Skip to main content

THE MURIEL RUKEYSER ERA: NOTE ON THIS TEXTUAL EDITION

THE MURIEL RUKEYSER ERA
NOTE ON THIS TEXTUAL EDITION

  • Show the following:

    Annotations
    Resources

  • Adjust appearance:

    Font
    Font style
    Color Scheme
    Light
    Dark
    Annotation contrast
    Low
    High
    Margins
  • Search within:
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeThe Muriel Rukeyser Era
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Epigraph
  4. Contents
  5. Acknowledgments and Permissions
  6. List of Abbreviations
  7. Note on This Textual Edition
  8. Editors’ Introduction
    1. All You Have to Do Is Challenge Them: The Muriel Rukeyser Era, Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
  9. Author’s Introduction
    1. Biographical Statement for “Under Forty: A Symposium on American Literature and the Younger Generation of American Jews” (1944), Muriel Rukeyser
  10. PART I. THE USABLE TRUTH: FIVE TALKS ON COMMUNICATION AND POETRY
    1. 1. “The Fear of Poetry” (1940, 1941)
    2. 2. “The Speed of the Image” (1940)
    3. 3. “Belief and Poetry” (1940)
    4. 4. “Poetry and Peace” (1940)
    5. 5. “Communication and Poetry” (1940)
  11. PART II. TWENTIETH-CENTURY RADICALISM: ON POLITICS, SOCIETY, AND CULTURE
    1. 6. “The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case” (1932)
    2. 7. “From Scottsboro to Decatur” (1933)
    3. 8. “Women and Scottsboro” (1933)
    4. 9. “Barcelona on the Barricades” (1936)
    5. 10. “Barcelona, 1936” (1936)
    6. 11. “Words and Images” (1943)
    7. 12. “War and Poetry” (1945)
    8. 13. “A Pane of Glass” (1953)
    9. 14. “She Came to Us” (1958)
    10. 15. “The Killing of the Children” (1973)
    11. 16. “The Uses of Fear” (1978)
  12. PART III. MEDIA AND DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION: A PHOTO-TEXT AND RADIO SCRIPTS
    1. 17. “So Easy to See” (1946), Photography-and-Text Collaboration with Berenice Abbott
    2. 18. From Sunday at Nine (1949), Scripts for Two Radio Broadcasts
      1. Series Introduction Episode One: Emily Dickinson
      2. Episode Four: The Blues
  13. PART IV. MODERNIST INTERVENTIONS: ON GENDER, POETRY, AND POETICS
    1. 19. “Modern Trends: American Poetry” (1932)
    2. 20. “Long Step Ahead Taken by Gregory in New Epic Poem” (1935), review of Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival
    3. 21. “In a Speaking Voice” (1939), review of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems
    4. 22. “The Classic Ground” (1941), review of Marya Zaturenska’s The Listening Landscape
    5. 23. “Nearer to the Well-Spring” (1943), review of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus
    6. 24. “A Simple Theme” (1949), review of Charlotte Marletto’s Jewel of Our Longing
    7. 25. “A Lorca Evening” (1951)
    8. 26. “Many Keys” (1957), on women’s poetry
    9. 27. “Lyrical ‘Rage’” (1957), review of Kenneth Rexroth’s In Defense of the Earth
    10. 28. “A Crystal for the Metaphysical” (1966), review of Marianne Moore’s Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics
    11. 29. “Poetry and the Unverifiable Fact” (1968)
    12. 30. “The Music of Translation” (1971)
    13. 31. “Thoreau and Poetry” (1972)
    14. 32. “Glitter and Wounds, Several Wildnesses” (1973), review of Anne Sexton’s The Book of Folly
    15. 33. “The Life to Which I Belong” (1974), review of Franz Kafka’s Letters to Felice
    16. 34. “Women of Words: A Prefatory Note” (1974)
  14. Appendix: Bibliographic and Archival Information for Selections by Muriel Rukeyser
  15. Notes on Contributors
  16. Selected Bibliography
  17. Index
  18. Copyright

NOTE ON THIS TEXTUAL EDITION

For each selection, either the version Muriel Rukeyser published during her lifetime or the fair copy she prepared for publication serves as this edition’s copytext. For the political essays “She Came to Us” and “The Uses of Fear” (originally published as “The Fear”), the editors have chosen to restore the fullest versions based, respectively, on Rukeyser’s typescript drafts and fair copy. Likely cut for space, these two articles’ abridged published versions are less persuasive than Rukeyser’s original ones. Minor editorial changes in the first published versions create tonal shifts contributing to the obfuscation, if not erasure, of Rukeyser’s activist and aesthetic vision.

For previously unpublished work, the copytext is either the latest dated surviving draft, the undated draft judged by the editors as the latest surviving version, or the fair copy incorporating the most edits. Only significant differences in earlier versions and unincorporated annotations are documented in this edition’s notes. The editors have opted to limit bibliographic notes to render Rukeyser’s prose more accessible to students and general readers. Recovering her lost and forgotten work is this volume’s chief aim. Future scholars will be free to provide a full bibliographic accounting about all these texts.

All selections have been quietly edited to correct errors, including of foreign words, as well as to introduce consistency in Rukeyser’s spelling and punctuation. The editors have maintained her idiosyncratic approach to the latter, except when regularizing serial commas for consistency. As other scholars recovering her work have noted, Rukeyser, frustrated by editorial “corrections” during her lifetime, affixed her custom-made stamp “Please Believe the Punctuation” to every submitted manuscript. Bill, her son, has provided us with an image of that stamp, reproduced here. To the best of our ability, albeit sometimes testing our patience, we have observed Rukeyser’s wishes. Her idiosyncratic or questionable word choices also remain untouched, and notes about them have been added when appropriate. The editors have modernized her hyphenation of certain compound nouns, and they have corrected her hyphenation of adverbial phrases. Now-outdated spellings of some words (like theatre for theater) are preserved, and the possessive form of all singular proper nouns (such as Jeffers’s) has been regularized for consistency.

During her lectures and radio broadcast scripts, Rukeyser often improvised sections, working from fragmentary notes. Most improvisation notes from her lectures’ and scripts’ fair copies are relegated to annotations, but the editors have included a few improvisation notes in the main body of The Usable Truth lectures because Rukeyser references that material directly thereafter in her talks’ fully scripted portions. For those exceptions, the editors’ annotations explain and interpret Rukeyser’s fragments to assist readers. Other editorial notes avoid interpretative glosses of Rukeyser’s ideas, instead offering only contextualizing information.

Notes are provided to specific editions, monthlies, pamphlets, and private correspondence Rukeyser referenced when those materials have been located. Most of her references to daily periodicals are not annotated. To conform with fair use standards, the editors have reduced Rukeyser’s outsized quotations from other writers’ works that are not in the public domain. Such instances are signaled in the notes. If material has been excised from those passages, the location of cut lines is indicated by a bracketed ellipsis. Lengthier quotations meriting full reproduction have been permitted by the respective authors’ literary estates or copyright holders, as noted in this volume’s acknowledgments. The editors have abridged only “A Crystal for the Metaphysical,” Rukeyser’s review of Marianne Moore, to render a clearer treatment of her subject with reduced citation. With a few exceptions, recorded in the annotations, the editors have quietly corrected Rukeyser’s misquotations of her sources.

In keeping with the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, the editors’ annotations do not specify source texts for classic works that are in the public domain or available in multiple editions. Full citations are provided for canonical authors’ paraliterary published essays, journals, and letters, as well as for specific editions used and cited by Rukeyser herself. Bibliographic information about recordings played during the selected episodes of Sunday at Nine, as identified by surviving engineering notes, appear in the annotations.

Annotate

Next Chapter
Frontmatter
PreviousNext
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org