Muriel Rukeyser and The Silencing of Women’s Voices

What happens when one woman tells the truth about her life . . .

Muriel Rukeyser is certainly one of the most important—yet overlooked—poets of the twentieth century. Why is there no biography her, still, 44 years after her death? Why are there no published letters? Why is the body of scholarship on her still so “slender,” as one critic (Kristin Grogan) recently put it? Compared to other important modernist poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, she has received shockingly little attention.

I became enamored with Rukeyser after teaching her novel, Savage Coast, in my “Forgotten Books” class a few years ago. The manuscript had been found in the archives and published. It had been rejectedin 1937 and neglected for nearly 80 years. It was too “forward thinking for its time,” the back cover said. (More on the novel below.) That got me thinking about the many silenced writings awaiting in the archives, if preserved at all. Rukeyser’s career is a fascinating/infuriating study in the erasures that affect so many women’s literary careers.

From The Paris Review

Rukeyser’s Literary Reputation

Rukeyser’s career began with a bang when, at 21, she won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for her first collection of poetry, Theory of Flight (1935). Then it was downhill for the next few decades. One astoundingly condescending reviewer in the Partisan Review likened her writing to a Time Magazine article and accused her of “beating language to a pulp.” The title of the review alone—“Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl”—is a put down, likening her to a pin-up girl (Bergman).

The gist of much of the criticism aimed at her was not merely for her political views, but for having so many of them! That her poetry addressed the crisis of the moment made it less important. That is addressed social issues, made it unliterary. That it was written by a woman, made it laughable. It was too emotional, too impassioned, too irregular and infelicitous, too angry at injustice.

In short, her poetry was both too womanly and unwomanly. According to scholar Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, “in letters and book reviews, she was called a ‘Helen, who was a lesbian,’ ‘a hussy’ who wrote like a ‘deflated’ Whitman, a threadbare ‘Sybil,’ and ‘the Common woman of our century, a siren photographed in a sequin bathing suit.’”

In the 1970s, the tide turned somewhat with the rise of feminism. Rukeyser was hailed by poets such as Anne Sexton as “Muriel, mother of everyone.” The publication of her Collected Poems in 1978 was greeted with belated acclaim yet also the same old criticisms. The New York Times reviewer claimed that “we [critics] have taken her a little too much for granted,” but he also lamented that she emphasized politics over poetics: “the ‘messages’ became more important to her than their expression.”

After her death in 1980, Rukeyser’s collected poems went out of print for decades. More recently, she has been reclaimed for her wider leftist politics, particularly her long poem sequence “The Book of the Dead,” the bulk of which Natasha Trethaway chose for her collection of The Essential Muriel Rukeyser. (It was written in response to the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster in 1931 in Gauley Ridge, West Virginia). Her “Poem” (1968) was went the rounds on Twitter in recent years for how clearly it speaks to our own era. It begins:

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

--“Poem”

From New Directions

So Why Is She Still in the Margins?

Muriel Rukeyser clearly deserves to be more widely known and celebrated. She is a descendent of the most significant strains of American poetry, uniting the bardic view of Whitman with the more intimate lyric poetry of Dickinson, and writing very much from the body in the way Whitman did more openly than Dickinson. It’s as if she embraced both traditionally male and female poetic realms. She certainly contains multitudes, making her difficult to classify, leaving literary critics at a loss.

Her poetry is known for its themes of equality and social justice, feminism, anti-racism, anti-war, support for workers, and Judaism. It reflects her progressive politics, for which she was surveilled by the FBI for decades as s suspected Communist. She believed poetry had a vital role to play in the American democratic experiment. Yet her poems were also formally experimental.

No one seems to have known what to do with this poet who could be at turns political, personal, erotic, feminist, leftist, and impassioned. Reading the short biography of her at the Poetry Foundation, one gets the impression that she was, perhaps, just a little too much. Too prolific, too opiniated, too passionate.

Probably her most famous line, which I quoted in my last post on Simone de Beauvoir, speaks to what perhaps many have felt reading her poetry. In it, she wonders about how much of women’s truth readers can handle.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? 

The world would split open.”

--“Käthe Kollwitz”

These lines have been called “a mantra among women poets” (Alice Ostriker). Rukeyser had a great influence on younger women poets, such as Alice Walker and Adrienne Rich, powerful taboo-breakers and truth-tellers. Yet the woman who paved the way for them and countless others isn’t remembered as widely.

I agree with Joely Byron Fitch, who wrote three years ago, in response to those famous lines: “what it means for a woman poet to tell the truth is still a fraught question, weighted with gendered expectations about who gets to tell what kind of truth, which truths can be universal and which merely personal.”

Rukeyser’s Unconventional Life

Maybe her too-muchness has had something to do with her life as well. If her poetry did not conform to Cold-War conservatism, her life most certainly did not. She began by rejecting her affluent Jewish upbringing in New York. Still in her teens, she traveled to the South to cover the Scottboro Trials. At twenty-two she traveled alone to Spain to cover the leftist People’s Olympiad and ended up in the middle of the start of the Spanish Civil War.

Rukeyser in front of Spanish Civil War poster from The Volunteer

At thirty-three she got pregnant. She was not married. She kept her son and raised him on her own.

Life the announcer.

I assure you

there are many ways to have a child.

I bastard mother

promise you

there are many ways to be born.

They all come forth

in their own grace.

--The Speed of Darkness

But so many aspects of her life remain shrouded. Rukeyser is often described as bisexual, but it seems to be barely known that her agent, Monica McCall, was also her partner for three decades. Rukeyser died in her apartment, the obituaries say. They call her a “close friend.”

While it may seem the world should now be ready for Rukeyser, I wonder. Scholar Rowena Kennedy-Epstein writes that after a lecture she gave on Rukeyser, “someone from the audience approached me and said, ‘I studied with Muriel, she was a wonderful teacher, but so ugly.’ Others have spoken of the difficult and expansive unevenness of her work in context of her difficult personality.” What made her so “difficult”?

This, of course, made me think about my recent post on Muriel Spark. I did a google search on Rukeyser to try to find something more concrete about what is considered “difficult” in her personality, but I found nothing. In the absence of a biography and letters, we simply don’t know enough about her personality and how it may have impacted her reputation. Her granddaughter has described her as “unruly: a queer, Jewish, feminist, single-mother-by-choice.” And then there were her politics. Any of that certainly could have made people call her “difficult.”

Erasing Rukeyser

The more you dig into Rukeyser, the more it seems that so much of her life—and her work—remains hidden from view, like the bulk of an iceberg. Kennedy-Epstein has been chipping away at that iceberg in the archives at the Library of Congress, where significant work of Rukeyser’s lies in dark files, unpublished, unfinished, unseen. The most significant, perhaps, of the invisible oeuvre Kennedy-Epstein has brought into print is the novel Savage Coast.

The manuscript of Savage Coast was carefully preserved, along with the reader’s report from her publisher, from 1937. I have seen both on a visit to the LOC before I began my travels. The anonymous reader declares the novel “BAD,” saying it reminded them of “terribly bad examination papers.” They complain, in particular, that the main character, Helen, “is too abnormal for us to respect what she sees, hears, and feels.” What makes her abnormal and not worthy of our respect? She is ill, she is a Communist sympathizer. That is all the reader says of her. The 1.5-page report has a lot to say about how bad the novel is, but very little about why. It’s just “bad writing.”

In her introduction to the edition of the novel published by The Feminist Press in 2013, Kennedy-Epstein points out that the novel is “sexually explicit, symbolically complex, political radical, and aesthetically experimental.” None of this is reflected in the report, except the repeated references to the novel’s “Communist sentiment,” although the novel actually presents a variety of leftist political views.

The novel is heavily autobiographical, portraying Rukeyser’s political and sexual awakening on the last train into Spain as the Spanish Civil War started in 1936. In the novel, Helen has the experiences that Rukeyser had. She is traveling alone. She is caught up in a volatile situation but does not simply stand on the sidelines. Instead she learns about the political rifts and inserts herself into political discussions. On top of that, she falls in love with a German leftist who has fled the Nazis, and has sex with him on the train, after knowing him only briefly. Yes, Helen/Muriel was certainly “abnormal” for 1930s America.

By the time I taught The Savage Coast in a course on “Forgotten Books” in 2019, students had to buy used copies online. But now the book appears to be available once again from The Feminist Press. It’s a fascinating read! It has, as Kennedy-Epstein says in her introduction, “the feeling of an epic poem inside the realist novel.”

Another book is also in the works from Kennedy-Epstein. On her faculty page, she says, “I am writing the first biography of Rukeyser for Bloomsbury USA (2026).” Hallelujah! Thank God someone is finally doing it!

Writing Our Truths

In our next community thread, we’ll build on this exploration of Muriel Rukeyser and silences and what it means to write our truths. Look for that next weekend. I look forward to seeing you there—and in the comments here. Are you a Rukeyser fan? What has her work meant to you? Are you new to her? What intrigues you and makes you want to learn more? I always enjoy hearing your thoughts!!

Yours in audacity,

Anne

Further Reading

“Muriel Rukeyser,” Poetry Foundation.

Bergman, “Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio,” American Literary History.

Joely Byron Fitch, “The Marks of Her Knowing: On Muriel Rukeyser’s ‘Käthe Kollwitz’”. Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.

“Grandeur and the Misery of a Poster Girl” in Partisan Review, 1943.

Kristin Grogan, Review of Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century in ALH Online Review.

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, “Learning from the Work Muriel Rukeyser Left Unfinished,” Literary Hub.

Alice Ostriker, “Learning to Breathe under Water: Considering Muriel Rukeyser’s Oceanic Work.” Poetry Foundation.

Muriel Rukeyser, The Savage Coast, ed. By Rowena Kenndy-Epstein.

Rebecca Rukeyser, “Yearning for My Grandmother Muriel Rukeyser (and Grappling With Her Legacy),” Literary Hub.

Thomas Lask, Review of Collected Poems, New York Times.