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Born in New York City, Muriel Rukeyser was educated at the
Fieldston School, Vassar College, and Columbia University.
Although brought up in a well-to-do family, she felt a strong
kinship with the disadvantaged and oppressed, gravitating
toward those whom she felt lived in solidarity with one another,
such as the socialists, communists, and artists she met in
New York during the 1920s and 1930s. Rukeyser was appalled
at the deplorable working conditions and poor wages in factories,
and she perceived the idealism and solidarity of the labor
movement as a liberating alternative to the emptiness of affluent
individualism. Her poetry shared this attention to social
injustice, but unlike some so-called "political"
poets, Rukeyser did not attempt to write in the supposedly
"simple" voices of workers. Instead, she insisted
that technically sophisticated poetry was not at odds with
political content and produced poetry that was complex in
style and politically dedicated. Her collections include Theory
of Flight (1935), U.S. 1 (1938), Beast in
View (1944), Body of Waking (1958), Breaking
Open (1973), and Collected Poems (1978).
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