Muriel Rukeyser’s Motherhood Poetry: Lyric Poetry and Publicness

This paper attempts to redefine motherhood as a female experience through the motherhood poetry of a modernist American poet, Muriel Rukeyser. In contemporary terms, motherhood tends to be defined as a feminine experience in which the relationship between mother and child is created, whereas Rukeyser's motherhood poetry emphasizes the intersection of such motherhood with the public values of society and the expansiveness of lyric poetry. Living in a time of upheaval and chaos in the war-driven world order, Rukeyser needed to keep a keen eye on the world as the space in which she and her child lived and would live, and thus it was inevitable for her to discuss motherhood in public discourse. Thus, the environment of motherhood brought about an ongoing search for her own place in the public sphere, and if this search can be seen as self-creative in nature, then motherhood poetry, which poetizes this search can be understood as a work that poetizes ongoing social participation. Through a reading of Rukeyser's work that expands the lyrical subject of the poems from the self to the public space, this paper examines how the individual specificity of the maternal experience expands into the universal experience of women and what that means for our reading of the poems today.