Selected Poems

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80) was born in New York City. She attended Vassar College for two years and then moved back to New York where she took classes at Columbia University. After college, she worked as an editor of the Student Review and witnessed events which were to make a serious impact on her life and poetry, including the Scottsboro trial in Alabama, the Gauley Bridge tragedy in West Virginia, and the civil war in Spain. The violence and injustice she saw, in the United States and abroad, led her poetry to function as a mode of social protest. She felt a deep responsibility to comment on human issues and was particularly concerned with inequalities of sex, race and class. With her poems, she frequently documented her own emotional experiences within the context of a greater political or social event. She was a powerful visionary and her work reflects her wish for a greater world community united by love. Rukeyser experimented with language and form, and her wide technical range, including lyrical forms and the documentary narrative, is illustrated in Adrienne Rich's edition of her Selected Poems (Library of America, USA, 2004; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2013). Many women poets have claimed Rukeyser's influence on their work, notably Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds and Marilyn Hacker. Two seminal anthologies of American women poets, The World Split Open (1974) and No More Masks (1973), took their titles from Rukeyser's poems, the latter from her poetic manifesto, 'The Poem as Mask', in which she declared: 'No more masks! No more mythologies!/ Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,// the fragments join in me and with their own music.' Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (2000/2006) also took its title from Rukeyser's poem 'Kathe Kollewitz'.

'She refused to compartmentalise herself or her work, claiming her right to intellect and sexuality, poetry and science, Marxism and myth, activism and motherhood, theory and vision - She was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair - the range and daring of her work, its generosity of vision, its level of energy are unequalled among twentieth-century American poets. Her poems can be panoramic (yet vividly concrete), intimate, epigrammatic, meditative, sensual, mordantly witty, visionary' - Adrienne Rich. 'One of the most important poets of our time - Her originality, her genius, her courage illuminate our century' - Sharon Olds. 'She was the first poet that I knew personally. I knew her when I was still an undergraduate. She was a very amazing human being and any traces of honesty in my life come from having seen how beautifully honest she was in administering her life and her poetry without any separation - you couldn't get a knife between the two things with her. The real influence was her human model of what a poet could be' - William Meredith, Paris Review. 'Muriel Rukeyser loved poetry more than anyone I've ever known. She also believed it could change us, move the world' - Alice Walker. 'Muriel, mother of everyone' - Anne Sexton.