22 Muriel Rukeyser: “Something like Joan of Arc” – Sara Vogt
Sara Vogt is a third year student from Wildwood, MO who is majoring in English-Technical and Professional Writing. This paper is an end of semester research project she completed for her Introduction to Advanced Study of Literature, ENG L260, class. Sara’s professor Jean Harper admired her work and said, “This paper was exceptionally well done, impeccably researched and infused with a personal passion that lifts it above the ordinary research paper. Excellent and inspiring work!”
Muriel Rukeyser: “Something like Joan of Arc”
Muriel Rukeyser’s creative career spans six decades, from the 1920s up to her death in 1980. During this time, she produced poetry, plays, biographies, and children’s books. Through her volume of work, she proved to be both ahead of her time and of her time in fascinating ways. Her creative output was huge, yet not until long after her death did her body of work begin to be re-reviewed and analyzed for modern audiences. Rukeyser’s artistic style was not of a genteel, traditional variety. Her art combined political activism with heart. She really wanted to change the world.
Rukeyser was born in New York City in 1913 and attended Vassar College (“Muriel Rukeyser”). While a student in 1932, she traveled as a journalist for a school paper to Scottsboro, Alabama, to cover the infamous trial of nine black boys accused of raping a white girl. While Rukeyser’s left-leaning politics were already evident by the time of her trip to Scottsboro, what she witnessed and experienced there seemed to inspire her to combine her art with activism. It was reported in her obituary in the New York Times that her poem The Trial was inspired by the events in Scottsboro (“Muriel Rukeyser”). From this point on, her work would be marked, to varying degrees, by activism on behalf of those who suffer.
Rukeyser’s first artistic success was her poem Theory of Flight, which won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1935, when she was 21 years old (Rudnitsky 237). To prepare to draft this poem, Rukeyser attended flight school. Lexi Rudnitsky, in her article “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air,” writes that the poem is a “sprawling meditation on the implications of the airplane for the future of literature, politics, and sexuality” (237). With this poem, Rukeyser proved to be ahead of her time by writing about technology not only as a woman but as someone who could see both the potential positive and negative consequences of the use of airplanes in society. From the time of invention, many writers, almost exclusively male, were only interested in glorifying the airplane for all it could do, but Rukeyser was praised for presenting a well thought out view (Rudnitsky 238). While Theory of Flight did not contain any real aspect of political activism, examining and writing about science and technology mixed with politics did prepare her for her next project, the long poem titled The Book of the Dead.
Rukeyser left college in 1936 at the age of twenty-three to investigate in person the location of the slow-moving but enormous human tragedy, the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in Fayette County, West Virginia (Rukeyser 9). The fact that Rukeyser left school to pursue this investigation seems to point to a desire to create art as an activist rather than as a scholar or writer only. The disaster was first reported in the New Masses magazine, an American Communist journal, in 1935, followed by hearings in the House Labor Committee in January of 1936, which were reported in the mainstream media. When Congress refused to take on a full investigation of the incident after recommendations by the committee, Rukeyser and her friend, photographer Nancy Naumberg, left New York to investigate the site at Gauley Bridge (Rukeyser 9).
Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead is a work of poetry as witness born from a custom of left-leaning political poetry from the turn of the century up to and including the 1930’s. Suzanne Gardinier writes in her article “ ‘A World That Will Hold All The People’: On Muriel Rukeyser,” leftist poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, and above all, Walt Whitman, influenced Rukeyser, and “political” poetry of the time was judged to a different standard than poets whose work was of a more personal nature (Gardinier 88-90). Gardinier goes on to say that Rukeyser and her poetry of witness was continuing in a “poetic tradition that insists on including within its scope the workings of power and history, which does not accept the given world as it is, injustices intact, but insists on transformation” (Gardinier 90). This poetic tradition is clearly seen in The Book of the Dead, yet Rukeyser’s poem contains facets that again show she thought and worked in ways ahead of her time.
The Book of the Dead is a collage of lyrical history of the geographic location of the disaster, actual testimony from the subcommittee hearings regarding the disaster, meditation on the nature of water, energy and power, and a book of remembrance for the men who died. Rukeyser sets the stage of the disaster by going back in time to review some of the history of West Virginia, from initial European settlers up to modern times. She weaves testimony from the subcommittee hearings with poetry to fix the most important but damning facts of the disaster in place but in a way that hopes to touch the heart of the reader. She dignifies the men who died by clearly describing the reason and the way they died, and some of them specifically, by using their names and bringing them to life. She highlights the river, the nature of water, the power it brings that never stops, and shows how it intersects with inventions of man.
The Book of the Dead proved to be ahead of its time for its style of long poem in the epic tradition, usually only written by men, and for the subject matter. In an interview regarding this poem’s focus being the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster, Rukeyser is asked to “justify the use of such a theme as you have selected (Dayton, 226).” It is hard to imagine any poet in current times being asked to “justify” their choice of subject matter. The poet chose the subject-case closed, end of story. Yes, it is proper to inquire about the motivation of a poet’s choice of a certain subject, but they do not have to “justify” their choice. That is the artist’s right. The fact that Rukeyser was asked to do so reflects that using art as political activism was still unexpected. Or it was just the fact that she was a woman. Rukeyser knows she is stepping on poetic traditions. Tim Dayton, in his article “Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead,” draws attention to this idea and highlights Rukeyser’s response to critics, found in her poem The Book of the Dead (226):
What do you want-a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here. (Rukeyser, 70)
Maintaining tradition is not part of Rukeyser’s plan for the impact of her poem.
Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead was published in 1938 not long after the exhibition of another groundbreaking artwork in 1937 depicting current events and human tragedy, Guernica, by Pablo Picasso. Guernica was inspired by the events of April 26, 1937. German bombers, siding with General Francisco Franco’s dictatorship against the Spanish Republican government during the Spanish Civil War, dropped 40 to 50 tons of explosives on the small town of Guernica, Spain. The article “Guernica: Horror and Inspiration” remarks that “until World War II, it was the most notorious bombing of the century (Rhodes 19).” The photographer Man Ray was with Picasso when he heard the news about the destruction of Guernica. Picasso “was completely upset,” Ray recalled (Rhodes 21). Only a few days later, Picasso would begin sketches for his painting, and would finish it by late June (Rhodes 24). The painting is considered by some to be Picasso’s best work and by others to be the most important artistic anti-war statement ever created. When commenting on the purpose of his art and what side he was on during the Spanish Civil War, Picasso responded by stating, “My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anyone think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death?” (Rhodes 23). Picasso is confirming that his art was his politics and vice versa.
Rukeyser seems to have lived a life of similar conviction. She once said, “We are talking about the endless quarrel between the establishment and the prophets, and I hope to be forever on the side of the prophets” (Kertesz, qtd. in Gardinier 90). One can imagine that she would have been profoundly moved by Picasso’s Guernica and his use of the canvas to express his grief and outrage over the destruction and loss of life in that town. The Book of the Dead was the result of Rukeyser looking at the Hawks Next Tunnel Disaster, digesting the scope and magnitude, and artistically rendering what it meant to her. But, before she took any of those steps, she had to actually care about what happened to those men and their families. If she didn’t care, how could she ever have produced her art?
Writers who have examined Rukeyser’s body of work in modern times comment on her integrity, her commitment to the human experience, and how her work merges the personal with the public. Referring to two of Rukeyser’s poems, Michele Ware describes her style as “the private self becoming fused with the public world” (299). After reviewing Rukeyser’s Collected Poems, released a year before her death, Denise Levertov commented that “virtually every page contains questions or affirmations relating to her sense of the human creature as a social species with the responsibilities, culpabilities, and possibilities attendant upon that condition” (Levertov, qtd. in Ware 298). Later in life, Rukeyser traveled to South Korea to plead for the release of fellow poet Kim Chi Ha from prison. This experience was the inspiration for her final work of poetry of witness titled The Gates, published in 1976 (Ware 299-300). Once again, she is the observer of events, but produces art that combines her personal reactions with a political statement about the event. She stands in person outside those prison gates but sums up the experience as standing “in the mud and rain at the prison gates-also the gates of perception, the gates of the body” (Ware 300). This reveals how the experience is both about her and not about her.
Rukeyser’s body of art reveals that she tried to live up to her “Joan of Arc,” righteous heroine ideal throughout her life, observing and creating art in the hope of moving the world in the right direction. She was of her time and ahead of her time, a woman tackling the state of the world and telling truth in her art. She believed all humans are connected and wanted readers to believe it, too.
Works Cited
Dayton, Tim. “Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Journal of Modern Literature, XXI 2 (Winter 1997-1998), 1998, pp. 223-240.
Gardinier, Suzanne. “A World That Will Hold All Their People”: On Muriel Rukeyser.” The Kenyon Review, Summer, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 88-105.
Kertesz, Louise. The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser. Louisiana State UP, 1980.
“Muriel Rukeyser.” Poetry Foundation, n.d., file:///C:/Users/sarav/OneDrive/Documents/Intro%20to%20Advanced%20Literature/Book%20of%20the%20Dead%20proeject/Muriel%20Rukeyser%20_%20Poetry%20Foundation.html. Accessed 6 Dec. 2021.
Rudnitsky, Lexi. “Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Theory of Flight’ and The Middle of the Air.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2008, pp. 237-257.
Rhodes, Richard. “Guernica: Horror and Inspiration.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 69, No. 6, 2013, pp. 19-25.
Rukeyser, Muriel. The Book of the Dead. West Virginia University Press, 2018.
Ware, Michele S. “Opening ‘The Gates’: Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetry of Witness.” Women’s Studies, Vol. 22, 1993, pp. 297-308.