Muriel Rukeyser

Writer and activist Muriel Rukeyser (b. 1913–d. 1980) was born into an affluent Jewish family and grew up in New York City. Her father was a construction engineer, and his career sparked a curiosity about technology in his daughter that is on display in her first poetry collection, Theory of Flight (1935). This early interest in weaving science and technology into poetry is indicative of Rukeyser’s lifelong tendency to tackle unexpected and seemingly incongruent subjects in her work. Rukeyser attended Vassar College for two years but had to leave in 1932, after the Great Depression took a toll on her father’s business. During the 1930s she continued to write while also becoming increasingly involved in leftist politics, traveling to cover the Scottsboro Trial in 1933 and the 1936 People’s Olympiad in Barcelona. Rukeyser burst onto the literary scene after Theory of Flight won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. By the 1940s, however, her publications became regular subjects of harsh critique from both sides of the political aisle. This resistance to her work largely stemmed from Rukeyser’s radical belief in the importance of merging poetics and politics. Such merging/boundary crossing is on display in what is perhaps her most famous work, The Book of the Dead, which was originally published in the 1938 collection U.S. 1. Scholars have read The Book of the Dead as a project of political witnessing, an example of documentary poetry, a feminist epic, and an early instance of environmental justice work. Rukeyser was radical not only politically and poetically but also personally: she had relationships with women as well as men, and raised her only son by herself. Later in her life, she gained popularity among younger feminist poets, who embraced Rukeyser as a literary foremother. Her self-edited Collected Poems was published in 1978, two years before her death. While Rukeyser is best known for her poetry, she also wrote prolifically in other genres, including essays, scripts, and fiction. Recent feminist recovery efforts have brought some of Rukeyser’s prose back into print, such as The Life of Poetry in 1996. Originally published in 1949, this treatise urges readers to embrace poetry’s potential to communicate truth and create unity. In 2013, Rukeyser’s lost Spanish Civil War novel Savage Coast was published, adding another important text to her collected works. If Rukeyser was ahead of her time, recent scholarly interest indicates the time is now ripe for her.