Rukeyser biography

American poet, follower of contemporary affairs, and bureaucratic activist. Pronunciation: ROO-kaiser. Born unite New York City on Dec 15, 1913; died on Feb 12, 1980, in New Dynasty City; daughter of Lawrence Inelegant. Rukeyser (an engineer and businessman) and Myra Lyons Rukeyser; imitation Ethical Culture Center and Fieldston School, 1921–30, Vassar College, 1930–32, Columbia University, 1931–32; married Glynn Collins (a painter), in 1945 (annulled 1945); children: William Laurie Rukeyser (b.

1947).

Arrested while house waiting upon Scottsboro trial in Alabama (1933); won Yale Series of Erstwhile Poets competition (1935); visited Westmost Virginia, witnessed early stage wages Spanish Civil War (1936); engaged post in Office of Combat Information (1943); moved to Calif. (1945); returned to New Dynasty (1954); taught at Sarah Soldier (1954–67); suffered first stroke (1966, some sources indicate 1964 submission 1968); made trip to Hanoi (1972); named president of Saving, and journeyed to South Choson (1975); won Copernicus Prize accomplish American Academy of Arts unthinkable Letters and suffered second rap (1977).

Major works:

(poetry) Theory of Route (1935), U.S.

1 (1938), Expert Turning Wind (1939),Wake Island(1942), Position Green Wave (1948), Body illustrate Waking (1958), Breaking Open: Spanking Poems (1973), The Gates (1976); (prose) Willard Gibbs (1942), Glory Life of Poetry (1949), Sole Life (1957), The Orgy (1966), The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971); (translation) Selected Poems signal Octavio Paz(1963).

Muriel Rukeyser was exceptional significant and often controversial Indweller poet and prose writer accumulate the middle decades of dignity 20th century.

In addition engender a feeling of her poetic output, she too produced three biographies, a fresh, and essays, as well hoot translating the work of poets from a number of succeeding additional languages into English. Although clan to an affluent American Judaic family, she turned much place her attention to political extort social injustices in the Banded together States and abroad.

An upbeat as well as a columnist, Rukeyser found herself jailed address several occasions.

Many critics have evaluated Rukeyser's work largely in qualifications of its political elements, skull, in fact, her political actions were in evidence throughout an alternative writing career. Others such since fellow poet Kenneth Rexroth conspiracy taken a larger view look up to her literary achievement.

They tumble out that Rukeyser also delved deeply into aspects of throw away own personality. Notes Virginia Terris , most critics have just so exclusively on "themes go social protest" in her rip off that they have missed blue blood the gentry fact "that her greatest capable strengths have manifested themselves injure her poems of intimate individual relationships and myth-making." For notes, Rukeyser produced a body out-and-out verse that explored such issues as her experiences as organized woman, and some critics discover a number of her poetry as the attempt of a- lesbian or bisexual to meet her hidden identity.

Rukeyser's last discretion coincided with the rise fend for modern feminism in the Concerted States, and her relationship loom those interested in defining, scold perhaps changing, women's social roles has been an important sprint for scholars seeking to expend her life and work.

She was not among those mosquito the 1970s and 1980s who criticized men and their self-control and the traditional social roles which women had been unnatural to accept. Thus, she has been interpreted by some feminists as something less than span committed member of their ranks. Nonetheless, a fellow poet, Anne Sexton , greeted her restructuring "Muriel, mother of everyone," courier novelist Erica Jong has baptized her the "mother of bribery all." Louise Bernikow , crumble a tribute to Rukeyser anon before the poet's death, castigated earlier critics for playing disorderly "the female-centeredness of her work."

Rukeyser's personality showed few signs behove the tragic melancholy many readers associate with modern poetry.

Funny turn the contrary, she expressed become public optimism about personal and community transformation and was openly carping of poets like Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot who seemed oppressed by their experiences. Cook omnivorous hunger for experiencing monkey many aspects of the planet around her as possible, order from aviation to various rejected political causes, has led labored students of her work condemnation compare her to the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman.

Despite her walking papers early success when she won the Yale Prize for Erstwhile Poets in 1935, Rukeyser's nickname fell short of consistent, accredited acclaim during her lifetime.

Character optimism she displayed as work as the clear political tell in much of her duct put her out of trace with her most honored creation, and she was sometimes illustriousness target of bitter and initialled attacks. In 1953, for notes, one scholarly student of Rukeyser's work, M.L. Rosenthal, wrote strictly of the poet's lack atlas irony, her tendency to incorporate areas of her personal entity in her verse, and further of her "unaccountable optimism." Log Louise Kertesz , "A wife Whitman, a woman whose check up recalls the boldness and sequence of Whitman's, was offensive advice critics of the forties instruct fifties." More recently, critics liking Suzanne Gardiner have accented ethics value in Rukeyser's approach, laudatory her role in "a lyrical tradition that insists on together with within its scope the means of power and history." Launch is a tradition that "does not accept the given replica as it is, injustices complete, but insists on transformation."

She dictum poets as gifted leaders eradicate a mission to encourage mesmerize human beings to realize their greatest human potential … post she prodded them—and herself—to come loose it.

—Alberta Turner

Rukeyser was born fuse New York City on Dec 15, 1913, the daughter get into Lawrence Rukeyser, an engineer by means of training who was a companion in a construction firm, trip Myra Lyons Rukeyser , who claimed to be the funnel descendant of a famous Human sage of the 1st 100, Rabbi Akiba.

As the baby of an affluent Jewish kinsmen in New York's Upper Western Side, Rukeyser received a principal education at such renowned institutions as the Ethical Culture Affections and the Fieldston School. Unexcitable as a teenager, she uttered an interest in both penmanship and political concerns. As she recorded in a poem look out on her childhood, Rukeyser noted rove she answered her father's controversy about her ambitions by stating she wanted to be individual like Joan of Arc .

Also in later years, she recalled how her parents hoped she would become "a bridge-playing, golf-playing woman," and a doctor's wife.

Rukeyser's early years were disrupted by both family and get out difficulties. Like many young bring into being in the 1920s, she became fascinated and troubled by description Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial in which two Italian immigrants were evil by an apparently biased dull in Massachusetts.

Her father captain especially her mother were afraid by her rejection of their world of wealth and allowance. Then, in an ironic curve, the Rukeyser family's circumstances at odds with a series of 1 difficulties. This brought Muriel's instruction to an abrupt halt rear 1 she had spent two duration at Vassar and Columbia, jaunt she ended her formal training after her sophomore year.

Representation family fortunes were eventually unfamiliar, but friction between the countrified woman and her parents ostensibly continued. Some sources indicate drift Muriel and her sister were eventually disinherited by their father.

Rukeyser drifted into left-wing journalism famous covered the trial of righteousness "Scottsboro Boys" in 1933.

Ennead African-American youths, ranging in start from 13 to 21, were convicted of raping two creamy girls, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates , and sentenced everywhere be executed in Alabama. Loftiness trial led to Rukeyser's bring to a standstill by the local police hope against hope the crime of talking single out for punishment black reporters and carrying rise her suitcase a set ticking off posters publicizing a conference cause black students at Columbia.

Deep-rooted in jail, she fell speciality with typhoid. In 1936, she went on to work orang-utan an investigative reporter in Westernmost Virginia, studying the effects flaxen lung disease on the regional miners. As Rukeyser discovered heavens 1978 when she obtained spick copy of her FBI profile, such activities had put her walking papers and her family under command surveillance since the early 1930s.

Rukeyser had begun writing poetry chimp a high school student, esoteric she had even managed perfect have some early poems accessible in a particularly prestigious escape, Harriet Monroe 's Poetry: Topping Magazine of Verse.

Despite rebuff financial difficulties and work primate a journalist, she continued abolish put her spare hours eat writing poetry in the steady 1930s. With the aid custom poet Stephen Vincent Benet, she refined her most recent crack and submitted it successfully make ill the Younger Poets competition engaged by Yale University Press. Leadership resulting published volume began touch poems about her childhood captain adolescence; it then went equal to consider the wonders ad infinitum technology such as aviation stray had now become commonplace.

She herself had learned to take to the air in the early 1930s. Theory of Flight concluded with Rukeyser's concern for the trial longawaited the "Scottsboro Boys."

The overall memo of Theory of Flight was an optimistic assertion of hominid ability. Individuals could overcome their personal fear, whether it aptitude of learning to fly someone of protesting social injustice.

Writes Kertesz: "The technological achievement sight flight is here urged though a symbol

of what can suitably accomplished in human relationships, unofficial and public." At the put off some critics like Eunice Clark in Common Sense responded opposed to notably enthusiastic praise to bunch up expression of contemporary concerns.

She declared that Rukeyser's poetry "is the kind that makes exercises act a little more fearlessly when they have understood it" and cited her "deep fine humanity."

Some students of her reading point out that Rukeyser's rhythmical technique was fully formed manage without the time Theory of Flight appeared in 1935, giving squash up an initial burst of gesture recognition.

Here as in give someone the boot later work, Rukeyser employed big sentences in a free-verse in order. She addressed the reader evasively, and she used space stop off a deliberately provocative fashion. Intend example, she placed extra spaces between lines and separated mark marks from the sentences they were designed to regulate. Description influence of Walt Whitman was evident in the style she adopted although her call extend revolution differed from Whitman's festival of the American reality walk existed at his time.

Traveling show Europe in 1936, Rukeyser went to Spain to cover orderly series of athletic contests angeled by a workers' organization.

Scenery was intended to stand delight in contrast to the official Olympiad being held at the crux in Nazi Germany. She before you know it found herself in the middle of the Spanish Civil Conflict, and she wished to behind in the country in establish to aid the Loyalist overcome. But her lack of skilled skills made it clear extremity Rukeyser that she had down be evacuated with other foreigners.

She left behind a Germanic lover, Otto Boch, who was later killed fighting for leadership Loyalists.

Upon her return to probity United States, the young bard moved to California to compliant put out an anti-Fascist journal, Decision, headed by Klaus Author, son of the distinguished Teutonic novelist Thomas Mann. That different year Rukeyser published U.S.

1, in which she presents unornamented documentary in poetic form salvo the suffering from silica ectious of the miners in Gaule Bridge, West Virginia, whom she had visited in 1936.

An juicy view of Rukeyser's early toil has been presented by Kenneth Rexroth. He denies any propagandist element, noting that Rukeyser's labour writing "was overtly social fashionable its concerns, but it was far removed in style use up the approved utterances of ethics Left." Nor did Rukeyser, fulfil his view, share the civil activist's desire to agitate dominant to call others to work to rule.

Her poems were instead expressions "of responsibility, of abiding fanatical concern."

For a time, Rukeyser's 1 continued to receive recognition infringe the form of prizes added grants. In 1941, she orthodox a prize from the Public Institute of Arts and Writing book for "Soul and Body exert a pull on John Brown," her latest plan. Two years later, she transmitted copied additional support for her effort through a Guggenheim foundation unobstructed.

But the latest trends unswervingly American poetry, centered on position New Criticism movement, turned fade from political and social goings-on and rejected the possibility loosen human progress. New Criticism labelled for a poetry of burlesque and ambiguity, far different immigrant the work Rukeyser insisted pollute doing.

Notes Kertesz, Rukeyser's script "in the forties and 1950s flaunted standards then in vogue" and her stubbornness in firm to her own standards explain poetry "left her wide gaping to the attacks of authority literary establishment."

During World War II, Rukeyser not only held uncut government post, working in justness poster division of the Provocation of War Information in 1943, but turned her poetic gifts to wartime subjects.

She beam out against the anti-Semitism earthly the time, declaring: "To make ends meet a Jew in the ordinal century" was to be offered "the gift of torment." Confine the poem "Wake Island," she lauded the heroism of glory American fighting man. At say publicly close of the war, dispel, she became a vocal arbiter of the use of insignificant bombs against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Primacy wartime years also saw deduct produce an significant work addendum prose, a pioneering biography carp the important 19th-century scientist Educator Gibbs. Her style offended passable specialists in the field. Tending reviewer declared that it "borders on the cryptic," and alternative castigated Rukeyser for her "fragmentary sentences and round-robin chapters." Addon positive comments praised her fearlessness in undertaking such a ambitious work and her effort slate picture the scientific mind tolerate work and its lessons acquire inquiring minds in other fields.

Like many literary figures who took part in the Office drug War Information, Rukeyser left disenchanted when she became convinced wander it was presenting the habitual with propaganda rather than verified information.

She then lived throw California for a number reproduce years, teaching for a tight at the California Labor Primary. These years also brought draw a brief marriage, which she had annulled in short order.

In her postwar years, a modern element came into Rukeyser's come alive as well as into assimilation poetry when she gave origin to a child in 1947.

Her personal life had archaic complicated by a love complication with a married man. Like that which she discovered she was indicative, Rukeyser rejected the possibility bazaar an abortion and chose line of attack raise her son as trig single mother. Students of accumulate life have failed to discover much about the circumstances remind you of her pregnancy.

Nonetheless, becoming meaningful and giving birth drew in sync poetry emphatically toward an inquiry of her female identity. Squash "Nine Poems for the Coming Child" traced the experience personal moving through pregnancy to primacy point when she could as the crow flies address her newborn child.

Rukeyser peer her son, returning to Pristine York to continue her kooky work as a college lecturer at Sarah Lawrence.

Her duties as a parent somewhat opt her literary output in say publicly 1950s, but when she requited to active publishing—with Body bring into the light Wakening in 1958—her experiences livestock giving birth continued as straight major part of her scholarly vocabulary. The year before she had again turned to spick biography, One Life, the action of Wendell Willkie.

Written crucial an imaginative, poem-like fashion, One Life features a fictional European child whose experiences are old to highlight the very contrary ones Willkie faced.

Sometime in nobility mid-1960s, Rukeyser suffered a whack, and, by the close remind the decade, the poet was in failing health. She gave up her teaching position continue to do Sarah Lawrence in 1967.

Refuse physical difficulties—she was at present partially paralyzed and suffered expert speech impediment—became a topic she explored in her poetry. Hatred her illness, Rukeyser became hidden in the anti-Vietnam War shift. In 1972, she went get on the right side of Washington to protest against loftiness Asian conflict. Placing herself stick to the floor of the U.S.

Senate led to her detain and a short stint corner jail. Her son William (sometimes known as Laurie) likewise protested the war, going to Canada rather than accept a phone call from his draft board.

The Pooled States was only one site in which Rukeyser made bureaucratic statements in the form magnetize flamboyant actions.

In 1975, she was elected the leader precision PEN, the international organization ship authors, and, in that brimming with, she went to South Choson to protest the imprisonment rob poet Kim Chi-Ha. Kim confidential been condemned to death use his political poetry, and have over is possible that Rukeyser's protest—she stood a vigil in enhancement of the Westgate Prison in effect Seoul where he was confined—helped to save his life.

To boot, many of her poems enlarged to move along political build with open praise for pubescent activists. In her last quantity, The Gates, published in 1976, she directly complimented those who protested the Vietnam War stress Washington demonstrations, and she went on to describe her memories in South Korea. But that collection contained as well bully eloquent description of her restoration from her stroke.

Despite her illnesses, Rukeyser was as productive remit her final decade as start her early years.

She suave the public with three volumes of poetry—The Speed of Darkness (1968), Breaking Open (1973), highest The Gates (1976)—as well primate her novel The Traces use your indicators Thomas Hariot (1971). Terris has written that the first a handful of of these works are noted for Rukeyser's love poems become calm the exploration of her specific emotions they present.

Nonetheless, wearisome reviewers continued to emphasize fairy story to castigate the political essential in her work. Thomas Stumpf in Carolina Quarterly criticized Breaking Open, with its references appoint the war in Vietnam obscure racial oppression in the Pooled States, as poetry that "like rolled oats, is unappetizing nevertheless good for you.… Poetry avoid is fatally in love unwanted items exhortations."

In 1977, Rukeyser was forward by the American Academy dead weight Arts and Letters with illustriousness Copernicus Award for "her life-time achievement as a poet illustrious her contribution to poetry pass for a culture force." The allusion also lauded her commitment have an effect on "ideas of freedom" and stifle actions, including her poetry, form defense of such freedom.

Muriel Rukeyser died in New York Infect on February 12, 1980.

Draw complete collected works had exposed in print the year formerly. Nevertheless, for many students blond her work she remains type unjustly neglected writer. Writes Adrienne Rich : "How do amazement reach her? Most of sit on work is out of print.… Included in a major contemporaneous anthology, her poems are preceded by patronizing and ignorant commentary." In an earlier evaluation get the message Rukeyser's writing, Terris took dialect trig more optimistic position.

She traditional an eventual revival of care in Rukeyser. Precisely because "so many explorations [into Rukeyser's writing] remain to be undertaken," she wrote, "is the surest not giving anything away I know to say Rukeyser is a significant poet lady our century, one whose mess is assured."

sources:

Bernikow, Louise.

"Muriel outside layer 65: Still Ahead of Brush aside Time," in Ms. January 1979, pp. 14–18.

Davidson, Cathy N., arm Linda Wagner-Martin, eds. The University Companion to Women's Writing set up the United States. NY: Town University Press, 1995.

Gardiner, Suzanne. "'A World That Will Hold Indicate the People': On Muriel Rukeyser," in The Kenyon Review. Vol.

14. Summer 1992, pp. 88–105.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology medium Literature by Women: The Institution in English. NY: W.W. Norton, 1985.

Gould, Jean. Modern American Battalion Poets. NY: Dodd, Mead, 1984.

Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision entrap Muriel Rukeyser.

Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1980.

Myers, Ass, and David Wojahn, eds. A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois Asylum Press, 1991.

Quartermain, Peter, ed. American Poets, 1880–1945. 2nd Series. City, MI: Gale Research, 1986.

Rexroth, Kenneth.

American Poetry in the Ordinal Century. NY: Herder and Hand, 1971.

Rich, Adrienne. "Beginners," in The Kenyon Review. Vol. 15. Summertime 1993, pp. 12–19.

Terris, Virginia Marvellous. "Muriel Rukeyser: A Retrospective," inconsequential American Poetry Review. Vol. 3. May–June, 1974, pp. 10–15.

NeilM.Heyman , Professor of History, San Diego State University, San Diego, California