Editors’ Introduction

All You Have to Do Is Challenge Them: The Muriel Rukeyser Era

ERIC KEENAGHAN AND ROWENA KENNEDY-EPSTEIN

In autumn 1947, two important events happened in the life of Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980). She gave birth to her only child, choosing motherhood as a queer, single woman when doing so was deemed not merely unconventional but scandalous. She also submitted to Doubleday The Green Wave (1948), a collection later considered for the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry. These major milestones coincided with her struggle to implement revisions to an unrealized off-Broadway production of her antifascist feminist verse-play The Middle of the Air, as well as her adapting The Usable Truth, a 1940 lecture series on the uses of poetry in times of crisis, for workshops offered to union members and veterans at San Francisco’s California Labor School. The postwar national political climate was inhospitable to such a mode of living and writing as Rukeyser’s, though. That November, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had become increasingly active, holding hearings on alleged communist activities in Hollywood and initiating a period of intensifying political repression and blacklisting that eventually caught up Rukeyser and many of her friends. When it was formed in 1938, HUAC was interested in Rukeyser because of her political publications since her return from the first days of the Spanish Civil War. After she applied for a government position in the Office of War Information in 1942, she was officially placed under surveillance by the FBI.1

The Green Wave is a response to this moment of anti-leftist hysteria. In its poems, Rukeyser wrestles with the ominous postwar climate’s authoritarian politics. The volume opens with “Water Night,” a poem preoccupied with isolation and surveillance. “The farthest shore” seems “darker” than when “I go to sleep,” Rukeyser writes in its opening lines.2 The next poem’s very title, “Eyes of Night-Time,” ominously tracks her sense of being watched.3 Throughout the collection, she depicts her surveilled body and interior sense of self as made grotesque in the shadow of war, nuclear disaster, and failed personal connections.

But The Green Wave does not just dwell on its author’s sense of her negative and limiting circumstances. Its poems also turn away from what Rukeyser would later call this period’s “dark beginnings,” as she moved toward a vision of transnational anti-fascist feminism.4 Even amid an ominous sociopolitical environment, Rukeyser lays claim to possibility and hope. “My dark around me let shine one ray,” she writes in “Eyes of Night-Time,” thus indicating her consciousness of how “in this almost total dark” there is “the one broad fact of light.”5 Her first translations of Mexican poet Octavio Paz and of Mao Tatua’s Raris, or Native chants from the Marquesas Islands, appear here as well, signaling her deepening commitment to theories of translation as a form of transcultural, human connection. Decades later, she would put it the following way: translators end up betraying one world order, and to realize a more democratic one, they “must dive far underneath into a place where we share experience.”6 The Green Wave ends with three astonishing long poems about the radical possibilities of women’s writing: “Easter Eve, 1945,” “Elegy in Joy,” and “Nine Poems for the Unborn Child.” These poems lyricize Rukeyser’s developing ideas about the intersections of anti-fascism, poetic process, birth, and feminism. In The Usable Truth lectures, she had already begun to develop these themes, which became more central to her prose writing over the rest of her career, as is reflected in many of the essays collected here in The Muriel Rukeyser Era.

The Green Wave is a tour de force, and so it is unsurprising it was nominated for the Library of Congress’s inaugural Bollingen Prize, along with three other volumes published in 1948: Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (Book Two), and Randall Jarrell’s Losses. Pound received the award, despite his book’s fascist content and his broadcasting of anti-American propaganda on Italian state radio during the Second World War. Tried for treason, in lieu of prison or execution he was committed in 1946 to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane, outside Washington, DC. His receipt of the award provoked a contentious debate among the anti-communist literary left and more mainstream liberal readers.7 Should form and aesthetic achievement be considered apart from politics? Or, as the Partisan Review put the question, “How far is it possible, in a lyric poem, to transform viscious and ugly matter into beautiful poetry?”8 Many, though not all, on the Left felt such a separation impossible, but that was not the sentiment of the selection committee, which consisted of the Library of Congress’s Fellows in American Letters and was chaired by T. S. Eliot. The committee’s official award announcement read, in part, “To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest.” Anti-communist leftist Dwight MacDonald cited this passage, calling the announcement “the best political statement made in this country for some time” and believing the determination of the award “the brightest political act in a dark period.”9 The jury of twelve considered it an apolitical decision, though. Aesthetically, art supposedly provided an “objective perception of value” affirming the basis for “civilized society,” regardless of how antidemocratic—or, indeed, fascist—the poetic content or the author’s views.

Such sentiment was shared by poets and critics like Richard Eberhart (incidentally, a friend of Rukeyser’s), who asserted, “Fifty years will remove the politics and leave the poetry. The Cantos can be read disinterestedly, which is only to pay them their due as art.”10 That is, form can be extricated from meaning. For former anti-fascists and radicals who had become conservative anti-communist liberals during and after the war, to implicitly censor a poet for holding repugnant ideological views would be as bad as Stalin himself. In that same moment, HUAC’s activities demonstrated the opposite argument to that of those determining the Bollingen Prize. The federal committee asserted that leftist politics—including those we would associate with Rukeyser’s anti-fascism, feminism, sex positivity, anti-racism, and anti-imperialism—were intrinsic to the aesthetic forms implemented by creators who held those beliefs.11 These contradictory ideas about the relationship between aesthetic form and political commitment concretized the postwar period’s ideological crisis, with which Rukeyser’s prose would assertively engage and which often was the reason for the suppression of her writings.

Except for Rukeyser, the sole woman, the other nominees for the Bollingen Prize have received their biographies, single-author monographs, critical editions, selected editions, and annotated editions. Consequently, their works have formed our understanding of poetics, history, and modernism. Pound has been privileged above the others. Even the title of Hugh Kenner’s field-defining and canon-forming book The Pound Era (1971), which originated in a much earlier project that helped rehabilitate Pound’s literary career, gave a nearly unshakable impression of that centrality.12 Rukeyser’s work has not received as much attention, and her career was impacted by the Bollingen decision. After The Green Wave, she would not publish another collection of new poetry for nearly a decade.13 Her only poetics volume published during her lifetime, The Life of Poetry (1949), fell out of print after its first run, much to Rukeyser’s disappointment. During the postwar period, she developed and planned several other major projects, including a biography about and the selected letters and writings of Franz Boas and a Herman Melville anthology, among others. Such unpublished and often unfinished work “did not linger in obscurity for lack of authorial energy or talent, or editorial stubbornness,” but instead was the product of “an often hostile and sexist readership” who targeted her because of her gender, radicalism, and queerness.14 Although these projects remained unrealized, she continued to write and publish short-form prose.

Today, there are several in-print editions of her selected poems, stand-alone republications of her key poetic works Elegies (1949, republished 2013) and The Book of the Dead (1938, republished 2018), and an authorized critical volume of collected poems. Her only prose work that has remained in print throughout most of its publication history is Willard Gibbs (1942), a biography of the first theoretical physicist and chemist. Several other major life-writing projects—including One Life (1957), a biography in verse and documents of politician Wendell Willkie, and The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971), about the eponymous Renaissance polymath and discoverer—as well as all her children’s books, quickly fell out of print and remain in that status. The turn of the millennium saw a recovery by the independent publisher Paris Press of two out-of-print prose books—The Orgy (1965, republished 1997) and The Life of Poetry (1949, republished 1996)—as well as one play, Houdini: A Musical (previously unpublished, 2002). In 2013, the lost novel Savage Coast was published with the Feminist Press, receiving substantial attention and bringing new readers to Rukeyser. Barring the inclusion of a few isolated essays in other recovery projects, most of her nonfiction short-form prose has not been republished or rediscovered.15 While a volume of selected critical essays about her work and influence appeared at the end of the twentieth century and a lightly biographical study of her career publications appeared months after her death, only during the last decade have a handful of critical monographs about Rukeyser begun to appear, along with two special issues of academic journals dedicated to her work.16 Most other criticism is consigned to isolated journal articles or single chapters in period-ranging books on modernism. Only one website is devoted to her legacy and teaching her work to new generations of readers, and, at the time of this writing, she has no author society.17 The imbalance is clear. Authors like Pound have been given an institutional path through history, and so they have come to define the critical field and their literary periods and even the periods that followed; and then there are writers like Rukeyser whose histories have been left fragmented and incomplete, with major works and key texts detailing their social and poetic vision left uncollected, not even selected.

What would have happened if Rukeyser had won the Bollingen Prize? What would it have meant if modernism were epitomized by a collection that moves from depictions of a gendered body stifled by war and crisis toward a body that is expansive and parturient? What would have happened if a Jewish, radical, bisexual, single mother had been the defining voice of postwar American poetry? What if it had been the Rukeyser Era? Posing these questions is more than just a thought experiment. We ask them as a provocation, to reorient our position to hierarchies of literary and cultural influence and to teach and read a more expansive version of the twentieth century in our present. As the Bollingen Prize anecdote encapsulates, our recovery effort with this volume is about more than making sure one author’s writings get fuller exposure via academic journals, in classrooms, or even among general audiences. Through Rukeyser’s unpublished and out-of-print prose, we can better comprehend the conditions that would suppress her and her contemporaries’ vision of transnational, liberatory inclusiveness to elevate racism, antisemitism, misogyny, homophobia, and antidemocratism, generally.

Although she is now known primarily for her poetry, Rukeyser also produced an extensive body of prose. A deeply committed thinker interested in the processes, conflicts, lineages, and possibilities of twentieth-century thought, in her accessible but philosophically complex work she addresses issues related to racial, gender, and class justice, war and war crimes, the prison-industrial complex, Jewish culture and diaspora, and many other facets of American history, politics, and culture. Throughout her varied career, she produced biographies, film scripts and teleplays, stage plays, children’s books, short stories, novels, essays, radio shows, and public lectures, as well as an extensive portfolio of journalism and nonfiction essays on the arts, social justice, and politics. During a period when few women were allowed to position themselves as public intellectuals—much less as equal citizens—most of this writing by Rukeyser has been forgotten, not reprinted since its first appearance if it was published at all, buried by editors and publishers because of conservative mid-century gender and political orthodoxies. By bringing forth a selection of Rukeyser’s political, social, and aesthetic writings for the first time, this volume introduces a new generation of readers to a writer who was trying to think her way through a period as dangerous, promising, and painful as our own. This is the Rukeyser Era, long delayed, but just in time.

Our archival encounters with Rukeyser’s prose writing have made us aware of just how narrowly constructed our understanding of American literary and political history has been. Through her prose we have found new orientations, not just for understanding Rukeyser and her work but also for finding new artistic networks and political affiliations. Her traditions are anti-fascist and anti-imperialist, feminist and queer. As a journalist, she turned her gaze toward those who were not seen fully, and she also theorizes the very idea of seeing. As an activist and writer shaped by the political and social unrest of the 1930s, her commitments originated in that decade’s anti-fascism and remained a central preoccupation throughout her life. Consequently, anti-fascism is a key point of departure for this recovery project and its reassessment of Rukeyser’s career. The term anti-fascist ought to be understood expansively, as encompassing more than a negating or oppositional political force. Anti-fascists “tend to fight not only against fascism, but also for racial justice, for socialist (or anarchist) transformation, and for gender equality.”18 That is to say, anti-fascism is, at its core, a creative and future-oriented sociopolitical vision—rooted in a belief or, as Rukeyser herself often called it, a wish for intersectional manifestations of social justice and democracy. There is no better way to characterize her career-long personal and political commitments, which run throughout her poetry and most of her other literary and paraliterary writings. Through our selections, we have tried to bring to the fore Rukeyser’s continuity of thinking and making, her constellations of political and aesthetic concerns, so clearly traced from her earliest work through the end of her life.

Rukeyser recognized early on how politics and aesthetics were inextricably connected in her worldview. During the Second World War, she provided an autobiographical statement for a special issue of the Contemporary Jewish Record, which we have selected as the author’s introduction to this volume. There, Rukeyser characterizes two forces as her primary influences: “poetry and fire,” the poetry of the Bible and her apocryphal maternal genealogy stemming from the “fire” of second-century Israeli revolutionary Rabbi Akiva ben Josef.19 She writes:

To live as a poet, woman, American, and Jew—this chalks in my position. If the four come together in one person, each strengthens the others. Red-baiting, undercuts at the position of women, anti-intellectual and anti-imaginative drives such as Congress has recently been conducting—these are on the same level as the growing storm of anti-Semitism.20

Gender consciousness, her sense of her national culture’s responsibility to fight for democracy, her expressed opposition to HUAC’s forerunner, the Dies Committee—all are interwoven forces motivating Rukeyser’s work as a poet. For her to mark them as bearing the same level of intensity as the moment’s antisemitism, at home and abroad, amid the Holocaust, is a remarkable and prescient rebuke of the marginalization of her voice in later years, a marginalization precipitated in part when the Bollingen committee overlooked her and instead gave accolades to a fascist.

Rukeyser began her career as a journalist and reviewer in 1932, while an undergraduate at Vassar College. She served as contributing editor for the Vassar Miscellany News, researching and writing pieces on topics ranging from modern poetry to strip-mining. She cofounded with classmates Eleanor and Eunice Clark the magazine Housatonic, which focused on New England’s culture, political history, and literature. She also cofounded the avant-garde magazine Con Spirito with Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Clarks. As happened with many of her peers, Rukeyser’s radical political sensibilities were activated during this time. According to historian Robert Cohen, her generation of student activists “viewed the Depression as the great radicalizing force of their time.”21 After attending workers’ talks sponsored by the Student League for Industrial Democracy during the spring of her sophomore year, Rukeyser was so moved that she drove to Pennsylvania to investigate labor conditions for herself and then reported on them to her classmates.22 That experience predated by four years her 1936 trip to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, which informed The Book of the Dead (1938), her now-celebrated documentarian poem about silica mining and industrial illness. Because of her family’s Depression-related financial straits, Rukeyser’s parents pulled her out of Vassar before the start of the next semester. Through the Communist Party–allied National Student League, she continued to work with student organizers in New York City. For that group’s periodical, Student Review, she covered the first, now largely forgotten, free speech movement, a response to the City College of New York’s firing of communist professor Oakley Johnson.23 More famously, in 1933, Rukeyser also wrote a probing Student Review editorial on the infamous trial of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, nine African American youths wrongfully accused of rape by two white women. She intended to write a follow-up piece on the trial’s gender dynamics, but that essay, though completed, was left unpublished, until now.

In the years that followed, she continued to work with leftist organizations, as a dance and theater reviewer for the communist magazine New Theatre, as a freelance agent for the New Theatre League, and as an editor at Frontier Films. Rukeyser’s early experiences as a student activist and in the leftist Cultural Front shaped the anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and pro-labor views that characterized her entire career. The single most defining experience of her political life, though, occurred in July 1936. She had been invited by the British progressive cultural monthly Life and Letters To-day to cover the People’s Olympiad, or the Anti-fascist Olympics, in Barcelona. En route to the games, she witnessed the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Read alongside Savage Coast (2013), Rukeyser’s posthumously published novel about her experiences in Spain, her editorials in Life and Letters To-day, the mainstream New York Herald Tribune, and the communist magazine New Masses provide crucial understandings of the conflict.24 What she witnessed informed her steadfast anti-fascism, a radically democratic vision she upheld for the rest of her life. As Rukeyser’s typed header on a handwritten table of contents for her Selected Poems (1951) states, “Spain made me.”25

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, in addition to writing biographies and plays, Rukeyser continued to work as a journalist, an editor of both film and print, a scriptwriter for film and then television, and an essayist. Her prose writing on politics illustrates the development of her leftist radical thought in the 1930s into anti-war activism and feminism in the 1970s. She wrote on topics as varied as film and images, and she wrote the narratives for photo-essays featured in glossy magazines like Coronet and Life.26 She often used her book and theater reviews to highlight the work of women who had been or would be written out of the emerging chauvinist modernist canon.27 These crucial pieces develop feminist theories of gender and literary production, and through them, Rukeyser cultivates a public voice on gender equity and motherhood that offers rich nuance about mid-century women’s lives and the intersections of political and aesthetic forms in women’s writing. Her educational commitments to racial justice in the 1950s can be seen through a documentary short she scripted about redlining and housing discrimination.28 They also can be read in her lost articles and fictionalized stories about the effects of racial integration on American schools and neighborhoods that originally appeared in such magazines as New Statesman (UK) and Discovery. Later, during the Vietnam conflict, Rukeyser became a public face for anti-war activism. During a nonviolent protest at the US Capitol Building in 1972, she and others were arrested for participating in the direct action. Rukeyser opted to serve a brief prison sentence, despite her ill health, rather than pay a court-ordered fine. This experience marked the beginning of her late human rights activism targeting the prison-industrial complex’s injustices and its connections to the white supremacist and imperialist war state. Between her trial and self-surrender to the authorities, Rukeyser went on an unofficial ambassadorial peace mission to Hanoi with fellow poet-activist Denise Levertov and Jane Hart, a US senator’s spouse. The trip reinforced her conviction that literary translation, especially of poetry, could be used by the peace movement as a protest tool.

As a standard-bearer for social, gender, and sexual justice who wove her activist commitments into her creative work, Rukeyser was, out of necessity, a fighter. In an extended Vietnam-era meditation on Henry David Thoreau’s theory of civil disobedience, she concludes:

I know it is only the violent person who understands nonviolence—who has to wake up every morning and be nonviolent for one more day. It is only the person who knows what it is to be irritating, to be hostile, who knows what the long physical battle is to put down—not put down, but to deal with hostility in oneself, to use all the parts of it which are usable, because there are ways to use war in oneself.

One man can make art of this. This is one of the ways of art, to use the warlike, to use the ways of active struggle. It can be shown; it can be given to other people; it can be given in art.29

In this passage culminates much of Rukeyser’s theorizing over several decades about a radical American tradition—about the uses of the imagination in a country defined by settler colonialism, slavery, war, expansion, and immigration, and about citizens’ and residents’ personal embodiments of that history. She is also describing something we grapple with today in our current political climate: How do we become conscious of the violence and repression that have shaped our bodies and identities? How might we transform such recognition into the generative, connecting, and radiant possibilities of artistic making and political solidarity?

These are some of the questions the texts included in The Muriel Rukeyser Era try to answer. Rukeyser was a prolific and energetic writer, working across mediums and genres. Just as the themes in her poetry are recurrent, so too are themes that thread through her prose. In making our selections, we have sought to bring a diverse range of her work together that demonstrates her political and aesthetic vision as it developed over the course of her life. Some of this work has never been published before, and we have left the breaks and lacunae of the drafts visible. In other cases, originally published versions were substantially edited from her archived fair copies, so we have noted how publishing pressures might have altered her more radical message. These texts, and their cultural erasure, tell stories about the places and communities Rukeyser was working in—the Depression years’ radical Cultural Front, Hollywood and Broadway in the 1930s and 1940s, the Office of War Information during the Second World War, the New York City juvenile court system, Manhattan’s downtown and uptown literary scenes, the San Francisco Renaissance, second-wave feminism and other arms of the New Left, anti-war and anti-nuclear organizations, prisoner and refugee rights, and other human rights movements. These selections also show Rukeyser as trying to elucidate her own times by writing and thinking at the forefront of them, thus giving them shape. We could not include all the unpublished or uncollected prose items she authored—essays, book reviews, dance and theater reviews, film scripts, stories—too many to name. Future scholarly and editorial efforts surely will bring out of the archives some of what we have omitted. What we have chosen to present here, though, is representative of how Rukeyser’s prose reflects her dual investment in aesthetic theorization and sociopolitical commitment. Through this representative selection, we set out to tell a cohesive story about a literary and activist visionary whose name, rather than a fascist’s, should characterize an era of American poetry and literature.

Part I. The Usable Truth: Five Talks on Communication and Poetry

In August 1940, anthologist and critic Louis Untermeyer published a feature on Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry in the widely circulating Saturday Review of Literature. His opening line praises her as “the most inventive and challenging poet of the generation which has not yet reached thirty.”30 Just twenty-six years old, she had already published three poetry collections: Theory of Flight (1935), U.S. 1 (1938), and A Turning Wind (1939). Within a week of the appearance of Untermeyer’s article, Henry MacCracken, the president of Rukeyser’s alma mater, Vassar College, invited her to come speak at the school.31 The resulting lecture series, The Usable Truth: Five Talks on Communication and Poetry, would inform The Life of Poetry (1949), her best-known prose work, an artful meditation on mid-century poetics that opens with a reminiscence of her flight from the outbreak of civil war in Spain.32 We open this volume with Rukeyser’s previously unpublished lectures because they bring together in new ways her thinking about war, poetry, and gender politics, anchored in an immediate, explicit response to historical contingencies. Her responses to the day’s crises intersect with questions of artistic forms and traditions, thus providing the basis for so much of her theoretical and poetic thinking.

In subsequent years, Rukeyser retooled her original talks, giving them the socialist-sounding title “Poetry and the People” while refashioning them into poetry workshops for workers and activists at San Francisco’s California Labor School, offered in 1945 and 1948. She also taught a ten-week course with the same title at Columbia University’s extension school in 1946. Only a handful of fragmented talks and notes from these courses and workshops survive, but, thankfully, all the original Vassar talks have been archived in their entirety. Without access to these initial lectures, many readers might be inclined to believe, erroneously, that The Usable Truth merely offers an undeveloped version of The Life of Poetry. The similarity of certain anecdotes in the lectures and the book, such as the opening story about leaving war-torn Barcelona as well as Rukeyser’s ideas about poetry’s affective and imaginative nature, are unsurprising. She was an iterative writer, returning to and repeating certain themes, stories, and ideas, though always with changes.33 But the Vassar talks crucially underscore how Rukeyser’s formalist and at times ontological claims in the postwar Life of Poetry sprung from historically grounded responses to her immediate, prewar political and cultural circumstances.

From their inception, Rukeyser wrote the lectures with an eye toward composing a new book to speak to her historical moment. Unlike many of the talks she gave later in her career, The Usable Truth is fully written out and neatly typed on paginated, looseleaf pages that contain relatively few emendations or notes for improvisation. Despite her intentions to publish her lectures as a book, only the first, “The Fear of Poetry,” would be printed in full, appearing in the art and politics journal Twice a Year. A revised brief extract from the series’ final talk, “Communication and Poetry,” appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse.34 Rukeyser crafted the talks during the “Plague Summer” of 1940, as her acquaintance Kenneth Patchen referred to the season when the US Congress debated legislation mandating the first “peacetime” draft.35 In the first lecture, given shortly after the controversial conscription law went into effect, she self-consciously signals how she and most of her audience at the all-women’s college would not be affected by the war in the same ways as their male counterparts. Throughout the series, Rukeyser references other current events—from Japan’s recent attacks on China to the European refugee crisis—as well as cultural and literary magazines’ debates about the war’s significance. She was intent upon using her poet’s eye and imagination to imbue the destruction and chaos with new meaning, to move toward a humanistic and democratically inclusive age of peace.

Rukeyser casts her net wide to accomplish this end. She sought to synthesize new meaning out of major box office releases by Alfred Hitchcock, recent translations of Soviet filmmakers on cinema’s political power, and refugees’ reports about a German poet and doctor who practiced a form of resistance others misread as collaborationism. She returns, repeatedly, to the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, a touch-stone uncommon in her other work and prescient of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialism, born of their own experiences of the Nazi occupation. She also discusses at length Herman Melville’s April 1851 letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne. That letter’s theorization of “visible truth”—erroneously transcribed by scholars as “usable truth”—lent Rukeyser’s series its title. Much of the material in The Usable Truth and its timely contextual references invaluably fill out our sense of how Rukeyser and other anti-fascists and activist-writers struggled with the prospect of the United States entering what was, before the bombing of Pearl Harbor over a year later, an unpopular foreign war.

Rukeyser tried to bring The Usable Truth into print soon after her Vassar visit. However, major publishing houses rejected her proposal because, as one editor put it, her approach to her material was too politically current, so her book would quickly become dated.36 But as late as October 1945, after the Second World War’s end, her literary agent was hopeful a major house would buy it.37 Over the next several years, following her teaching at Columbia and the California Labor School, and as she developed various poetic, dramatic, and film projects, her revisions of her ideas gave them more transhistorical viability. The Life of Poetry is both exciting and challenging, but with Rukeyser’s revisions something integral to her thinking, to what made that book possible, was lost. The Usable Truth’s explicitly political and timely contents reveal how Rukeyser, in the shadow of the war-state, eventually suppressed certain historical and political material to bring into print a potentially paradigm-shifting argument about poetry’s resistant potential. Not only do the talks give us a glimpse of Rukeyser’s own public intellectualism in action, but they also provide a clearer sense of how a form of later modernist poetics sprung explicitly from its author’s weaving together of aesthetic theorization and an anti-fascist feminist engagement with national and global political crises.

Part II. Twentieth-Century Radicalism: On Politics, Society, and Culture

The second section of this volume charts Muriel Rukeyser’s development as an activist and public intellectual from her college days until the years shortly before her death. Her student writing reflects how her political consciousness was shaped by the first wave of radicalization on American college campuses. For Housatonic, a magazine she cofounded and coedited with two classmates in 1932, Rukeyser wrote “The Flown Arrow,” on the repercussions of the execution five years earlier of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists sentenced to death without due process. This early piece signals how Rukeyser’s journalism, throughout her career, tracked the way legal and political injustices often driven by anti-leftist hysteria are justified by, and extended through, cultural and aesthetic norms that police race, ethnicity, gender, labor, and their intersections. On the execution, she writes that “the arrow has flown. It has lodged in our flesh, and we feel, deep in this body of our strength, the split wound that the deaths of men like Sacco and Vanzetti enlarge in America.” She then moves from fatalism toward possibility by reminding the reader that “while the struggle for balance lasts, the arrow has not flown.”38 Decades later, she continued this thread in “The Uses of Fear,” a revised version of which the New York Times published in 1978, that looks back at the lasting consequences of another politicized state execution—that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953—which encapsulated the Cold War’s paranoia and terror. In this essay, too, she invites readers to face the fears and terrors of our past. Rukeyser also subjected the present to similar scrutiny, as her previously unpublished Vietnam-era essay, “The Killing of the Children” from 1973, demonstrates. There, following the author’s movements from an anti-war protest at the US Capitol Building to Hanoi and then to jail, where she meets a young Black girl incarcerated for killing her child, Rukeyser shows the interconnected crises of America. War making occurs both abroad and at home, in the forms of carceral capitalism, racism, and sexism.

Rukeyser’s early career as a journalist and activist prepared her for such undertakings in writing about social and political issues. After leaving Vassar, she took anthropology classes at Columbia University, where she became the publicity chair for the “Conference on Negro Student Problems.” Through that committee, Rukeyser met and worked alongside established radical intellectuals and artists, including Franz Boas, Alain Locke, Augusta Savage, and Zora Neale Hurston. It was partially in this role that she, with two communist organizer friends, traveled to Alabama in 1933 to report for the Student Review on the trial of the Scottsboro Nine. Her published article “From Scottsboro to Decatur” and her unpublished follow-up essay “Women and Scottsboro” depict the contexts of a trial central to anti-racist organizing and solidarity in the 1930s. Rukeyser documents how the local police’s ominous exertion of segregation laws stymied her ability to report, even leading to her detention overnight on framed-up charges of distributing inflammatory propaganda. Both articles mix first-person narrative with journalistic techniques, focusing on the intersections of race, gender, and place.

Developing what would become her signature hybridization of lyrical prose and documentary evidence, Rukeyser’s journalism about the first days of the Spanish Civil War, “Barcelona on the Barricades” and “Barcelona, 1936,” mix modernist collage techniques with anti-fascist politics. She traveled in July 1936 from London to Barcelona on a last-minute assignment for the British magazine Life and Letters To-day to report on the People’s Olympiad, an alternative to Hitler’s Berlin games. Instead of reporting on the games, she witnessed the outbreak of civil war. Her experience was transformational. She would write about it for the rest of her life, including pieces memorializing her lover Otto Boch, a German exile and long-distance runner who had died fighting Franco’s fascist advance on the Zaragoza front.39 When evacuated by boat from Barcelona, Rukeyser was famously asked, “And poetry—among all this—where is there a place for poetry?”40 She made her career out of continually responding to this question, theorizing the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

Rukeyser’s thinking on perception, especially during moments of political crisis like wartime, is especially illuminated in two essays presented here. The first, “Words and Images,” was written in response to her resignation in 1943 from the Office of War Information, a federal propaganda agency. Exploring the relationship between the photographic image, its caption, and state propaganda, Rukeyser outlines a compelling, politicized poetics for multimodal practice. “The point is not in the naming of a picture,” she writes, “but in a reinforcement which is mutual, so that the words and the picture attack the same theme from slightly different approaches.”41 Such reciprocity between word and image infuses meaning into wartime atrocities, which would otherwise remain meaningless. As she writes in the second essay, “War and Poetry,” from 1945: “War enters all our lives, but even that horror is only a beginning. The war is in our poetry only so far as it is in our imaginations, as a meaning, as a relationship, or simply as a fact.”42 These pieces develop Rukeyser’s ongoing thinking through a documentary poetics of witness, which have become invaluable for later generations of writers, including Susan Sontag, Carolyn Forché, C. D. Wright, Claudia Rankine, Ada Limón, and Solmaz Sharif.

Rukeyser is especially interested in how a crucial political event causes laws and norms to change or when a political crisis comes to a climax. But in her essays about social transformation, she tells more complicated stories about such moments and traces longer, less triumphant histories. She studies moments when a culture shifts subtly, moments like the volta in a sonnet when there is a “turn” in thought or shift in tone. Rukeyser then follows the repercussions that unfold. Her essays take us beyond the historically recognizable moment and into generative and surprising places, where the stories’ subjects or their descendants reassert their voices, thus keeping the narrative open. Exemplifying this dynamic is “She Came to Us,” an article written in 1958 for the New Statesman, a British newspaper. Here, Rukeyser’s subject is Minnijean Brown, one of the Little Rock Nine, the group of Black adolescents who pioneered the federally mandated educational desegregation by enrolling in Arkansas’s formerly all-white Little Rock Central High School. The essay depicts Minnijean’s arrival in her new school in Manhattan. She had been wrongfully expelled from her home institution in the Jim Crow South for resisting her white classmates’ violent racist backlash. Rukeyser closes with a scene of Minnijean analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet in English class, which very well could read as the author’s own assertion of her theory not just about poetry but also about social life: “She talks about the music and the rhyme. You cannot separate out any of these elements, she says, and hope to keep the beauty. The beauty is the entire thing, she says.”43

Many of the pieces included in this section model how Rukeyser’s short-form stories about sociopolitical issues anticipate, and fall somewhere between, the experimentalism of Norman Mailer’s New Journalism and later New Narrative and autofiction by queer writers like Robert Glück, Eileen Myles, and Maggie Nelson. Rukeyser, for instance, imagined her 1953 short story “A Pane of Glass,” after its initial publication, as part of a cycle blurring the boundaries of fiction, theory, and autobiographical essay.44 The story opens during a snowy New Year’s Day on the Upper West Side, the writer and her five-year-old son walking home together from sledding in Central Park. They encounter a group of teenage boys—“men, really”—who are ominous in their self-protective powers of whiteness and masculinity.45 The young men take up the entire street, throw snowballs indiscriminately, and break the pane of glass in her building’s front door. She takes her son and goes down the block to confront the group, but she realizes she has no recourse. They challenge her, laughing. Her son says they “have no shame.”46 Later, she learns that while she was getting ready to go out for a holiday party, a teenage girl had given birth alone in the building and, from the frozen roof, threw the newborn down the air shaft. Certain people are allowed to move freely, with no thought for the consequences of their actions, no matter how destructive, while others live always in forms of legal and social dispossession from their own bodies, in shame, no matter how much potential and power they hold. For Rukeyser, these contradictions, magnified in New York City’s racial, gender, and class disparities, constitute the crisis of America.

“A Pane of Glass” ends with the writer searching for the girl at her arraignment downtown, in New York City’s juvenile courts. Rukeyser became personally familiar with this legal setting over the next several years. In 1955, she worked with—and planned a book about—educator Helen Parkhurst’s advocacy of so-called “delinquent” youth.47 Later, around 1958, after being targeted and essentially blacklisted by anti-communist organizations, Rukeyser was recruited to work with a mayoral commission to write a report, for which she ultimately was uncredited, on New York City’s juvenile court system. Her intimate, sympathetic accounts of the lives of children in these systems, especially of teenage girls like those in “A Pane of Glass” and “The Killing of the Children,” speak to Rukeyser’s career-long awareness of how the law is unevenly exerted in America. Toward the end of “A Pane of Glass,” standing in the halls of a courthouse, she reflects on her own choice to become a mother, wondering who she can call to help the young girl. But her thinking about the different outcomes of pregnancy before legal abortion is interrupted by a surprise reencounter with Steve, a travel companion from the train to Barcelona and on the ship with evacuees out of that city almost a decade and a half earlier.48 His presence compels her to recall the old question posed to her as they left Barcelona: “Here, in the soft-shining marble, we might still have been on the deck of that far ship, just evacuated from the city at peace, the great city so soon to fall. We had looked across the shore-waves to the city, and then at each other. He turned just such a look on me, and then the printer from Paris had said, ‘And where, in all this, is the place for poetry?’”49 Now Steve is an attorney, and he fills her in on the girl’s case and its history. “That’s a different story, isn’t it?” he asks. Though she momentarily believes it is, she realizes nothing has changed—about the girl’s situation or even her own. “Yes, I did; for a moment I did change my mind. But how do I dare? This will open, and open, and all be the same story.”50 With such repetitions of the same story, the same fight, social justice activists find new opportunities to connect, in solidarity, and open outward.

Part III. Media and Democratic Education: A Photo-Text and Radio Scripts

During the interwar years, Muriel Rukeyser sought to popularize radical modernism’s formal possibilities to counter the predominant, conservative vision of American literature and intellectual thought. Her interest in bringing together word and image informed her early photo-essays for glossy magazines as well as the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), initially intended to be an ekphrastic project featuring photographs by Nancy Naumburg and then planned for a film adaptation.51 After the war, Rukeyser further developed her thinking about and her practice of multimodality as a form of democratic education through several projects meant to make complex aesthetic and political ideas accessible to general audiences. Two such projects are featured in The Muriel Rukeyser Era: Sunday at Nine (1949), a radio series on poetry and music developed for KDFC, San Francisco’s first classical music radio station, and So Easy to See (1946), an unrealized scientific photo-text collaboration with photographer and inventor Berenice Abbott. Rukeyser’s exciting choices of formal and material hybridity remake our understanding of political and aesthetic intersections, while also modeling new formal modes for writing a queer vision of the democratic imagination.

Rukeyser met Berenice Abbott in Greenwich Village at the end of the 1930s, and they worked as collaborators and friends for the next three decades. From the early 1940s through the 1960s, when the sciences were elevated over the arts in the United States, they shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses of and relationships between the two fields of knowledge. Abbott had already established herself as a preeminent modernist portrait photographer in 1920s Paris. Through the 1930s, she had been working on another photo-text collaboration with her partner, Elizabeth McCausland, the groundbreaking Works Progress Administration photo series Changing New York (1935–1939), from which a fraction of the photos were published with McCausland’s captions as a city guidebook.52 But it was with Rukeyser that Abbott became especially interested in harnessing the democratizing potential of photography, and their collaboration resulted in an extraordinary though unrealized project.53

From the archive’s traces of their collaboration, we have selected Rukeyser’s introduction to what would have been her book with Abbott, So Easy to See. If finished, their project would have continued the endeavor Rukeyser began a few years earlier with her biography of mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs, the work of making visible complex theoretical and ontological forms of knowledge. Abbott, using a Supersight camera she had invented, took photographs of everyday objects—an apple, a leaf, a fish head, Rukeyser’s eye and hand. So Easy to See would have paired those images with Rukeyser’s poetic-theoretical discussions of “seeing.” Her text moves the reader through a series of what the poet calls correspondences centered around Abbott’s “Apple” photograph. Rukeyser takes us from the halved apple’s correlation to the vulva and lesbian desire, to the split atom and the atomic bomb, making us think of all the connections between the apple and women’s relationship to knowledge. Their project was repeatedly rejected by male editors and curators, who demeaned and undervalued its innovative nature. Working against accepted gendered and disciplinary boundaries to reveal “a meeting-place for art and science” as sources of imaginative possibility and social progress, their project engenders questions about what kinds of collaborative and artistic practices are sanctioned, about the ontology of things and the everyday, about materialist philosophy, and about the radical possibilities of interdisciplinarity.54

Just as photography appealed to Rukeyser as a means of democratically recasting modernist art, she also recognized the democratic potential of another modern technology: radio. Until the ascendancy of television in the 1950s, radio was the dominant form of broadcast communications, with tens of millions of sets in American homes. Rukeyser decided to try her hand at producing her own broadcast. The result was Sunday at Nine, a four-part educational series juxtaposing poetry and music. Rukeyser proposed her series to the new, small San Francisco company KDFC, the Bay Area’s first classical music station, founded in 1948.55 In her proposal’s extant draft, Rukeyser explains she was inspired by similar broadcast poetry programs produced by the British Broadcast Company and the Mexican National Lottery, though they did not feature music as hers would; she also believed the Library of Congress would be interested in sponsoring Sunday at Nine.56 The introduction she recorded for the series informs her audience that she wished to take advantage of the popularity of music broadcasts to foreground poetry’s ability to move audiences and bring them together, a power stemming from poems’ roots in music. In The Life of Poetry, she would put it this way: “And the songs and poems, used on radio, throw away the gift of the isolated voice. Radio poetry could now make its leap, could enter a level in which the single voice, or a very few voices, might invite an opening-up of consciousness undefined by the other senses.”57 Over the course of Sunday at Nine’s four sixty-minute episodes, Rukeyser introduced listeners to a wide range of poetry.58 She read full poems fitting each episode’s theme or focus, and she interspersed those readings with musical recordings carefully curated for how they speak to the episode’s poetic themes and content. The only exception to this format was the final episode, wherein the music was the poetry.

The first episode focuses on Emily Dickinson. Shortly following the publication of a selection of Dickinson’s poems and her first biography, Rukeyser set out to recover for popular audiences this then largely ignored predecessor. As such, this episode is a key project of postwar feminism. Furthermore, amid the early Cold War’s climate of homosexual panic, she uses coded language, which we have flagged for readers in our notes, to signal the queerness of Dickinson’s work and life. The second episode of Sunday at Nine focuses on the work of American regionalist Robert Frost, about whom Rukeyser had written a trenchant review a decade earlier.59 As in that earlier piece, she explores how Frost provides an opportunity for readers to wrestle with the question of localist senses of place and national identity. The series’ third installment foregrounds the poetry of war and peace, represented by writers ranging from her friend Richard Eberhart to her publisher James Laughlin, the British conscientious objector Alex Comfort, and a translated poem by Greek author George Seferis. Using such “more general” themes as points of departure from popular lyricists like Dylan Thomas, Rukeyser believed she could highlight how “modern poetry” provides “moments [. . .] in which one recognizes oneself” and one’s “fantasies,” exteriorized in the public and political worlds.60 The series’ final episode redefines American poetry and modernist poetics in an anti-racist manner by expanding the definition of poetry to include the blues.

Indeed, this fourth installment reveals much about Rukeyser’s motivation to develop a radio program and about why this effort should be regarded as both a mode of democratic education and the establishment of a modernist countertradition. As noted earlier, Ezra Pound’s legal troubles stemmed from his anti-American broadcasts on Italian state radio, and the Bollingen Prize controversy of 1948 and 1949 largely focused on the political and ethical content of those fascistic, racist, and antisemitic programs. Exactly when those debates about modernist aesthetics and fascist politics were circulating, Rukeyser decided to appropriate the Poundian ideological broadcast and use it to amplify her own democratic messaging, an objective especially clear in her focus on the blues in Sunday at Nine’s fourth episode. Rukeyser uses that cultural form to construct an anti-racist and anti-fascist poetic and musical tradition that recasts modernist poetics, including her own, as stemming from Black aesthetic forms and history. In her broadcast, she explicitly poses the blues as the alternate musical basis of the pre-Renaissance Provençal troubadours, whom Pound had long championed as forerunners of Euro-American modernism.61 As a white Jewish American, Rukeyser implicitly continues a line of radical modernist blues poetries running from Harlem Renaissance writers like Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes to blues performer Josh White, a friend she features on her program. Ultimately, this episode anticipates the revolutionary music history of poet LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and Black Music (1967).

Rukeyser and her producers attempted to syndicate Sunday at Nine through other radio stations, and they also sought to sell it for educational use in “universities, museums, schools, and related institutions.”62 The four realized episodes were just the first in a projected total of thirteen—which were to include “evenings of the Elizabethans, the Pacific Islanders, poets of other times and places, of many religions, and of myth.”63 Those other episodes were neither written nor broadcast. If they had been, we would have been gifted with the multimodal version of The Life of Poetry! Only the first episode’s engineering cues exist, and Rukeyser’s son, William, has located the recording of her readings and commentary for only the second episode, on Frost.64 The full scripts for all four produced and broadcast installments survive, though. We have selected to present here the first and the last episodes because they provide important insights into Rukeyser’s queer feminism and her anti-racism, key facets of her anti-fascist poetics and activist commitments. Print cannot duplicate the full multimodal experience of listening to Rukeyser’s readings or the accompanying musical recordings, but we have used the surviving engineering notes to annotate, in most cases, the exact versions of classical compositions she had curated for her episode on Dickinson. And we have identified versions of the blues songs Rukeyser either indicated or is likely to have been thinking of for her final episode. Many of these recordings are available online or through streaming services. Adventurous readers can reconstruct the musical interludes while reading Rukeyser’s scripts, thus bringing to life these key popular texts of her anti-fascist and anti-racist feminist pedagogy.

Part IV. Modernist Interventions: On Gender, Poetry, and Poetics

Muriel Rukeyser’s unrecovered and uncollected short-form prose includes considerable writing about the aesthetics and poetics of twentieth-century poetry. As is evident in the sole student essay about poetry selected for this volume, “Modern Trends: American Poetry” (1932), originally published in the Vassar Miscellany News, she was an astute poetry reader from the earliest point in her career. With its insightful introduction of its student audience to three modernist writers—T. S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, and Robinson Jeffers—the piece exemplifies her early and unwavering sense of American modernism as spanning formalist experimentation (Eliot), social commitment (MacLeish), and visionary lyricism (Jeffers). She would combine those tendencies, to different extents, in her own poetry. In other selections, such as her reviews of American regionalist Robert Frost (“In a Speaking Voice,” 1939) and of translations of Rainer Maria Rilke (“Nearer to the Well-Spring,” 1943) and her presentation at a celebration of recent translations of Federico García Lorca’s poetry and plays (“A Lorca Evening,” 1951), we find Rukeyser similarly testing the staying power of major predecessors and contemporaries, all with implications for her own evolution of modernist lyric.

Three major essays included here—“Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (1968), “The Music of Translation” (1971), and “Thoreau and Poetry” (1972)—provide further indications of how Rukeyser envisioned poetry, as well as literary translation, as bridging the gap between personal expression and social transformation. These texts are indispensable for extending understandings of Rukeyser’s vision for the culturally transformative work performed through poetry. These major pieces originated as talks at either academic or professional conferences, thus highlighting her position as a public intellectual and situating her critical and theoretical work in their historical contexts. As in her early Usable Truth lectures, Rukeyser produces some of her most potent and durable ideas in these essays by working out of, and responding to, her present moment in public forums.

These short-form writings also provide fascinating insights into her evolving poetics and sociopolitical vision. Take, for instance, her early review of the now-forgotten epic Chorus for Survival (1935), by the socialist poet-activist Horace Gregory. The essay, which appeared in the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker, is a deft, autotelic performance with which Rukeyser creates herself as poet-critic through her rereading of a friend and mentor. She highlights how the formal innovation of Gregory’s project translates high-modernist precedents into the register of what was called revolutionary poetics. Rukeyser notices the formal similarities between Gregory’s long poem and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930), how each fashions a loosely cohering narrative out of multiple-voiced lyrics. Without explicitly arguing it, Rukeyser makes the case through her reading of Gregory’s use of a poetics of fragmentation and polyvocality to theorize the foundation for a new, more politically engaged American modernist long poem. She soon went on to implement those ideas in her own long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), the epitome of Popular Front poetics in its fusion of documentarian objectivity and more personal lyric forms.

In “Lyrical ‘Rage’” (1957), a review of her friend Kenneth Rexroth, Rukeyser theorizes this fusion as giving poetry the power to transform “rage, in the speaking man,” into a more controlled “sharp willingness to condemn,” like what one finds in “the committed man.”65 Women writers, especially, tackle the connections between political commitment and poetic form. Selections explicitly about gender that we have chosen include a review of the third collection by Rukeyser’s friend and Gregory’s wife, Marya Zaturenska (“The Classic Ground,” 1941); a review of the forgotten poet Charlotte Marletto’s sole collection, about childbirth and motherhood (“A Simple Theme,” 1949); a review essay on Marianne Moore (“A Crystal for the Metaphysical,” 1966); a late review of Anne Sexton (“Glitter and Wounds, Several Wildnesses,” 1973); a meditation on the love letters between Franz Kafka and his fiancée (“The Life to Which I Belong,” 1974); and a preface for the first second-wave anthology of women’s poetry (“Women of Words,” 1974). Each piece provides a deeper understanding of Rukeyser’s sense of how gendered personal experience and intimacies inform political commitment and literary expression. Her example influenced a generation of feminist and bisexual and lesbian poet-activists—ranging from Sexton to June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima, Alice Walker, and Judy Grahn. As the editor of the feminist anthology The World Split Open (1974) remarks in the headnote for Rukeyser’s contribution, “Historically, she is one of this country’s most important poets and one of the first and most persistent women to possess the consciousness that shapes this collection.”66 Rukeyser’s poem “Käthe Kollwitz” (1968) even had lent the anthology its title: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”67

“Many Keys” (1957), a suppressed article commissioned and then rejected by The Nation, exemplifies Rukeyser’s politicized and gendered poetics. This lost essay charts the precariousness faced by American women writers. In it, Rukeyser deftly illuminates how the sexist marginalization of women and their writing owes to the patriarchal denigration of women’s experience, domestic labor, and motherhood. “There is waste in nature, waste in art, and plenty of waste in the lives of women,” she asserts. “Waste is an influence, and the making of poetry works against waste.”68 Giving value to such “waste” necessitates a gendered poetics of open form, “to make the forms so that experience is seen to include the world, so that all things of daily life are seen in their essential and full vitality.”69 Her ideas provide a hitherto little-known feminist complement to the field poetics of such contemporaries as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov, and she anticipates the theorization of motherhood and creative life so central to feminist thought.

Recovering Rukeyser’s prose on gender and poetry begs another question about canon making: what if Rukeyser’s feminist theorization of open-form writing emanating from dailiness and waste, rather than from Olson’s male-centered projective verse, were put at the center of the so-called New American Poetry?70 If it had been, generations of female and queer writers could have been clued in earlier to how poetry is a testing ground for what queer feminist Sara Ahmed calls sweaty concepts, experiential and embodied struggles toward self-liberation, feminist community building, and institutional transformation.71 If these writings had not been lost, overlooked, or wasted, then perhaps Rukeyser would have sooner helped generations of scholars and writers reconcile themselves to the fact that cultural work and the dailiness of women’s and queer persons’ lives can be the origin points for raising consciousness and motivating activism.

As we strive toward a conceptual vocabulary better serving the activist and creative work demanded of us and the social transformation our world desperately requires, Rukeyser’s texts can help us find this language, fill in historical and theoretical gaps, and ask new questions about poetry’s role and artistic practice, more broadly. Such questioning is crucial to facing down an oppressive power culture and overcoming the fears propping it up. “That is the enemy, the form and content of fear, to be driven against us,” Rukeyser writes in The Usable Truth. “And if you come with your lives to meet what is here, you are the heroes of the poems, for there is the meeting-place. And that defines the form and content of the poetry I tell you. Facing and communicating, that will be our life, in the world and poetry.”72 Her prose provides another meeting place where readers can communicate with and learn from her, a first step in staging our own resistance. Rukeyser’s caption to her gouache painting The Four Fears (1955), which supplies this volume’s cover image, encourages herself, and us, to do just that: “All you have to do is challenge them.”73 A tiny woman resembling the poet, dark-haired and dressed in blue, stands at the bottom of the frame. Her back is turned to us, as she faces head on the titular fears, personified as giant figures, ominously clad in black robes before an infernal red backdrop. The prose found here, in The Muriel Rukeyser Era, equips us to make our own stand, to face the complex challenges and oppressions of our time, as Rukeyser did throughout her career.