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MURIEL RUKEYSER

Muriel Rukeyser, as an independent writer and political activist, engaged teacher and mentor, bisexual and single mother in the proliferation era, she was a pioneer whose long career became an inspiration for the generations of women poets coming of age in the late fifties and after. Anne Sexton called her, simply, "Muriel, mother of everyone".

Most reviewers and scholars during Rukeyser's lifetime and literary historians since have oscillated in their opinions about the author. Even those who admire her ambition and idealism are not always enthusiastic about her methods.

Rukeyser was born December 15, 1913, in New York City. Her mother had been a bookkeeper, her father a salesman who became wealthy as a partner in a sand and gravel company that prospered during the Manhattan skyscraper boom in the teens and twenties. In 1930 she entered Vassar College, where she became friends and started a literary magazine with Elizabeth Bishop, Eleanor Taylor, and Mary McCarthy, the future author of The Group, the noted novel based on their lives during and after college. IN 1935, two years after leaving Vassar College without a degree, Rukeyser won the Yale Younger Poet Award for her first collection, Theory of Flight, which drew on the flying lessons she had taken in 1933.

Attracted to liberal causes from her teens, Rukeyser participated in leftist political and literary groups and started writing for socialist and Communist journals. Although she later fell victim to the anti-Communist witch-hunts, she never did join the party, as she found its doctrinaire policies too confining. In 1933 she traveled to Alabama to witness the notorious trial of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white women.

Muriel Rukeyser went to Spain to report on the Olimpiada Popular (People's Olympiad), organized in opposition to the official 1936 Olympic Games hosted by the Nazis in Berlin, but was soon forced to leave Barcelona with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. She later supported the anti-fascists who opposed the ultimately victorious Generalissimo Francisco Franco. The experience formed the basis for her fourth book, Mediterranean (1938).

During and after World War II, Rukeyser gave a series of public lectures, later collected in The Life of Poetry (1949, reissued 1996). She married, had the brief union annulled, and in 1947 gave birth to a son by another man; she chose to raise the child by herself. Her family did not approve and in fact disinherited her.

Muriel Rukeyser in Spain

Chief among them, she organized and openly protested against the Vietnam War and was arrested at a demonstration on the steps of the Capitol. In 1972 she also traveled to Hanoi with Denise Levertov. Because of her strong social stands, she was frequently attacked by literary critics and partisans of both the right and the left. In 1975, while president of the American Center of P.E.N., she went to Seoul in an attempt to argue on behalf of the imprisoned Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha, who had been condemned to death on charges of a Communist "conspiracy" against the state. The episode formed the basis of "The Gates," the title poem offer last separate volume (1976). Following a heart attack, she died on February 12, 1980.

Muriel Rukeyser participan in a populist uprising in Barcelona (1936)

Rukeyser never held a permanent academic post, but over the decades she taught and gave poetry workshops in several institutions and colleges. Others of her individual poetry books are Beast in View (1944), The Speed of Darkness (1968), and Breaking Open (1973). Her novel/memoir The Orgy (1965) was reissued in 1997 with a preface by Sharon Olds. Rukeyser also collaborated on translations of work by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1973).

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