Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyserwas 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"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth15 December 1913
CountryUnited States of America
flight contradiction
Flight is intolerable contradiction.
dream action flight
Dreams are the sources of action, the meeting and the end, a resting place among the flight of things.
penalty
In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty.
american-poet brought poems
Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.
beware falls possible rest second talk
I think there is choice possible to us at any moment, as long as we live. But there is no sacrifice. There is a choice, and the rest falls away. Second choice does not exist. Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
atoms universe
The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms
feelings approach poetry-is
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
body language punctuation
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge ...
hollywood standards contempt
Hollywood works continually to keep its standard of contempt for the audience.
history buried lost
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
distance men brave
Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
made our-lives
All the poems of our lives are not yet made.
passion play giving
We sit here, very different each from the other, until the passion arrives to give us our equality, to make us part of the play, to make the play part of us.
vocabulary work-out silence
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.