Inspirational Quotes by Muriel Rukeyser (American Poet)

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) was an American poet and political activist. She is best known for her four decades of poetry about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Her political activism is revealed in such poems as “The Book of the Dead” (1938) and “The Gates” (1976.)

Born in New York City, Rukeyser attended private schools and attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie and Columbia University. She contributed poems to periodicals and edited literary journals. In 1935, her first volume of poetry was issued as Theory of Flight in the Yale Younger Poets series.

Rukeyser’s travels over the next few years provided material for the poems in the Mediterranean (1938,) U.S. 1 (1938,) and A Turning Wind (1939.) One of her most influential compositions was a group of poems titled The Book of the Dead (1938,) documenting the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster’s circumstances in West Virginia, where hundreds of miners died of occupational silicosis (lung disease.)

Rukeyser produced several volumes of poetry, the prose work The Life of Poetry (1949,) and books for children. She wrote the biographies Willard Gibbs: American Genius (1942; featuring the 19th-century mathematician and physicist) and The Traces of Thomas Hariot (1971; featuring the 16th-century English astronomer, mathematician.)

Rukeyser translated Octavio Paz (Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1963,) Gunnar Ekelöf (Selected Poems of Gunnar Ekelöf, 1967,) and Bertolt Brecht (Uncle Eddie’s Moustache, 1974.) Her last volume of poetry was The Collected Poems (1978.)

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