the dark life of muriel rukeyser
The only way to tell about Muriel Rukeyser’s personal life and childhood is
through her poetry, where she described herself as alone and unhappy. She
was daughter of Lawrence, a
businessman, and Myra, a former
bookkeeper. She grew up around New York City in the large city, and was
inspired by such poets as John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Walt
Whitman. She became a student at Vassar College at the age of 17, and she
later attended Columbia University. Rukeyser’s poems were published in the
New York Herald Tribune and Poetry. She was also a member of two school
publications, the Vassar Review and the Vassar Miscellany News.
One of her poems was published in the Yale University Press. Rukeyser also
won the award for the Yale Series of Younger Poets contest.
She wrote to escape from her everyday life. She lived in New York City, which did not seem as peaceful as living out in the country, where she most likely would have liked to spend more time. This was the main focus of her poetry, along with anger about her childhood, feminism, and political activism. She believed that poets should let the world realize their full potential. She did not want to be a poet who wrote poems just for the sake of writing poems. She wanted her poems to mean something to people and inspire them to be more active in the world. Rukeyser took part in several protests for various causes such has the sentencing to death for eight black men when they raped two white women, and once started her own silent protest in South Korea because the poet Kim Chi-Ha was in prison. Muriel Rukesyer was married once, and had one child by a man she did not marry.
Rukeyser wrote elegies, odes, lyrics, documentary poems, epigrams, and monologues. She became a teacher at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence College, and the California Labor School. She taught women to be individualists, which is exactly what she was. She was living in a time where men and women were not treated equally, which led to some of her writings to be about taking a stand on what you believe in, mainly for women. She greatly encouraged women to fights for their right in society and for equality between the sexes.
Muriel Rukeyser died in 1980, in her hometown of New York City, where she spent her life unhappily. Even though she was displeased with her life, she wrote several books, poems, biographies, essays, a novel, plays, and television scripts.
List of Published Works:
Poetry
Theory of Flight (1935)
U.S. 1 (1938)
Mediterranean (1938)
A Turning Wind (1939)
The Soul and Body of John Brown (1940)
Wake Island (1942)
Beast in View (1944)
The Children's Orchard (1947)
The Green Wave (1948)
Orpheus (1949)
Elegies (1949)
Body of Waking (1958)
Waterlily Fire: Poems 1932-1962 (1962)
The Outer Banks (1967)
The Speed of Darkness (1968)
29 Poems (1970)
Breaking Open (1973)
The Gates (1976)
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1978)
Out of Silence: Selected Poems (1992)
Prose
Willard Gibbs: American Genius (1942)
The Life of Poetry (1949)
One Life (1957) Biography of Wendell Willkie.
The Orgy (1967)
Poetry, and Unverifiable Facts (1968) Lectures.
The Traces of Thomas Harriet (1971)
The Education of a Poet (1976) Lecture.
Letters
Come Back Paul (1955)
I Go Out (1961)
Bubbles (1967)
Mazes (1970)
Anthology
Selected Poems of Octavio Paz (1963) With others.
Sun Stone (1963) By Octavio Paz.
Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf (1967)
Three Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf (1967)
Uncle Eddie's Moustache (1974) Poems for children by Bertolt
Brecht
Drama
The Middle of the Air (1945)
All the Way Home (1958) Documentary Filmscript.
The Colors of the Day (1961)
Houdini (1973)