Paperback
Out of Silence: Selected Poems — Paperback
The Life of Poetry — Paperback

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