Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser, Muriel - rooˈkīsər, 1913–80, American poet, b. New York City. Her poetry expresses the beauty and passion in the confrontation between the individual and her constantly changing world. Theory of Flight, her first volume of poems, appeared in 1935. Other works include U.S. 1 (1938), The Green Wave (1948), Body of Waking (1958), Waterlily Fire (1962), Speed of Read More...

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Muriel Rukeyser

1 .

U.S. 1 (Includes The Book of the Dead)
by Muriel Rukeyser. 147 pgs.

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CONTENTS

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

The Road

West Virginia

Statement: Philippa Allen

Gauley Bridge

The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones

Praise of the Committee

Mearl Blankenship

Absalom

The Disease

George Robinson: Blues

Juanita Tinsley

The Doctors

The Cornfield

Arthur Peyton

Alloy

Power

The Dam

The Disease: After-Effects

The Bill

The Book of the Dead

NIGHT-MUSIC

A Flashing Cliff

Girl at the Play

Burning Bush

Eel

Homage to Literature

The Handclap

Trophies

Panacea

In Hades, Orpheus

The Drowning Young Man

Boy with His Hair Cut Short

Course

More of a Corpse Than a Woman

Three Negresses

Formosa

Night-Music

Driveway

Lover as Fox

Gift-Poem

Woman and Emblems

Outpost

TWO VOYAGES

The Cruise

Mediterranean

NOTE
2 .

A Turning Wind
by Muriel Rukeyser. 120 pgs.

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Note

Elegies

Moment Of Proof

Lives
3 .

Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935-1962
by Muriel Rukeyser. 200 pgs.

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Acknowledgments

Contents

I. from Theory of Flight

Effort at Speech Between Two People

Sand-Quarry with Moving Figures

Song for Dead Children

Wooden Spring

Sonnet

The Gyroscope

Sundays, They Sleep Late

Cats and a Cock

The Surrounded

Ii. from U. S. 1

Gauley Bridge

The Disease

George Robinson: Blues

The Dam

A Flashing Cliff

Lover as Fox

The Drowning Young Man

Boy with His Hair Cut Short

Time Exposures

Adventures, Midnight--Ii.

Woman and Emblems

Iii. from a Turning Wind

Reading Time: 1 Minute 26 Seconds

Democritus Laughed

Target Practice

Correspondences

Ryder

Chapman

Ives

Iv. from Beast in View

Ajanta

Drunken Girl

Who in One Lifetime

Long Past Moncada

A Game of Ball

Song

V. Elegies

First Elegy. Rotten Lake

Third Elegy. the Fear of Form

Fifth Elegy. a Turning Wind

Sixth Elegy. River Elegy

Seventh Elegy. Dream- Singing Elegy

Ninth Elegy. the Antagonists

Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy

Vi. from the Green Wave

Water Night

Salamander

Green Limits

Mrs. Walpurga

Foghorn in Horror

Easter Eve

Nine Poems for the Unborn Child

Vii. from One Life

Power Never Dominion

Are You Born?--I

Phaneron

In Your Time, There Have Been Those

No One Ever Walking This Our Only Earth

Murmurs from the Earth of This Land

Viii. from Body of Waking

Mother Garden's Round

Haying Before Storm

After Their Quarrel

Night Feeding

The Watchers

F. O. M.

The Sixth Night: Waking

Suite for Lord Timothy Dexter

Voices of Waking

Body of Waking

Ix. Waterlily Fire

The Speaking Tree

The Way Out, from "Akiba"

For a Mexican Painter

A Song of Another Tribe

Song

Notes
4 .

Selected Poems
by Muriel Rukeyser. 116 pgs.

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The New Classics Series

Contents
5 .

Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars (Chap. 4 "Extending the Document: Muriel Rukeyser")
by Michael Thurston. 272 pgs.

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Poetry makes nothing happen, wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s--the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, and Muriel Rukeyser.
Thurston combines close textual reading of the poems with research into their historical context to reveal how these four poets deployed the resources of tradition and experimentation to contest and redefine political common sense. In the process, he demonstrates that the aesthetic censure under which much partisan writing has labored needs dramatic revision. Although each of these poets worked with different forms and toward different ends, Thurston shows that their strategies succeed as poetry. He argues that partisan poetry demands reflection not only on how we evaluate poems but also on what we value in poems and, therefore, which poems we elevate.

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Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the World Wars

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Something Happen

1: Tradition and the Political Poet

2: All Together, Black and White

3: Getting the Goofs to Listen

4: Extending the Document

Conclusion: The Age Demanded

Notes

Works Cited

Index
6 .

Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead
by Tim Dayton. 162 pgs.

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The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser was published as part of her 1938 volume U.S. 1. The poem, which is probably the most ambitious and least understood work of Depression-era American verse, commemorates the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, the Gauley tunnel tragedy. In this terrible disaster, an undetermined number of men--likely somewhere between 700 and 800--died of acute silicosis, a lung disorder caused by prolonged inhalation of silica dusts, after working on a tunnel project in Fayette County, West Virginia, in the early 1930s. After many years of relative neglect, The Book of the Dead has recently returned to print and has become the subject of critical attention. In Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead, " Tim Dayton continues that study by characterizing the literary and political world of Rukeyser at the time she wrote The Book of the Dead. Rukeyser was very much a figure of the "cultural front, " and her poem clearly emerges from 1930s radicalism, as well as from Rukeyser's deeply felt calling to poetry. After describing the world from which the poem emerged, Dayton sets up the fundamental factual matters with which the poem is concerned, detailing the circumstances of the Gauley tunnel tragedy and establishing a framework derived from the classical tripartite division of the genres--epic, lyric, and dramatic. He looks at the lyrical, documentary, and meditative sections of the poem, which presents reflections upon the significance, particularly the historical significance, of the Gauley tunnel tragedy. For Rukeyser, that disaster was the emblem of a history in which those who do the work of the world are denied control of the vast powers they bring intobeing. Dayton also studies the critical reception of The Book of the Dead and determines that while the contemporary response was mixed, most reviewers felt that Rukeyser had certainly attempted something of value and significa

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Muriel Rukeyser's: The Book of the Dead

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Muriel Rukeyser and the Gauley Tunnel Tragedy

2: Introductory Poems and Lyrical Monologues

3: The Documentary Poems

4: The Meditations and a Coda

5: The Critical Reception of the Book of the Dead

6: The Book of the Dead: a Vision of History

Appendix

Works Cited

Index
7 .

Lyric and Document in Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead, in Journal of Modern Literature
by Tim Dayton. 18 pgs.

Journal Article

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8 .

A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," in Twentieth Century Literature
by Shoshana Wechsler. 15 pgs.

Journal Article

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9 .

Ecology, Egyptology and Dialectics in Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," in Mosaic (Winnipeg)
by Leonard M. Scigaj. 18 pgs.

Journal Article

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10 .

The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature ("The Middle Generation: Muriel Rukeyser and Karl Shapiro" begins on p. 156)
by Michael P. Kramer, Hana Wirth-Nesher. 299 pgs.

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Jewish Americans produced some of the most important writing in the U.S. in the twentieth century. This Companion addresses the distinctive Jewish American contribution to American literary criticism, poetry and popular culture. It establishes the broadest possible context for the discussion of Jewish American identity as it intersects with the corpus of American literature. Featuring a chronology and guide to further reading, the volume is valuable to scholars and students alike.

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Contributors

Chronology

Introduction: Jewish American Literatures in the Making

References and Suggested Further Reading

1: Beginnings and Ends: the Origins of Jewish American Literary History

References and Suggested Further Reading

2: Imagining Judaism in America

References and Suggested Further Reading

3: Of Crucibles and Grandfathers: the East European Immigrants

References and Suggested Further Reading

4: Coney Island, Usa: America in the Yiddish Literary Imagination

References and Suggested Further Reading

5: Hebrew Literature in America

References and Suggested Further Readings

6: Traces of the Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing

References and Selected Further Readings

7: Accents of the Future: Jewish American Popular Culture

References and Suggested Further Readings

8: Jewish American Poetry

References and Selected Further Readings

9: Jewish American Writers on the Left

References and Selected Further Readings

10: Jewish American Renaissance

References and Selected Further Readings

11: The Holocaust in the Jewish American Literary Imagination

References and Selected Further Readings

12: Jewish American Women Writers and the Race Question

References and Selected Further Readings

13: On Contemporary Literary Theory and Jewish American Poetics

References and Selected Further Readings

14: Identity Matters: Contemporary Jewish American Writing

References and Selected Further Readings

Index

Cambridge Companions to Literature
11 .

A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Discussion of Muriel Rukeyser begins on p. 224)
by Jack Myers, David Wojahn. 302 pgs.

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Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1: Introduction: Recircuiting the American Past

Notes

2: Modernism Comes to American Poetry: 1908-1920

Notes

3: Helmet of Fire: American Poetry in the 1920s

Notes

4: Utopocalypse: American Poetry in the 1930s

Notes

5: Constructing a New Stage: The Poetry of the 1940s

Notes

6: The "Forbidden Planet" of Character: The Revolutions of the 1950s

Notes

7: A Quilt in Shades of Black: The Black Aesthetic in Twentieth-Century African American Poetry

Notes

8: American Poetry in the 1960s

Notes

9: The Demise of the "Delicate Prisons": The Women's Movement in Twentieth- Century American Poetry

Notes

10: American Poetry: 1970-1990

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index
12 .

Space in America: Theory, History, Culture ("Water and 'The Land's Disease': Poetics and Politics of Muriel Rukeyser's 'The Book of the Dead'" begins on p.193)
by Klaus Benesch, Kerstin Schmidt. 588 pgs.

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Concepts of Space in American Culture

Theory Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object

Where Are We? Some Methodological Reflections on Space, Place, and Postmodern Reality

The Subject-Object Paradigm: Conflict and Convergence in Theories of Landscape, Consciousness, and Techno- Scape since Emerson and Thoreau

Multiplicity: Foldings in Architectural and Literary Landscapes

Between, Beyond, Elsewhere: Mapping the Zones and Borderlands of Critical Discourse

Landscape / Nature Foundational Space, Technological Narrative

Waste and Race: An Introduction to Sustainability and Equity

The Cultural Spaces of Southern California: From Colonial Conquest to Postborder Region

Simulated Safaris: Reading African Landscapes in the U.S.

Water and "The Land's Disease": Poetics and Politics of Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" Gerd Hurm

Technoscape / Architecture / Urban Utopia a Brief Introduction to Architectural Body

The Architectural Body—landing Sites

Urban Exodus? the Future of the City

Envisioning Progress at Chicago's White City Astrid Boger

Where Every Woman May Be a Queen: Gender, Politics, and Visual Space at the Chicago World's Fair, 1893 Tracey Jean Boisseau

Literature Charles Sealsfield's and Ferdinand Kürnberger's Spatial Constructions of America Joseph C Schopp

Man Is Not Himself Only: Senses of Place in American Nature Writing

Interior and Exterior Spaces: Versions of the Self in the American Novel around 1900

Moving Earth: On Earthquakes and American Culture in Arthur C Clarke's Sf-Novel Richter 10 Florian Dombois

'Just Driving': Contemporary Road Novels and the Trivial- Ity of the Outlaw Existence Ruth Mayer

Sites of Community, Sites of Contest: The Formation of Urban Space in the American West

Borders and Catastrophes: T.C. Boyle's Californian Ecol- Ogy Elisabeth SchÄfer-WÜnsche

Performance / Film / Visual Arts Theatrical Space and Mediatized Culture

Dancing the Digital: American and European Visions of Digital Bodies in Digital Spaces

Slow Spaces Remarks on the Music of John Cage

African-American Contestations of Public and Ceremonial Space during the Civil War: Freedom Jubilees, 1861-1865

The Ring and the Stage: African Americans in Parisian Public and Imaginary Space before World War I

Belizaire the Cajun and the Post-Codofil Renaissance of Cajun Cultural Capital and Space

Brooklyn Bridge: Sign and Symbol in the Works of Hart Crane and Joseph Stella

Contested Space: Washington Crossing the Delaware as a Site of American Cultural Memory

Contributors
13 .

A Library of Literary Criticism: Modern American Literature ("Rukeyser, Muriel (1913- )" begins on p. 410)
by Dorothy Nyren, Dorothy Nyren. 554 pgs.

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Foreword

Periodicals Represented

Adams, Henry (1838-1918)

Agee, James (1909-1955)

Aiken, Conrad (1889- )

Algren, Nelson (1909- )

Anderson, Maxwell (1888-1959)

Anderson, Sherwood (1876-1941)

Auchincloss, Louis (1917- )

Auden, W. H. (1907-)

Babbitt, Irving (1865-1933)

Baldwin, James (1924- )

Barnes, Djuna (1900- )

Barry, Philip (1896-1949)

Behrman, S. N. (1893- )

Bellow, Saul (1915- )

BenÉT, Stephen Vincent (1898-1943)

Bierce, Ambrose (1842-1914?)

Bishop, Elizabeth (1911- )

Bishop, John Peale (1892-1944)

Blackmur, Richard (1904- )

Bodenheim, Maxwell (1893-1954)

Bogan, Louise (1897- )

Bowles, Paul (1910- )

Brooks, Cleanth (1906- )

Brooks, Van Wyck (1886- )

Buck, Pearl (1892- )

Burke, Kenneth (1897-)

Burns, John Horne (1916-1953)

Cabell, James Branch (1879-)

Caldwell, Erskine (1903- )

Capote, Truman (1924- )

Cather, Willa (1873-1947)

Ciardi, John (1916-)

Clark, Walter Van Tilburg (1908- )

Cowley, Nalcolm (1898- )

Cozzens, James Gould (1903- )

Crane, Hart (1899-1932)

Crane, Stephen (1871-1900)

Cullen, Countee (1903-1946)

Cummings, Edward Estlin (1894- )

Dickinson, Emily (1830-1886)

Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) (1886- )

Dos Passos, John (1896- )

Dreiser, Theodore (1871-1945)

Eberhart, Richard (1904-)

Edmonds, Walter

Eliot, T. S. (1888- )

Ellison, Ralph (1914- )

Farrell, James Thomas (1904- )

Fast, Howard (1904- )

Faulkner, William (1897- )

Fearing, Kenneth (1902- )

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879-1958)

Fisher, Vardis (1895- )

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940)

Fitzgerald, Robert (1910- )

Fletcher, John Gould (1886-1950)

Fowlie, Wallace (1908- )

Frost, Robert (1875- )

Garrigue, Jean (1914- )

Ginsberg, Allen (1926- )

Glasgow, Ellen (1874-1945)

Gold, Herbert (1924- )

Goyen, William (1918- )

Gregory, Horace (1898- )

Guthrie A. B., Jr. (1901- )

Hayes, Alfred (1911- )

Hearn, Lafcadio (1850-1904)

Hellman, Lillian (1905- )

Hemingway, Ernest (1898- )

Hersey, John (1914- )

Howard, Sidney (1891-1939)

Howells, William Dean (1837-1920)

Hughes, Langston (1902- )

Inge, William (1913- )

Jackson, Shirley (1919- )

James, Henry (1843-1916)

Jarell, Randall (1914- )

Jeffers, Robinson (1887- )

Kantor, Mackinlay (1904- )

Kerouac, Jack (1922- )

Kingsley, Sidney (1906- )

Kreymborg, Alfred (1883- )

Kunitz, Stanley (1905- )

Lardner, Ring (1885-1933)

Levin, Meyer (1905- )

Lewis, Sinclair (1885-1951)

Lewisohn, Ludwig (1882-1956)

Lindsay, Vachel (1879-1931)

London, Jack (1876-1916)

Lowell, Amy (1874-1925)

Lowell, Robert (1917- )

Mccarthy, Mary (1912- )

Mccullers, Carson (1917- )

Macleish, Archibald (1892- )

Mailer, Norman (1923- )

Malamud, Bernard (1914- )

Marquand, John P. (1893- )

Masters, Edgar Lee (1868-1950)

Mencken, H. L. (1880-1950)

Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892-1950)

Miller, Arthur (1915- )

Miller, Henry (1891- )

Moody, William Vaughan (1869-1910)

Moore, Marianne (1887- )

Moore, Merrill (1903-1957)

Morris, Wright (1910- )

Nln, Anais (1903- )

Norris, Frank (1870-1902)

O'Connor, Flannery (1926- )

Odets, Clifford (1906- )

O'Neill, Eugene (1888-1953)

Parker, Dorothy (1893- )

Patchen, Kenneth (1911- )

Porter Katherine Anne (1894- )

Pound, Ezra (1885- )

Ransom, John Crowe (1888- )

Rexroth, Kenneth (1905- )

Rice, Elmer (1892- )

Richter, Conrad (1890- )

Roberts, Elizabeth Madox (1886-1941)

Roberts, Kenneth (1885-1957)

Roethke, Theodore (1908- )

Rukeyser, Muriel (1913- )

Salinger, J. D. (1919- )

Sandburg, Carl (1878- )

Santayana, George (1863-1952)

Saroyan, William (1908- )

Sarton, May (1912- )

Schulberg, Budd (1914- )

Schwartz, Delmore (1913- )

Scott, Winfield Townley (1910- )

Shapiro, Karl (1913- )

Shaw, Irwin (1913- )

Sherwood, Robert (1896-1855)

Sinclair, Upton (1878- )

Stafford, Jean (1915- )

Stegner, Wallace (1909- )

Steinbeck, John (1902- )

Styron, William (1925- )

Tate, Allen (1899- )

Taylor, Peter (1917- )

Thurber, James (1894- )

Trilling, Lionel (1905- )

Twain, Mark (1835-1910)

Van Doren, Mark (1894- )

Van Druten, John (1901-1957)

Viereck, Peter (1919- )

Warren, Robert Penn (1905- )

Welty, Eudora (1909- )

Wescott, Glenway (1901- )

West, Nathanael (1906-1940)

Wharton, Edith (1862-1937)

Wheelock, John (1886- )

Wheelwright, John Brooks (1897-1940)

Wilbur, Richard (1921- )

Wilder, Thornton (1897- )

Williams, Tennessee (1914- )

Wilson, Edmund (1895- )

Winters, Yvor (1900)

Wolfe, Thomas (1900-1938)

Wright, Richard (1908- )
14 .

Aggression: A Social Psychological Analysis ("A Student's Memoir of Muriel Rukeyser" begins on p. 124)
by Leonard Berkowitz. 368 pgs.

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Introduction

Contents

Chapter 1: Instinct Conceptions of Aggression

Chapter 2: The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis

Conclusions

Chapter 3: Situational Determinants of the Strength of the Instigation to Aggression

Summary

Chapter 4: The Inhibition of Aggressive Acts

Summary

Chapter 5: The Nature and Target of the Aggressive Response

Summary

Chapter 6: Intergroup Hostility: 1. Displacement Reactions

Introduction

Summary

Chapter 7: Intergroup Hostility: II. Situational Conditions Enhancing or Reducing Conflict

Summary

Chapter 8: Catharsis

Summary

Chapter 9: Violence in the Mass Media

Introduction

Summary

Chapter 10: The Operation and Development of Aggressive Personalities

Summary

Chapter II: Aggression in Crime, Homicides, and Suicides

Summary

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

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