Scholarship Archives - Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser Trailblazer Jan Heller Levi

Jan Heller Levi was 24 years old, when she first met Muriel Rukeyser and became her personal assistant, helping her through the final months of her life. It was 1978, and in her introduction to A Muriel Rukeyser Reader Jan vividly recalls that from the moment a fragile but somehow lionlike Rukeyser opened her apartment door, “I was hers.” Fourteen years after Rukeyser’s death, in 1994, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader appeared, generously conceived and expertly edited by Heller Levi, by then a published poet and faculty of Creative Writing at Hunter College. Most of Rukeyser’s books were already out [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-09-04T16:35:13+00:00September 4, 2026|Scholarship|0 Comments

Rukeyser Trailblazer Jan Freeman

Jan Freeman, a vigorous advocate of Rukeyser's work and vision, is a woman who values and brings into focus other women’s work. She founded Paris Press in 1995 for the express purpose of publishing literature by women that had been overlooked and undervalued over the years. Paris Press, which closed in 2018 and is now housed at Wesleyan University Press, published works by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Ruth Stone, Zdena Berger, and most notably, Muriel Rukeyser. Freeman loved Rukeyser from the time she was in college. Muriel Rukeyser is the reason Freeman started Paris Press in the [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-09-04T16:10:09+00:00September 4, 2026|Scholarship, Writings|0 Comments

Rukeyser Trailblazer Kate Daniels

When less than a decade after Muriel Rukeyser’s death all of her poetry was out of print, Kate Daniels took it upon herself to bring Rukeyser back into circulation with her aptly entitled collection, Rukeyser: Out of Silence, published in 1992. What attracted Daniels to Rukeyser was her fierce individuality and unapologetically noncanonical poetry, forgoing formal purity in favor of social engagement and emotional truth. A poet herself, Daniels was intrigued by Rukeyser’s many refusals–her “persistent refusal to do what was expected of her as a woman” (74); her refusal to write to the fashion or political tides; her refusal [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-09-04T16:11:03+00:00September 4, 2026|Scholarship, Writings|0 Comments

Kat Graff, Wilderness Journeys: 6/19/25

A crucial question for the study of Jewishness is the relationship between identity and environment. Diaspora, scattering, conventionally refers to a “group of people who have … become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin” (OED).[1]] In other words, diasporic identity locates itself in the experience of living the difference between the present “host” place and the point of origin, the “mother” place, which is geographically and temporally absent. We find this theme also in feminist discourse, for instance in Alicia Ostriker’s unanswered question, “Does there exist, as a subterranean current below the surface structure of male-oriented language, [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-02-28T18:28:37+00:00February 28, 2026|Essays, Scholarship|0 Comments

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

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Muriel Rukeyser

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