Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.
Read more about Muriel Rukeyser: Early Life, Activism and Writing, In Other Media, Works
Famous quotes by muriel rukeyser:
“Came to Ajanta cave, the painted space of the breast,
the real world where everything is complete,
there are no shadows, the forms of incompleteness,
The great cloak blows in the light, rider and horse arrive,
the shoulders turn and every gift is made.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.
...
No more masks! No more mythologies!”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Erasing the failure of weeks with level fingers,
she sleeks the fine hair, combing: ‘You’ll look fine tomorrow!”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“Those who speak of our culture as dead or dying have a quarrel with life, and I think they cannot understand its terms, but must endlessly repeat the projection of their own desires.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)