Keywords

Muriel Rukeyser; Spanish Civil War; modernism; World War II poetry

Abstract

Throughout her career, Muriel Rukeyser published works in a variety of forms—poems, prose, translations, biographies, and scripts for films and musicals—on a wide range of topics, most famously the silicosis tragedy at Gauley Bridge in The Book of the Dead (1938) but also on the Spanish Civil War and World War II in “Letter to the Front” (1944), women’s liberation in “The Poem as Mask” (1968), and the imprisonment of South Korean poet Kim Chi Ha in “The Gates” (1976). However, criticism of Rukeyser’s work typically disregards this variety. She is most often characterized either as a young, left wing, experimental modernist poet based on her two poetry volumes from the 1930s—Theory of Flight (1935) and U.S. 1 (1938)—or as forerunner and mentor to second-wave feminist poets in her poems from the 1960s and 1970s. Such approaches to Rukeyser’s work often simplify or ignore her poems about the Spanish Civil War and WWII from the 1940s and 1950s. In 2013, one hundred years after her birth, it is time to reexamine Rukeyser as a war poet and acknowledge the diversity of her war poetry.War is a constant threat in her poems from the 1930s up to the 1970s. Rukeyser’s theories poetry’s role during wartime are most clearly articulated in The Life of Poetry, a compilation of her lectures at Vassar given throughout the 1940s in response to the growing threat of fascist forces. These lectures reveal the influence of visual and cinematic theories on Rukeyser’s ideas about poetic form. Her preoccupation with the relationship between words and images in these lectures corresponds to her experiences working for the Graphics Division of the US government’s Office of War Information (OWI) on war posters in 1943 and her curating of an exhibition based on those works, titled Words at War at the New York Public Library in the summer of 1943. In The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser compares the movement of images in film to the combination of images in poetry. Her discussion of the synergy created through the juxtaposition of images recalls the theories of cinematic montage proposed by the Russian, silent film director Sergei Eisenstein. In her lectures, Rukeyser claims that the famous montage stair-sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin is analogous to the interplay of distinct images in a poem to create a unified meaning. Several critics have analyzed the use of documentary film techniques in Rukeyser’s most famous poem The Book of the Dead to help make sense of that poem’s complex form, yet her use of cinematic montage techniques in her Spanish Civil War and WWII poems has not yet been examined. Eisenstein’s theory of montage sheds light on Rukeyser’s experiments with poetic form in war poems such as “Wake Island,” “Third Elegy: The Fear of Form,” and “Letter to the Front.”

Date Created

October 2013

https://works.bepress.com/rachel-edford/9/download/

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