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Biography
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).
Explorations
Throughout her career, Rukeyser regarded herself as a poet
of the American radical left. Her poetry, however, does not
favor the populism and accessibility that we might associate
with the works of Sandburg, Cummings,
or other poets with similar political and social views. We
can look at two Rukeyser poems, Effort at Speech Between
Two People (1935) and Movie (1935), to observe
how her complex prosody interacts with her themes and values.
1. In Effort at Speech Between Two People, who
is the other person -- the person whom the speaker implores
to "Speak to me"? Is it anyone in particular? A woman?
A man? Everyone? What social class do these people belong
to? What hints do you pick up as to who these two people
are: the speaker and the person addressed?
2. There is a conflict described in Movie. What
is it? Does the poem suggest that the public is being controlled
by the movies? Or is something else, something unexpected
by "The Director," going on?
Other sites to consult:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=101:
The Academy of American poets Web site for Rukeyser, with
biography and sound file.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rukeyser/rukeyser.htm:
This recommended site contains a biography of Rukeyser
and selected criticism.
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