Muriel Rukeyser wove narrative poems like a 20th-century tapestry.
I’d never heard of the poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980). Okay, I may be a cretin, but in my defense, she died while my poetry diet was generally confined to the British crowd (Romantics, Victorians, Moderns), and the famous American poets like Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.
Two years ago, Library of America had a sale, and included were a slew of volumes of “selected poems” for their American Poets Project. Among the many poets included were collections by Sandburg, Anne Stevenson, John Berryman, Edna St. Vincent Millary, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edith Wharton, and many others. One of those “others” was Rukeyser.
Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems was published in 2004. The list price for a new copy on Amazon is $20. LOA still has it on sale for $7.00. I bought the LOA volume, along with several other books and avoided shipping costs. Copies of her collections, collected poems, and selected poems are still in print; the benefit of the LOA version is that it provides a concise introduction to her poetry ,and it was edited by poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012).(I’d previously read Rich’s poetry. I’m not a total cretin.)
Muriel Rukeyser
In her introduction, Rich writes that Rukeyser was “a new kind of American,” rooted in and identified with New York City but “internationalist in her spirit and actions.” She was also identified with her causes and protests as she was with her poetry.
Rukeyser was in Spain for the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. She marched for women’s causes. She opposed the Vietnam War and was arrested for her protests. She wrote a book-length poem entirely about an industrial mining disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis. She also wrote some rather remarkable poetry, narrative poems (often long narrative poems) that wove together people’s lives, experiences, and tumultuous events of the Great Depression, World War II, and a world that for years seemed to stay on the edge of conflict. Poetry was protest.
In “First Elegy, Rotten Lake,” you read about a lake visit that becomes something else: “As I went down to Rotten Lake I remembered / how the one crime is need. The man lifting the loaf / with hunger s motive can offer no alibi, is /always condemned.” She speaks of lines at the employment bureau and students desperate to pass examinations, equating them with the crime of need. In “Ajanta” (1944), Rukeyser writes of a world considering annihilation, a broken world that’s like a midnight cave where no shadows (and thus no light) fall. In “Nine Poems” (1948), she tells an unborn child that “you will enter the world where death by fear and explosion / Is waited; longed for by many; by all dreamed.”
One gets the sense that Rukeyser saw her protests and beliefs as a duty. “In dark weeping helpless moments of peace,” she writes in “Letter to the Front” (1944), “Women and poets believe and resist forever.” More than two decades later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, she writes, “I lived in the first century of world wars. / Most mornings I would be more or less insane…”
Not all of Rukeyser’s poems were about issues, conflicts, and events. This poem was first published in 1938 in the collection U.S. 1.
Homage to Literature
When you imagine trumpet-faced musicians
blowing again inimitable jazz
no art can accuse not cannonadings hurt,
or coming out of your dreams of dirigibles
again see the unreasonable cripple
throwing his crutch headlong as the headlights
streak down the torn street, as the three hammerers
go One, Two, Three on the stake, triphammer poundings
and not a sign of new worlds to still the heart;
then stare into the lake of sunset as it runs
boiling, over the west past all control
rolling and swamps the heartbeat and repeats
sea beyond sea after unbearable suns;
think: poems fixed this landscape: Blake, Donne, Keats.
In addition to numerous poetry collections, Rukeyser published novels, biographies, essays, and screen plays. She was born in New York City to well-to-do parents, and she attended Vassar, where she served as literary editor of a leftist undergraduate journal called Student Review and other publications. Stephen Vincent Benet launched her poetry career when he selected her manuscript Theory of Flight for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. She was known for mentoring younger poets, including Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Alice Walker, and – not surprisingly – Adrienne Rich. She died in New York in 1980 at age 66.
Rukeyser’s poetry will not make you feel comfortable. She once said that her main literary influences were poetry and fire. She fought injustice wherever it might be found – gender, race, war, poverty – and never hesitated to use her pen to defend and promote what she believed. But Adrienne Rich was right in calling her a new kind of American, rooted in her birth city but ranging across over the globe.
Photo by Gregorio Puga Bailon, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
- Muriel Rukeyser: Protester, Political Activist, and Poet - November 10, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Paul Kingsnorth and “These Were the Stories of My People” - November 5, 2026
- Poets and Poems: Rachel Hicks and “Accumulated Lessons in Displacement” - November 3, 2026
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