Muriel Rukeyser Archives - Muriel Rukeyser

In a War on All Fronts

In a War on All Fronts (1943) 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 [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2026-06-12T16:10:26+00:00June 12, 2026|Writings|0 Comments

Eric Keenaghan, Unburying History: Two Lost Antifascist Poems by Muriel Rukeyser

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 [...]

Eric Keenaghan2026-08-06T20:05:31+00:00June 10, 2026|Ruke Blog|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

Rukeyser’s Difficulty–ALA Conference Session, Chicago, Illinois, May 26, 2022

Thursday, May 26, 2022, 4:30--5:50pm, American Literature Association Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois Organized by: Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University Chair: Vivian Pollak, Washington University “The Promise of the Night-Flowering Worlds,” Trudi Witonsky, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater “‘Not even the bones of what I want to say’: On Muriel Rukeyser and Frances Wickes,” Casey Miller, Eastern Michigan University “Race, Place, and the Politics of Compassion in Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘The Gates’,” Jacqueline Campbell, Princeton University Panel Description For decades, much of Muriel Rukeyser’s writing remained unpublished, unfinished, or lost in the archive. Thanks to the recovery work of scholars such as Rowena [...]

Elisabeth Daumer2025-06-22T14:08:32+00:00April 13, 2022|Ruke Blog|0 Comments

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