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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MURIEL RUKEYSER AND THE POETRY OF ANTIFASCISM  
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Jeremy Wang-Iverson
June 30, 2026
Rain Taxi
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_ This new collection of essays, articles, and radio scripts should
help bring renewed attention to this too-little-known modernist left
wing poet and writer. _

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_The Muriel Rukeyser Era__Selected Prose_Muriel RukeyserEds. Eric
Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-EpsteinCornell University PressEAN/UPC:
9781501771750

This year marks the ninetieth anniversary of the onset of the Spanish
Civil War, which had a profound effect on the American writer Muriel
Rukeyser (1913-1980). The days she spent in Barcelona when the war
began in July 1936 served as a source of inspiration throughout her
life, forging her commitment to antifascism and her unwavering belief
in writing’s ability to create the conditions for political change.

The unrestrained idealism expressed in Rukeyser’s work inspired
succeeding generations of American poets: Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds,
Kate Daniels, Natasha Trethewey, Daniel Borzutzky, and Solmaz Sharif
are among her legion of admirers. Many critics found her artistic
approach less convincing and her political commitments suspect, but in
recent years, with fascism once again on the rise globally, the tide
has turned in her favor, and a Rukeyser revival is firmly underway.

This is not to say that Rukeyser was neglected in her lifetime. She
won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, _Theory of
Flight_ (Yale University Press, 1935); a few years later, she was
called “the most inventive and challenging poet of the generation
which has not yet reached thirty” by Louis Untermeyer in _The
Saturday Review of Literature_. Along with winning more prestigious
awards and fellowships, she lived to see her collected poems
published—a significant capstone—and published fiction, plays,
memoirs, biographies, criticism, children’s books, and translations
of poets such as Mexico’s Octavio Paz and Sweden’s Gunnar Ekelöf.
And not incidentally for a writer committed to political activism,
Rukeyser served as president of PEN America and wrote op-eds for the
_New York Times_.

Despite her accomplishments, Rukeyser did not achieve the canonical
status that many poets and scholars believe she deserves. Partly this
is because so much of her writing has not been given the same
consideration as her poetry, but with the recent publication of _The
Muriel Rukeyser Era _(Cornell University Press, 2023), a selection of
her prose edited by Eric Keenaghan and Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, that
can begin to change.

Gathering work from the full span of Rukeyser’s life, _The Muriel
Rukeyser Era _shows the extent to which she experimented with genre
and technique in an effort to connect with larger audiences and
advocate for social justice. With many of its entries originally
written for a general readership, this anthology is an excellent
starting point to learn about Rukeyser: Here we meet a writer with
genuine concern for those struggling, and we gain a clear
understanding of her profound desire to share what she witnessed. The
volume is an inspiring reminder of the ways in which an artist can
defy a political reality and strive to create something new.

Rukeyser’s resolve to pursue this lofty project crystallized in the
days following the start of the Spanish Civil War, an experience into
which newly published pieces offer further insight. She was twenty-two
years old, and it was an improbable turn of events that led her to
Spain. Initially, she went to London, accompanying the activists
George and Elizabeth Dublin Marshall, who were researching
cooperatives. While in London, she met Robert Herring, the editor of
_Life and Letters To-Day_; Herring asked if she would go to Barcelona
to cover the People’s Olympiad, a gathering of athletes protesting
the official games held in Nazi Germany that summer. She left London
on July 18, and as Herring notes in the header for the article
Rukesyer eventually wrote: “_She was on the last train to enter
Spain after fighting began and arrived back in London on July 27th.
This was her first trip to Europe.” _

And what a trip it was: The People’s Olympiad never took place. When
Rukeyser arrived in Barcelona, as she explained in another
journalistic account included in _The Muriel Rukeyser Era_, the war
had begun:

I could never find the man who was managing the publicity for the
Olympics because he was always out on the street fighting with the
People’s Front. We were taken to dinner that night in an automobile
spangled with bullet holes, the upholstery stained with blood; the
officials apologized for the condition of the car, explaining there
had been fighting that day. 

Rukeyser returned to New York later that year and wrote the novel
_Savage Coast_, which fictionalized her experience in Spain, including
an account of falling in love with a German athlete named Otto Boch,
who was later killed fighting the fascists. The novel, written before
George Orwell’s _Homage to Catalonia_, was rejected by her publisher
and only released in 2013 by The Feminist Press. Rowena
Kennedy-Epstein, who discovered the believed-to-be-lost manuscript for
_Savage Coast _in Rukeyser’s archive at the Library of Congress,
writes in the book’s introduction that it “defies and remakes the
artistic, political, and gendered categories of twentieth-century
modernism.” Eulàlia Busquets, who has translated _Savage Coast_
into Catalan, describes it as a “documentary, biographical, and
experimental” novel, writing in her 2020 essay “Returning to
Savage Coast” (published in _Muriel Rukeyser: A Living
Archive_, /2020/05/08/eulalia-busquets-returning-to-savage-coast/
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_Savage Coast_ tells us about the things that could have been possible
but that ultimately did not happen . . . _We must go on fighting_ . .
. This is the message Rukeyser held on to as she left Spain on the
ship Ciudad de Ibiza and accepted the responsibility to tell what she
had seen the day she “was born” in Spain.

This moment of epiphany on the ship as she was evacuated from Spain is
narrated by Rukeyser in several non-fiction pieces as well. In _The
Muriel Rukeyser Era_, Keenaghan and Kennedy-Epstein include a series
of lectures that she gave at Vassar in 1940, when she was twenty-six,
that were previously part of the one book of essays published in her
lifetime, _The Life of Poetry_. This is Rukeyser from the original
introduction:

We were on a small ship, five times past our capacity in refugees,
sailing for the first port at peace. On the deck that night, people
talked quietly about what they had just seen and what it might mean to
the world . . . Suddenly, throwing his question into talk not at all
leading up to it—not seeming to—a man—a printer, several times a
refugee—asked, ‘And poetry—among all this—where is there a
place for poetry?’

_Then I began to say what I believe_.

Rukeyser’s attempts to answer the printer’s question can be traced
across several lectures, essays, and reviews in pieces included in
_The Muriel Rukeyser Era_. The most direct (and amusing) answer is in
a radio script that she prepared in 1949, aired by a San Francisco
station that summer. There are moments where Rukeyser sounds like a
writer tentatively trying a new technology—think of Joyce Carol
Oates’s earliest tweets—before she locks in:

Mrs. Melville said to her mother—and you can hear the misery of her
words—“Herman has taken to writing poetry. You need not tell
anyone, for you know how such things get around.” What is this
distaste for poetry? If you ask your friends about it, you will find,
as I have, that they will give you the same answers. Your friends may
say that they have not the _time_ for poetry. Now this is a curious
position to take; for poetry, of all the arts that live in
time—music, theater, movies, writing—poetry is the briefest and
most compact of these. 

She continues: “A poem invites a total response from you . . . A
first-rate poem, a fine poem, will reach you intellectually . . . or
may I say that when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too
. . . but the way is through emotion . . . through what we call
feeling.” 

Rukeyser could have been describing her own extraordinary poem
sequence _The Book of the Dead_, first published as part of her second
full-length collection, _U.S. 1_ (Covici Friede, 1938). Remarkably,
her trip to Spain was the second reporting trip the poet took in 1936;
earlier in the year, with photographer Nancy Naumburg, she went to
Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, where thousands worked in unsafe
conditions to build a tunnel for Union Carbide, and reported on the
1931 industrial tragedy known as the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster.
(Naumburg’s photos were meant to be published with the poem, which
was not realized until an edition published by West Virginia
University Press in 2018.)

Rukeyser revealed in _The Book of the Dead _“how the company cheated
these men out of their lives,” as Naumburg put it. She approached
her work on the poem not unlike a documentary filmmaker, as Catherine
Gander details in her book _Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: The
Poetics of Connection _(Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Documentary
was an emerging artform at the time; Rukeyser co-wrote with Ben Maddow
(a distant cousin of Rachel) the 1941 documentary short “A Place to
Live [[link removed](1941_film)],”
which was an Oscar nominee. As late as the 1970s, Gander tells us,
Rukeyser was in touch with the producer Paul Rotha about adapting _The
Book of the Dead_ into a film.

Along with her interest in film and radio, Rukeyser also worked as a
translator, biographer, and literary critic; aspects of this work are
also represented in _The Muriel Rukeyser Era_. The careful selection
of pieces, accompanied by insightful and detailed notes, provide a
coherent presentation of writings that span Rukeyser’s life, clearly
showing how key themes and ideas echoed throughout her work. The
editors’ sleuthing, subtle and penetrating, gives us a peek into
Rukeyser’s process, even how she grappled with language as she was
working. The volume amply makes its case that Rukeyser should be
considered a major American writer of the 20th Century.

Over twenty years ago, Adrienne Rich wrote that Rukeyser “created a
poetics of historical sensibility—not as nostalgia, but as a
resource to express and interpret contemporary experience and imagine
a different future.” Now, in another time of crisis, her voice is
indispensable once again—and many are listening.

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