Background

Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York City, the daughter of Lawrence Rukeyser and Myra Lyons.

Education

She graduated from the Fieldston School in 1930 and then attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N. Y. , from 1930 to 1932. She also was a student at Columbia University in New York City during the summers of 1931 and 1932.

Career

While a student at Vassar, Rukeyser was the literary editor for the leftist undergraduate journal Student Review. In 1931 she drove south with two friends to cover the controversial trial in Scottsboro, Ala. , of nine black youths accused of raping two white girls. During her brief stay in Scottsboro, she and her friends were detained by police and charged with contempt of court after they were seen speaking with black reporters and they were connected to a black student conference. This experience is evident in her poem "The Trial" and may have established her interest and commitment to social causes and those wrongly accused of crimes.

Most of her poetry written during her undergraduate days centered more on personal than social or political issues, and after leaving Vassar to pursue a writing career, she began publishing poems in such periodicals as Poetry. In 1935 she became an associate editor for New Theater magazine and took a flying course in order to learn the mechanics of aviation for her collection of poems Theory of Flight (1935). These poems contained descriptions of the structure of a plane in addition to aspects of her own adolescence and reflections of social concerns. She received critical attention for this first collection, and although it won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, it was labeled overburdensome with obscure details by some reviewers.

In 1936, Rukeyser traveled to London and then to Spain, where she reported on the People's Olympiad, which had been organized by workers sports clubs in protest against the official Olympic Games being held in Nazi Germany. Upon her return to the United States she became active in the cause of Spanish loyalists. Her second volume of poems, U. S. 1, was published in 1938, and one of the most striking poems in the collection, "The Book of the Dead, " details the story of a West Virginia mining town dying of silicosis. One reviewer, however, commented that "while having come into her own, " she had yet to "fuse the personal and social. "

Rukeyser followed this collection with A Turning Wind (1939), The Soul and Body of John Brown (1940), Wake Island (1942), Beast in View (1944), The Children's Orchard (1947), and The Green Wave (1948). Three collections were published in 1949, Orpheus, Elegies, and The Life of Poetry, and her later works are Selected Poems (1951), One Life (1957), Body of Waking (1958), Waterlily Fire (1962), The Orgy (1965), The Outer Banks (1967), The Speed of Darkness (1968), Twenty-nine Poems (1970), The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971) Breaking Open (1973), and The Gates (1976).

In 1979 a comprehensive volume of her poetry was published and critics raved about the vast nature of her work, which reflected American history from the Great Depression to the Vietnam War. A posthumous collection, More Nights, was published in 1981. Rukeyser also translated the work of other poets, including Octavio Paz and Bertolt Brecht. Her books for children were Come Back Paul (1955), I Go Out (1961), Bubbles (1967), and Mazes (1970).

She also wrote a play, a biography (Willard Gibbs, 1942), and for motion pictures and television. Her academic career included serving on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence from 1956 to 1967 and on the board of directors for the Teachers-Writers Collaborative in New York from 1967 to 1980. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Society of American Historians. She also served as president of PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, and Novelists) from 1975 to 1976. Walker was one of the up-and-coming black women writers who had studied under Rukeyser at Sarah Lawrence. A long time resident of Greenwich Village in New York City, she died there of a heart attack after suffering from two strokes.

Achievements

• Muriel Rukeyser has been listed as a noteworthy poet. by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Book of the Dead

    ( Written in response to the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster ...)

  • Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #9)

    (The poetry of Muriel Rukeyser confronts the turbulent cur...)

  • Elegies

    ( An elegant relaunch of Muriel Rukeyser’s Elegies, previ...)

  • Savage Coast (Lost & Found Elsewhere)

    ( "At first “Savage Coast” is a train-of-fools comedy; la...)

  • A Muriel Rukeyser Reader

    ( A Muriel Rukeyser Reader gathers a generous selection o...)

  • Houdini: A Musical

    ( This previously unpublished work presents the spectacul...)

  • Collected Poems Of Muriel Rukeyser

    ( Muriel Rukeyser held a visionary belief in the human ca...)

  • The Orgy: An Irish Journey of Passion and Transformation

    (Those who have traveled know the experience of extended t...)

  • Out of Silence: Selected Poems

    (American; Classroom Adoption; Fiction; General; Poetry)

  • The Life of Poetry

Views

Quotations: In a January 1979 interview for Ms. magazine, Rukeyser commented to Louise Bernikow: "The heart of the reimagining is rebellion, breaking through old thought. "

She also spoke of women poets: "I wish we were better. I wish the cute and coy elements were purged. I know it's attractive, but it isn't what I need in poems. I think a lot of June Jordan, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Black women know how to rebel. I try to hold in my mind somebody who sees it all--some future unborn black woman poet. "

Membership

Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters

Member of the Society of American Historians

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Thomas Lask, in a New York Times review, commented: "Poetry was never an artifice to Muriel Rukeyser, never a decoration on life. The woman and the poet were one. She was always committed. What that commitment meant to her is the substance of her richly rewarding book. "

Connections

Rukeyser had one child but there is no information on whether or not she ever married.

Father:

Lawrence Rukeyser

Mother:

Myra Lyons

References

• Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection by Catherine Gander (2013-01-31)
• Muriel Rukeyser, Part 1 of 1 - Scholar's Choice Edition
• Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The Poetics of Connection
• The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser by L. Kertesz (1980-05-26)
• Muriel Rukeyser's the Book of the Dead