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Muriel Rukeyser Quotes (1913-1980)
Poet, Activist
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About Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser (15 December 1913 – 12 February 1980) was an American poet and political activist, most famous for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.
Best Muriel Rukeyser Quotes
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“The use of truth is its communication. (p 27)”
“"I speak to you. You speak to me. Is that fragile?"”
“To be against war is not enough, it is hardly a beginning.”
“O for God's sake
they are connected
underneath.”
they are connected
underneath.”
“Many of our poems are such monuments. They offer the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility.”
“I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.”
Most mornings I would be more or less insane.”
“What do you want — a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.”
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.”
“The great ideas are always emerging, to be available to all men and women. And one hope of our lives is the communication of these truths.”
“Here is your road, tying
you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.
“I was told by friends, when it was a matter of deciding to go ahead and have a child, that I would have to choose between the child and poetry, and I said no. I was not going to make that choice; I would choose both.”
“it was suggested to me in my adolescence, it would be a good idea if I married a doctor, and when he was out on housecalls I could write my poems. Now of course we have no housecalls and we have women poets-the culture has changed to that extent.”
Muriel Rukeyser Quotes by Topic
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Muriel Rukeyser on Poetry 2 quotes
“Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry”
Muriel Rukeyser on Completeness
“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.”
Muriel Rukeyser on War
Muriel Rukeyser on Tradition
Muriel Rukeyser on Now
“However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole. If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.”
What Muriel Rukeyser Said About Others
Discover personal opinions Muriel Rukeyser shared regarding contemporaries.
Muriel Rukeyser on Paul Cézanne 2 quotes
“Cézanne paints solids, but we reach them beyond the canvas.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Josiah Willard Gibbs 2 quotes
“...only one man lived who could understand Gibbs's papers. That was Maxwell, and now he is dead.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Marcel Proust 2 quotes
“The questions are raised, even with the older questions, like Proust's madeleine, still setting challenges to the sciences.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Emily Dickinson 2 quotes
“Emily Dickinson's strictness, sometimes almost a slang of strictness, speaks with an intellectually active, stimulated quick music.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Charlie Chaplin 2 quotes
“exclusively verbal humor have been conveyed by Harpo Marx, who with Charles Chaplin, Jimmy Savo, and Danny Kaye, ranks as a master artist of pantomime.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Herbert Read 2 quotes
“"A poet has to undergo a process of birth and growth: he does not discover himself until he has rejected the alternate selves represented by the poetry already existing in the world," says Herbert Read.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Henri Poincaré 2 quotes
“I rely for my information about mathematical creation on such sources as Poincaré, who speaks of the mind seeming to act only of itself and on itself, selecting, making only the useful combinations, choosing, and finally being struck, as by strong light, with certainty.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Marsden Hartley
“Hartley knew there were many ways to be brave”
Muriel Rukeyser on Walt Whitman
“Whitman is a "bad influence"; that is, he cannot be imitated.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Victor Hugo
“I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Alexandre Dumas
“I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac.”
Muriel Rukeyser on Honoré de Balzac
“I was exposed to Dickens, Dumas, Victor Hugo, de Maupassant, Balzac.”
Quotes About Muriel Rukeyser
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Muriel Rukeyser from others.
Dorothy Allison on Muriel Rukeyser
“Muriel Rukeyser gave me the notion, the promise of what art could be....Nothing stopped her, neither war nor fear, shame or confusion. She knew fear but did not give into it. She went through fear as she went through hatred, coming out the other side into hope and I took her life as an ideal.... It was from her that I learned that art-poetry, fiction, story-art is not product, art is life itself. The use of poetry, she said, is usable truth and such was the nature of her passionate courage she made me believe her. I rank Muriel Rukeyser with Walt Whitman, the essential American poet, democratic at the level of hope. Lifesaving. Indispensable. And even now when I feel myself overcome with my own fears and confusion, she draws me out every time.... She is life-saving still.”
Bettina Aptheker on Muriel Rukeyser
“Muriel Rukeyser's first poem in her first book of poetry published in 1935 begins: "Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry." And in her tribute to the German graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz, Rukeyser asked: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?" And answered: "The world would split open." This is not the poetry of contrivance; this is the poetry of naming, of philosophy, framing a set of ideas through which to interpret our realities as women.”
Eavan Boland blurb for on Muriel Rukeyser
“Muriel Rukeyser is an essential and defining voice. Few poets have combined rigorous perspective with ethical witness in the way her work manages to do. Few poets manage to love the world in as challenging and musical a language as she provides.”
Elly Bulkin on Muriel Rukeyser
“the writers Muriel Rukeyser and Ruth Seid (pen name: Jo Sinclair), two strongly Jewish-identified, anti-racist white lesbians.”
Jan Freeman on Muriel Rukeyser
“This book ranks among essential works of twentieth century literature; it is saving, challenging. In The Life of Poetry Rukeyser examines the ways in which poetry can revive democracy and improve the quality of life for the people of the United States, and for poets, artists, and creative individuals everywhere...The Life of Poetry is not a book of criticism nor is it a literary treatise. It is a book that breaks boundaries and assumptions about the place of literature and the arts in American life. Rukeyser suggests that by living with the senses and the imagination open, living with poetry, human beings can prosper and attain peace. Remarkably, Rukeyser's words are as necessary and provocative now as when the book was first published, in 1949.”
Reginald Gibbons blurb for on Muriel Rukeyser
“Rukeyser was the most courageous poet of her brilliant generation. Her example and her greatest works are indispensable to our understanding of America, and to our own ability to say the truth.”
Marilyn Hacker blurb for on Muriel Rukeyser
“one of the twentieth century's germinal writers.”
Anne F. Herzog on Muriel Rukeyser
“An "American genius," our "twentieth-century Whitman." Anne Sexton and Erica Jong both referred to Muriel Rukeyser as "the mother of everyone."”
Pearl London on Muriel Rukeyser
“An awfully long time ago and a very short time ago, in one of the early books, Muriel wrote that "poems flowered from the bone." I always think of that line because it somehow seems to be both a prophecy and a summing up of all the work that has taken place in the books that came later.”
Eileen Myles on Muriel Rukeyser
“Muriel Rukeyser unspools one of the most passionate arguments I've ever read for the notion that art creates meeting places, that poetry creates democracy.”
Sharon Olds blurb for on Muriel Rukeyser
“One of the most important poets of our time.... Her originality, her genius, her courage illuminate our century.”
About Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser (15 December 1913 – 12 February 1980) was an American poet and political activist, most famous for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism.