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
life god trying
Try to live as if there were a God
player speech action
There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.
knowledge mean civilization
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has--the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge--infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
writing order feels
One writes in order to feel ...
imagination poetry feelings
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling . . .. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually-that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too- but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
mother remember poet
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
new-beginnings blessing all-things
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.
time seeds all-things
Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest.
personality happens
Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
three-things done forget
What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
fear
Let us not fear the hidden. Or each other.
moving emotional ideas
The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic . More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout. Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.
sacrifice
Beware of those who talk about sacrifice.
marriage lifetime
My lifetime listens to yours.