Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)

Was Rukeyser dissuaded from writing novels because of the crudely macho critical response to her first draft, submitted in 1937 at the age of 24? The more I read of her poetry and non-fiction prose, the less I believe that she could be so easily cowed. For some reason though, she did set the work aside, although she continued to edit it. It was not published in her lifetime, and in fact was only published this year due to the efforts of Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Perhaps Rukeyser decided show more fiction was too weak a form. Her editors requested "a brief impressionistic sketch," but instead of ingratiating with pen and ink, she gave us a Picasso oil. Like many of Picasso's landscapes, this novel conveys mood better than emotion, but it exemplifies much of the courage expressed in Rukeyser's remarkable book, The Life of Poetry. The novel is beautiful and strong and stands up to re-reading. show less

I am fascinated by Rukeyser's personal story & her engagement with history. Although her thinking in these essays is sometimes fuzzy & her use of abstractions, such as truth, reality, imagination, consciousness & even language, is often contradictory (she says one thing & then, shortly thereafter, seems to say its opposite), she repeatedly won me over when her poet's voice sneaks into her prose. For example, when she characterizes Emily Dickenson's style as one of a "slang of strictness" or show more when she talks about poetry as a "transfer of human energy." I loved Chapter Twelve, "Out of Childhood," which is composed of impressionistic vignettes (film stills)that summarize & encapsulate the author's childhood & coming to maturity, both as a person & a writer. Compressed, evocative & vastly informative in their succinctness. Worth the price of the book. show less

Until recently I generally dipped into my poetry books at random and read a few pages at a sitting. I might in this haphazard manner read a complete volume. There was no plan & this would generally only with my most beloved poets. A few years ago, I began to read complete volumes. It points your attention to themes running through a volume of poems. With "Collected" or "Selected" Works, reading the complete volumes allows one to follow the arc of the poet's interests & craft. To me, Muriel show more Rukeyser's voice grew clearer and stronger as her life progressed. Her last poems have an urgency that has built to a crescendo. show less

Muriel Rukeyser is best known as an American political poet. From the 1930s through the 1970s, she wrote poems about feminism, social inequalities, Judaism, and war. As a young woman, though, she was a political activist, and traveled to Spain as a journalist to cover the People’s Olympiad, the leftist Catalonian government’s alternative to the Nazi’s Olympics in Berlin. While she was en route to Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and she had a brief but intense affair with a show more young German leftist athlete. This experience served as the basis for her novel Savage Coast, which was only last year rediscovered in her archives and published for the first time. It’s a wonderful modernist novel, in which a train of foreigners is stranded in the midst of war. Rukeyser has a keen ear for dialogue, and creates a sharply satirical chorus of voices. For readers who share her political sympathies, or love her poetic voice, Savage Coast is a wonderful discovery. show less