About Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender, and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her 'exact generation,' Anne Sexton famously described her as 'mother of us all,' while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was 'our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda.' One of her most powerful pieces was the long poem titled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, 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.Browse all poems and texts published on Muriel Rukeyser
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
