Essays Archives - Muriel Rukeyser

Elisabeth Däumer, From the Archives: The Four Fears

In the winter of 2023, Rowena Kennedy-Epstein shared with me a drawing by Rukeyser that would be featured on the cover of The Rukeyser Era: Selected Prose, published later that year. The drawing depicts four massive figures surrounded by a wall of red. In the front, dwarfed by the gigantic figures, is a miniature version of Rukeyser herself, clad in a blue dress. In the lower right, if you look closely, you see the penciled words in Rukeyser’s distinctive handwriting, “The Four Fears, March 1955.” Rukeyser, The Four Fears. Drawing. Library of Congress. Shown with permission of the Rukeyser [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-07-02T15:40:33+00:00July 2, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Lara Meintjes, “this word, this power”: Deixis and Muriel Rukeyser’s Poetics of Witness in The Book of the Dead

The first poem in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is “The Road.” It describes not “the” road, but rather “these” roads. A plurality of roads knotted and weaving: a suburban road with “junction” and “fork” merges onto a “well-travelled six-lane highway planned for safety.” The description of this last six-lane conduit mimics the joining of roads and lanes in its stacked hyphenated words. The poet maps her readers away from their own neighborhood and into the broader world of what Rukeyser refers to as “your country,” thus establishing that there exists a world to which the reader belongs [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-01T03:00:06+00:00June 1, 2025|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Louise Kertesz, Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein’s Unfinished Spirit, Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, is itself a work of bold originality and personal, passionate scholarship. It’s fitting that Rukeyser’s work modeled those qualities when critics were dismissing them as inappropriate, even offensive in a woman writer. In her acknowledgments, K-E professes the deep connection she has forged with her subject: “Writing about Rukeyser has helped me think through our political, humanitarian, and environmental crises and to remain, as she models, a ‘vulgar optimist.’”

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-21T20:01:32+00:00July 12, 2023|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Trudi Witonsky, “Lecture by Mr. Eliot”: Some Context

Published 7/20/2022 The Vassar Encyclopedia's entry on Muriel Rukeyser contains part of a poem, originally published anonymously in the November 1933 issue of Con Spirito. Highly critical of T.S. Eliot, "Lecture by Mr. Eliot" was identified as Rukeyser's by Mary McCarthy, musing over the publication in her memoir, How I Grew: "The Scottsboro Boys. Yes, that sounds like Muriel and the reference would be to a reading by Eliot in Avery [Hall] during our senior year, when he gave us one of the early Possum poems" (260). This remembrance might seem like slim evidence, without available confirmation from any of [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:13:49+00:00July 11, 2022|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Elisabeth Däumer, Context for “Waterlily Fire”

By Elisabeth Däumer, Eastern Michigan University Published 2012/05/10 Rukeyser composed this five-part poem over the span of four years (1958-1962) in response to a fire at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, which destroyed two of Monet's Waterlily paintings, one of them an 18-foot long panel attached to the wall in the second-floor gallery. "As the blaze spread, the wall caught on fire, and the painting was almost completely consumed" (Life Magazine 1958, p. 56). Monet's 18-foot long Waterlily Painting destroyed at the Museum of Modern Art on April 15, 1958 Beloved by New Yorkers, the paintings [...]

mthunter222025-03-24T07:13:40+00:00May 10, 2022|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Susanna Ansorge, Rat Elegy–A Creative Response to Rukeyser’s Elegies

Preface Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies challenges readers with an array of complicated literary devices and historical references as a way of digesting a thoroughly grueling time in world history, as she lived through it. Since the work isn't reflecting on the past, but rather a historical present, Elegies stands as especially relevant for readers experiencing unprecedented times. Even as one of those readers, I still had a lot of difficulty interpreting Rukeyser's ambitious collection. As that's the case, I wanted to emulate her as a way of understanding the work. If I can at least reconstruct how these elegies were written, [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:25:01+00:00January 18, 2022|Essays, Ruke Blog|0 Comments

Joely Byron Fitch, The Marks of Her Knowing: On Muriel Rukeyser’s “Käthe Kollwitz”

There’s a line in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” next to which I write: this, the center of everything. That line, from the five-part poem’s second section, reads: “A woman pouring her opposites.” The poem is better-known for a question that Rukeyser later asks, then immediately answers: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open” (Muriel Rukeyser Reader 214, part 3, lines 25-26). These might well be Rukeyser’s most-quoted lines; they appear in some form as countless epigraphs, as the title of at least two anthologies, and in the pages [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2021-06-22T14:24:30+00:00June 1, 2021|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

Trudi Witonsky, Introducing Louise Kertesz, Friday February 19, 2021

I’m thrilled to introduce Louise Kertesz to you. I first came to read Muriel Rukeyser through Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and you get used to reading one sensibility, even as it evolves and breaks and innovates. But when you start reading someone new, someone as complicated as Rukeyser, it’s bewildering at first, and you need a guide. So, as many of you have done, I turned to Louise’s 1980 monograph, The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, where as I read, I could see the patterns of the themes and images and processes come into coherent shape. Louise had had to rely [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2023-09-04T17:26:01+00:00May 24, 2021|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

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Muriel Rukeyser

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