What does it mean to be antifascist? The answer seems self-obvious: to oppose fascism. But when does that opposition happen? And at what point does it become a legitimate and recognizable form of resistance? Too often, we tend to discount cultural activism, the only sort of resistance most art can produce, as inadequately political. Political poetry, antifascist poetry, stuck to the page rather than moving through the street, seems detached from oppressive realities, opting for the aesthetic over the sociopolitical. Direct actions, with their performative and theatrical dimensions, have an aesthetic quality, too. But even for those of us who love the art and believe it can transform readers, much poetry’s unapologetic links to the unseen and the private seem to interfere its political impact. Subjective change rarely produces measurable, objective results. For resistance to fascism to be adequate, shouldn’t it require as much spectacularity as that demonstrated by the wielders of the same force and violence which we wish to challenge? Don’t we need visible, quantifiable signs of the ground we have regained by resisting fascist creep?
My own doubts about poetry’s potential antifascist force are rather recent, a product of the powerlessness I have felt since the start of Trump’s second presidential administration. Before, during, and after the first one, I had no problem calling Muriel Rukeyser radical and naming her an antifascist.
With regularity, though, my students even then refused to recognize her through those labels. “She’s too private, she doesn’t disclose her full position in society. You’ve written about that yourself,” they charged. “How can someone who withholds her personal truth create social transformation in the name of truth?” Or they complained, “She’s too private, a lyricist who never strays too far from her personhood.” I suppose they believed her insufficiently public to have been politically effective, no matter the fact that publishing literary work with a clear resistant vision is, at its core, a public act. “What can poetry really do for social justice?” the most skeptical ones asked, resurrecting an old chestnut, even though many of them, too, identify as poets or elected to take my classes on poetry, on radical poetry, on Rukeyser’s poetry.
Older folks, established poets less likely to shy away from the idea that poetry can be political (at least the idea that their poetry can be political), have tended to be more generous with their appreciations of Rukeyser’s work as a precursor of theirs, even after this new moment of American neofascism began. But when I answer their questions about what I see as the basis of her antifascism, when I point to her exposition of fascism’s social psychological and linguistic dimensions, more than once such established poets have said something to the effect of “Oh, that’s not really political, that’s moral opposition.” True, it’s neither realpolitik nor a street action. It’s not rooted in Marxist or even post-Marxist analyses of political economy. But if an author’s vision is grounded in morality, in ethics, does that mean their poetry cannot be political, cannot be “properly” antifascist or radical?
Such skepticism and criticisms are infectious, I must admit. Imposter syndrome and doubt set in, and I now often wonder, Have I been wrong all along?
Then, there are other moments when my belief feels justified. One such occasion was when I “found” the two “lost” poems by Rukeyser presented here and published for the first time. These two previously unknown pieces shed light on both the limits and the possibilities of a poetics of antifascist resistance.
* * *
Archival work is strange. Those of us steeped in it merely “discover” what has been in plain sight all along. At the very least, what we “find” was discoverable earlier, if only someone had thought to look where it was buried, to see it when they did look there, in that box or folder, or if they only knew that what is on the paper or notebook they were handling was missing or not yet known. Buried history, that’s what Rukeyser calls such phenomena in The Life of Poetry (1949). Despite her phrase’s passive construction, she knew full well when she coined it that those historical materials and narratives are not merely lost due to circumstances, silted over by time. They are actively buried, the casualties of others’ suppressive agency.
Although Rukeyser, at least not in that book, explicitly attributes such agency to fascist actors, we know full well that that is a modus operandi of fascism—to bury history, to erase it, to overwrite it with a narrative conforming to a white supremacist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal authoritarian state or folk national ideal. Historian Jason Stanley calls this phenomenon “the erasure of inconvenient realities,” which are supplanted by fascistic “invented histories” whose mythologies rationalize the regime’s supremacism and domination (15). Another historian, Federico Finchelstein, complicates the matter further. He notes that in the past “fascists were not merely lying, but self-deceiving”; that is, they truly believed that the false myths they used to replace erased historical actualities were just realities that hadn’t yet come to pass (27).
Fascist myths are the stuff of the future real conditional, the products of a wishful thinking so powerful it engineers a new reality and manifests a longed-for nonexistent past. In the process, everyone loses sight of how the leader’s and his enablers’ shared will created the very conditions required to make true the lied-about and longed-for past. If we’re inclined to resist their falsehoods and myths, our eyes, when they pass over what has been suppressed by fascists’ dissemblance or misbegotten beliefs, are more likely to recognize the significance of those traces. From the traces and pieces of actuality that survive, we can recognize the realities plowed over by the dominant order’s lies and desires.
Archival scholars know what it means to need to see—to re-see—the evidence directly in front of us by viewing it aslant. New and changing vantages reveal other significances of what we saw all along, even if the reason why we missed those meanings had little to do with fascists’ desires or historically suppressive machinations.
* * *
Not long ago, in December 2025, I was virtually riffling through hundreds of photos I had taken of documents from Rukeyser’s archive at the Library of Congress. (It never fails to amaze me that the bulk of this poet-activist’s profoundly antifascist work is now housed precariously, entrusted to the care of an institution funded by a neofascist federal administration.) I don’t even remember what I was specifically looking for, or hoping to find, as I clicked through the images. For me, such relatively aimless searching through archival photographs often is based on some vague, unspecific hope, grounded only in my sense that much remains to be unburied, even after it has been photographed, processed, recategorized as it moves from the official, material archives into my personal, digital one.
At the time, I was working out an idea for an invited, yet-to-be-completed essay about Rukeyser’s antifascism. I merely hoped I would find a trace I had overlooked while completing a recovery edition of The Middle of the Air, Rukeyser’s lost play warning about the threat of nativist fascism. My work on that project was a process of either rediscovering the materials I simply had forgotten about or more closely attending to the ones I remembered but had not yet closely read. All I know for certain about that evening of poring over images related to the play, taken three years earlier, I did not expect to find what I did. An unpublished poem, buried.
The Strong Angel
The Rebirth, told again and again. Of a season, a city, a child.
When word came from the city, that it was free, the news reached us all. Many remembered the hills and the river, faces and that light, the streets and the wine and houses, door by door; but to most of us it was a city we had never known. There was a strength in that. We never knew the city; but its conquest fell on us. A shadow like enemy bombers, some huge fierce plane with a shadow four years long; that flying shadow which this year lifts. Pain is disclosed, more pain. But it is birth.
There is a movement between the world and France.
There is survival here, grace which survives. But more besides.
There is a strong angel, seizing the imagination, making a sign, music to reach us all. Until we who never knew that place carry with us its images — seeing those spires, and under them, behind that angel’s river, that angel’s city, all lands, all seas, the whole air.
And now we carry among the images a new strong scene — not only armies of survival who arrive at the city, but armies of belief, fighting deep in its center, at the heart.
This belief seizes us, gives us once more the city reborn, a hope reborn, and those divinities who live and live again.
The typescript is close to a fair copy, even though there are a few emendations.[1] Several of those changes are just layered type or holograph marks in ink and pencil to correct mistyped words. But two of Rukeyser’s changes strike me as more significant. One occurs in the fourth line, where she lightly, in pencil, smudges out the “t” in the recurrence of the word there. She possibly only wanted to avoid repeating the first there starting the line, but if we consider the previous line, her change radically transforms the whole poem: “There is movement between the world and France. / There is survival there, grace which survives. But more besides.” When the line becomes “There is survival here,” as in not in France but instead possibly in “the world” or even in the United States, the here where Rukeyser was writing, the survival, grace, and more-than-grace she seeks removes us from the external occasion for her poem.
With the erasure of one letter, she turns the poem’s collective gaze selfward: the grace born of Paris’s liberation from Nazi occupation in August 1944 is now carried by others, by the “we” embodied by Rukeyser’s narrator and audience. That is, such grace becomes emblematic of the spirit of the period’s transnational antifascist movement.
Rukeyser’s other major emendation to this unpublished poem is less subtle than her erasure of a single letter. In pencil, she crossed out the original title, “FOR PARIS 1944,” and replaced it with “THE STRONG ANGEL.”
* * *
There are few extant unpublished poems in Rukeyser’s archives, at least that I have “found.” Encountering one should have been momentous enough for me to at least remember it! How could I have forgotten “The Strong Angel” or not recognized it for what it was?
Since this poem is about the liberation of Paris, my memory lapse or oversight is even stranger. After all, I am obsessed with the mythology, literature, and history of the Occupation. And here is a poem invoking the French Resistance, the underground, those “armies of belief, fighting deep in its [Paris’s] center, at the heart.” Moreover, this poem, when mythologizing those fighters, cites them as catalyzing a “rebirth” of “the world.” This new world includes those who were not subject to Nazi occupation yet need liberation, too. “This belief,” the Resistance’s belief, Rukeyser writes, “seizes us.” She mythologizes the historical event of liberation. She neither commemorates a past event nor misrepresents fascism as a past threat, now overcome as of August 1944. Instead, Rukeyser projects into the future the work of building antifascist solidarity and discovering an antifascist grace. The present tense of “The Strong Angel” marks such work as ever-continuing, perpetually undergone. And it is a psychological and moral experience, felt in the spirit of solidarity and effected through feats of poetic memory.
When I “found” this poem three years after I first “found” it, I wrote to Elisabeth Däumer, the editor and publisher of this website, and Bill Rukeyser, the poet’s son. I wanted to share “The Strong Angel” with them and, eventually, with you.
Now, over three-quarters of a century after Rukeyser wrote this poem, we’re the ones in need of liberation. What began as an occasional poem has continuing relevance as history is newly buried, or reburied, and as new violences are perpetrated, or old violences perpetuated, by yet another generation of fascists.
Despite Rukeyser’s slight revisions, “The Strong Angel” remains rooted in the contingencies and circumstances giving rise to it. Nonetheless, I am grateful she had the foresight to mythologize the occasion. But let’s be clear: Rukeyser’s use of mythology is an antifascist counterstrategy to fascists’ approach to mythologizing history. They replace historical fact and truth with ahistorical constructs and lies. Antifascist mythology responds to the present to invoke, in a humanistic fashion, future possibilities for all. It is not a nostalgic yearning for a national past that never really existed.
As Rukeyser instructs in “The Fear of Form” (1939), the third installment of her great antifascist suite Elegies (1939-1949): “The useable [sic] present starts my calendar” (Elegies 15). Her example is part of our own usable present and ought to inform our strategies in crafting antifascist responses and resistances to our own neofascist moment.
* * *
Within an hour of sending the photo of “The Strong Angel” to Elisabeth and Bill, I “found” another unpublished poem in my archival photo stash. This one was from a more recent research trip, my visit the previous spring to the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, the other major repository of Rukeyser’s manuscripts. However, the poem in question, “In a War on All Fronts,” is not collected with Rukeyser’s papers. She had sent it to her girlfriend at the time, Belgian-born novelist and poet May Sarton. So, the poem has remained hidden in the lovers’ correspondence. Its single sheet is deposited in a folder with drafts of two other poems, “Wreath of Women” and “Mortal Girl,” both published in Rukeyser’s collection Beast in View (1944). The draft typescript of the latter poem is signed “Muriel / May 1943.” No letter accompanies the poems, and since they all are creased as if folded in half, rather than thirds, they likely were not mailed. Rukeyser could have just handed them to her partner in New York City while Sarton was visiting from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In a War on All Fronts
Sickness is general in our time.
Wounds we newly understand
Fall on us, rise up from the ground.
The fevers of confusion’s kiss
Leap to confusion in the land
And flame through our divided minds.
Let me not die of this.
Let me come through and live again
To fight the war the world must win.
The hurt child in the fascist street,
The rain of clubs on Negro heads
Demand more blood, cry for defeat.
Cry for a day after defeat:
Day of the world’s discovery
For which we face an age of loss.
Let me not die of this.
Let me strike before I go
But grant me more life than one blow.
The hurt child in the fascist street,
The sickness of our divided state,
Call to the anger and the great
Imaginative gifts of man.
The enemy does his rigid work,
Deals blackness; we grow, in that dark.
Let me grow and fight again.
Let all the living strike in proof
They start the world this war must win.
An undated sheet from Rukeyser’s archives lists “In a War on All Fronts” as the fourth among twenty-five titles she initially intended to exclude from her collection Beast in View (1944) (Rukeyser, Poems not to be in Beast in View). Ultimately, though, she included several titles appearing on the list either in this project or in her next collection The Green Wave (1948). Other poems were left uncollected, though Rukeyser had published them in literary magazines and student newspapers. Still others, to this day, remain unlocated and are unpublished.[2] Although the sheet supplies no reason for Rukeyser’s omission of any of these pieces from Beast in View, I suspect she felt that “In a War on All Fronts” was too much of its own time.
Permit me a small digression to help make this point.
* * *
Almost one year before writing “The Strong Angel,” Rukeyser already was leaning toward a poetic practice of mythologizing the war. In doing so, she also mythologized both fascism and antifascism. Later, in The Speed of Darkness (1968), she would present an untitled poem whose oft-cited first line says much about how she imagined the so-called War Against Fascism as not contained in a distinct historical epoch: “I lived in the first century of world wars” (Collected Poems 430). Both fascism and antifascism were historically unmoored, doomed to repeat. They deserved a poetic, mythologizing treatment to do fuller justice to both the threat of fascism and the liberating power of antifascist resistance.
The draft of “Mortal Girl” that Rukeyser gave to Sarton has one major revision: she had penciled out the second line of the final stanza. That line, bolded below, also was cut from the version published in Beast in View:
Within me your city burning, and your desperate tree,
Europe, your earthquake, many Crusades; all war,
all that the song and the apparition gave
to claim my mouth with fire, leave me mad
with song and pain and waiting, they make me free
in all my own shapes, deep in the spirit’s cave
to sing again the entrance of the god. (Rukeyser, Mortal girl [draft]; emphasis added)
By cutting a single line, Rukeyser removed historical markers and thus rendered the poem a mythopoetic reflection on waiting a god’s arrival. On the face of it, the messianic overtones of a freedom born with the deity’s coming suggest he is welcome. However, the narrator’s madness and pain suggest otherwise, as do the poem’s earlier allusions to the Greek patriarchal deity Zeus’s violent sexual transgressions, with his rapes of Leda (“you as a swan arrived”) and Danaë (“you as a shower of gold”), as well as his tricking his wife Hera to nurse his mortal-born son Herakles whose spillage of her breastmilk created the first lilies (“the lily bright in my hand”). War culture in Europe, the cradle of twentieth-century fascism, is the power Rukeyser’s narrator awaits, anticipating being ravished by it.
The upshot of that expected violation is the narrator will bring forth a new race of demigods for a new age. Helen of Troy, Jason, and Herakles—these were the heroes born of the Greek deity’s sex crimes. They are the precursors of Rukeyser’s modern, mythologized antifascism, born of a queer Jewish woman who confesses her complex bodily and political desires to her lover, Sarton, to whom she gifted this poem’s draft.
Perhaps such mythologizing is the only means for achieving what Rukeyser, in a letter to Sarton, called “combining” (Rukeyser, letter to May Sarton, n.d. [1944]). With this word, she was referring to poetic attempts to move past binaries and splits of all kinds. In this same letter to Sarton, Rukeyser urges the Belgian expatriate to erase from her own poems about the war, which are still unpublished, “the division between the kind of love you have and the kind of anger you have” (Rukeyser’s emphases). Doing so, according to Rukeyser, would better allow Sarton “to acknowledge the whole body, to praise and love the whole body.” Or, we might say, to be her fully integrated self. Rukeyser continues:
It is a political mistake when it [i.e., combining] does not happen; I think it is why the revolutionaries distrust the intellectuals who cut off something of themselves when they approach the revolution. It must mean a split, and it means that when the swing occurs back to one’s other self, one will also turn against the revolution or whatever belief or form one has reached. (Rukeyser’s emphases)
Either acknowledge the messy coexistence of love and hate now, or risk betraying one’s cause and beliefs later. Perhaps that sort of work on oneself and on behalf of an antifascist effort can only be done when one lifts oneself and one’s poems out of a strict affiliation with and bondage to historical particulars. Rather than erase history, such efforts merely strip events of their impersonality and distance to reintegrate them into historical subjects’ personal experience and psychologies. As I explore in the introduction to my critical edition of Rukeyser’s previously “lost” play The Middle of the Air, the antifascist dimensions of that literary effort consisted in exposing the psychological dimensions of both fascism and microfascisms, or those authoritarian desires and potentialities lurking even in supposedly democratic societies and institutions.
The psychological nature of fascism affects everyone. And if that is true, then the ethical affirmation of antifascist beliefs must also be a psychological phenomenon. And it is a process that is never completed. To continually renew our commitment to and belief in fighting fascism, we must perpetually struggle with our senses of complicity with it, even, on some level, our desire for it.
* * *
Since “In a War on All Fronts” lacks a signature and a date, it technically is not an occasional poem. But it still strikes me as more historically grounded than even the unpublished draft of its companion piece, “Mortal Girl,” with its explicit reference to the European war.
And “In a War on All Fronts” even seems more political to me than “The Strong Angel” does. Indeed, it borders on the realpolitik. One reason why I say so is that Rukeyser uses the word fascist, a surprisingly rare occurrence in her entire body of work. It occurs only in a few published poems.[3] In one of them, the eighth part of the sequence “Letter to the Front,” from Beast in View, the term surfaces in a lightly veiled attack on one of Benito Mussolini’s Italian American supporters, Generoso Pope, “that fascist, Malicioso King” (Rukeyser, Collected Poems 244). Here, Rukeyser identifies Pope with the name of the antagonist from The Middle of the Air, a counterhistorical imagining of an attempted American fascist revolution that had not (yet) come to pass. (The play’s political thriller plot line eerily anticipates the MAGA insurrection and attempted coup at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.) In the first two versions of The Middle of the Air‘s script, like in “A Letter to the Front,” Rukeyser does not shy away from using the word fascist to explicitly name the threat King poses. However, after Beast in View was published, she excised the word fascist from her last three rewrites, all composed in 1945 or later.
Given the rarity of Rukeyser’s use of the word fascist in her literary writings before and during the United States’ entry into the war, and her erasure of it afterward, I find it astounding that “In a War on All Fronts” explicitly uses the term not once but twice. And the word recurs. Indeed, the entire line is repeated as a refrain—“The hurt child in the fascist street.” Such repetition does the work of magically manifesting a fascist public space, making it a named and thus visible reality, despite the street’s non-specificity.
Another reason why I believe “In a War on All Fronts” presents a practical politics, rather than “just” a moral activism, is that it answers a question I have mulled over when my own doubts have surfaced about the so-called authenticity of Rukeyser’s radicalism or the genuineness of her antifascist commitment. Would Muriel have punched a Nazi? Why yes, she would have! “Let me strike before I go / But grant me more life than one blow.” Militant antifascism was imaginable not only for those “armies of belief,” the French Resistance fighters she celebrates in “The Strong Angel.” Americans, including herself, needed to be ready to act and to be unafraid to take up a reactive and defensive violence, when necessary.
* * *
Given the emotional and psychological nature of fascism and microfascisms, though, Rukeyser understood that militancy, the “strike” or “blow” she or others might land on our enemies, could not be the end-all of antifascist resistance. Whoever she is invoking or praying to here needed to “grant” her “more life.” For Rukeyser, simply living as a queer, resistant Jewish woman was a defiant act in the 1940s.
Indeed, it would be defiant today. The embrace of joy and the cultivation of care and mutual aid in resistant communities are now encouraged by activists. Some appreciate how more life, and more of a good life, as well as a more just life, are not merely the desired outcomes of political action but also the vehicle for it.
The phrase “more life” pops up with some frequency in Rukeyser’s writing, most notably in The Life of Poetry. I have not (yet) been able to prove it with archival evidence, but I would bet money that her use of this phrase knowingly continues and evolves a concept introduced by the Old Left poets and married couple Lucia Trent and Ralph Cheyney when Rukeyser was coming of age. The title of their essay collection More Power to Poets! A Plea for More Poetry in Life, More Life in Poetry (1934) invokes the thesis of their introduction to Marcus Grahams’s earlier volume An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry (1929). There, Trent and Cheyney write:
Poetry and propaganda are two sides of the same shield. Without passion there can be no poetry, and all who feel strongly burn with a zeal to have others share their feeling. True poets are also propagandists, even though their propaganda may be simply for the love of life and the life of love.” (35)
At the start of the Great Depression, two communists had made the case for the inextricable connection between realpolitik and moral and aesthetic political vision. As “two sides of the shield,” rather than the two-sided capitalist coin usually invoked, the ideology propagandizing practical politics and the sentiment and attitude defining moral politics are both part of the armor the revolutionary or radical poet wears into battle. Defense, preservation, survival, ensuring more life and more love for oneself and others are foundational to a politics of challenge, confrontation, militancy.
I haven’t been able to definitively pin down Trent and Cheyney’s influence on Rukeyser. But she was familiar enough with Cheyney, at least, to mention him in passing when writing about the anarchist martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti in her early essay “The Flown Arrow” (1932). So, I will characterize my belief that she consciously used the phrase “more life” to articulate her antifascist vision in “In a War on All Fronts” as an unverifiable fact.[4] As Rukeyser theorized in her late lecture “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (1968), poetry articulates intuited truths, truths that are felt and thus are as true as anything which can be empirically verified through documented proof. Such felt connection matters here, when we are thinking about antifascism and poetry.
By unburying the history lost when Rukeyser, for whatever reason, decided not to publish these two poems, we discover that punching Nazis and mythologizing moral resistance—what activists and political theorists now call militant and liberal antifascisms, respectively—are two sides of the same shield. And it is a shield we need to take up now, in its wholeness, without division if we are to survive and find joy amidst the terror, violence, and war perpetuated by twenty-first-century neofascist regimes.
Notes
[1] Photographs of this archival poem and another discussed below can be found on this website.
[2] In the same folder with Rukeyser’s list of uncollected poems are heavily emended sheets of one other title on that list: “Drunken Girls 2, 3, and 4,” the unpublished final three parts of Beast in View’s “Drunken Girl.” Another poem Rukeyser lists as uncollected in that volume, “Waltz,” was published in the magazine Poetry as part of “The Child in the Great Wood,” a sequence also including “Full Moon,” an unpublished poem not on Rukeyser’s inventory, plus several pieces later republished in Beast in View. Her list indicates two other uncollected pieces as having been published in student newspapers: “Home Thoughts from Home” in The Manitoban (University of Manitoba) and “An Endless Chain” in an as-yet unlocated issue of The Vassar Review (Vassar College). Though the titular phrase “Home Thoughts from Home” is used as the first line in part six of “A Letter to the Front,” the poem in The Manitoban is different in both its form and narrative.
[3] Rukeyser uses the word fascist in the following poems: “Trophies,” from U.S. 1 (1938); “Not Fun,” from A Turning Wind (1939); and part 8 of “Letter to the Front,” from Beast in View (1944) (Collected Poems, 116-7, 162-3, and 244). She uses the hyphenated word anti-fascist only in “Mediterranean,” from A Turning Wind. It appears twice there—once in the prose prologue and again in a line (Collected Poems, 144, 146).
[4] Rukeyser also used the phrase “More Life,” capitalized, in the first talk from her antifascist lecture series, The Usable Truth (1940). See Muriel Rukeyser, “The Fear of Poetry,” p. 47.
Bibliography
Finchelstein, Federico. A Brief History of Fascist Lies. U of California P, 2022.
Keenaghan, Eric, editor. Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Middle of the Air”: A Critical Edition. Cornell UP, 2027.
Rukeyser, Muriel. Beast in View. Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1944.
—. “The Child in the Great Wood.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, October 1941, pp. 1-9. Independent Voices. Accessed May 29, 2026. [Cluster including Rukeyser’s uncollected poems “Full Moon” and “Waltz,” among other republished poems.]
—. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Edited by Janet E. Kaufman and Anne E. Herzog with Jan Heller Levi. U of Pittsburgh P, 2005.
—. Drunken girls [complete series, parts 1-4]. Unpublished draft poem, n.d. [c. 1942-3]. 3 typescript pages. [Beast in View] Holograph and typescript draft of 7 poems, folder 1, Berg Coll MSS Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
—. Elegies. 1949. New Directions, 2013.
—. “The Fear of Poetry.” 1940, 1941. The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Cornell UP, 2023, pp. 39-56.
—. “The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case.” 1932. The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Cornell UP, 2023, pp. 103-12.
—. “Home Thoughts from Home.” The Manitoban, November 5, 1945. Digital collections, University of Manitoba Libraries, http://hdl.handle.net/10719/1426290. Accessed May 29, 2026.
—. In a war on all fronts. Unpublished draft poem, n.d. [1943]. 1 typescript page. Berg Coll MSS Sarton, box 144, folder 16, May Sarton Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
—. Letter to May Sarton, n.d. [c.1944]. 4 holograph pages. Outgoing correspondence with May Sarton, folder 10, Berg Coll MSS Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
—. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996. Originally published 1949.
—. Mortal girl. Draft of published poem. May 1943. 1 typescript page. Berg Coll MSS Sarton, box 144, folder 16, May Sarton Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
—. Poems not to be in Beast in View. Unpublished list, n.d. [c. 1944]. 1 holograph page. [Beast in View] Holograph and typescript draft of 7 poems, folder 1, Berg Coll MSS Rukeyser, Muriel Rukeyser Collection of Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
—. “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact.” 1968. The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose. Edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Cornell UP, 2023, pp. 252-66.
—. The strong angel [f.k.a. To Paris 1944]. Unpublished poem, n.d. [1944]. 1 typescript page. MSS38505, series II: box 5, Muriel Rukeyser Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
—. Wreath of women. Draft of published poem, n.d. [1943]. 2 typescript (carbon) pages. Berg Coll MSS Sarton, box 144, folder 16, May Sarton Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundation, New York, NY.
Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Random House, 2018.
Trent, Lucia and Ralph Cheney. Introduction. An Anthology of Revolutionary Poetry. Edited by Marcus Graham. The Active Press, 1929, pp. 33-44.
—. More Power to Poets! A Plea for More Poetry in Life, More Life in Poetry. Henry Harrison, 1934. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Accessed May 29, 2026.
About the author
Eric Keenaghan is the editor of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Middle of the Air”: A Critical Edition (Cornell University Press, 2027), a previously unpublished antifascist play, which Muriel Rukeyser wrote and revised between 1941 and 1950 and which was produced in 1945. With Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, he also co-edited The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose (Cornell University Press, 2023), a co-winner of the MLA Prize for Bibliographical or Archival Scholarship. He teaches at the University at Albany, SUNY. To learn more, visit Eric’s faculty website or his author website, and follow him on Instagram and Bluesky.
