Politically, she is a Left Winger and a revolutionary. She speaks for her part of the generation born “in Prinzip's year” that found the world they grew up in too bitterly tainted by that year to accept.
We focus on our times, destroying you, fathers
in the long ground—you have given strange birth
to us who turn against you in our blood,
she says in “The Blood Is Justified” and again
I do not say : Forgive, to my kindred dead,
only : Understand my treason, See I betray you kissing,
I overthrow your milestones weeping among your tombs.
I do not intend to add, in this preface, to the dreary and unreal discussion about unconscious fascists, conscious proletarians, and other figures of straw which has afflicted recent criticism with head noises and small specks in front of the eyes. But I will remark that when Miss Rukeyser speaks her politics—and she speaks with sincerity and fire—she does so like a poet, not like a slightly worn phonograph record, and she does so in poetic terms. For evidence, I offer the section “The Lynchings of Jesus” in the long poem “Theory of Flight”; the short “shot” of the coal-mine in the elegy for Ruth Lehman and the poem “The Blood Is Justified,” among others. They are worth reading, to see what a young and talented person thinks of certain contemporary things—and how a poet of talent can make poetry out of them.
I use the word “shot” advisedly—for the mind behind these poems is an urban and a modern one. It has fed on the quick jerk of the news-reel, the hard lights in the sky, the long deserted night-street, the take-off of the plane from the ground. It knows nature as well—the look of landscape, the quietness of hills. But its experience has been largely an urban experience, and it is interesting to see the poetry of youth so based. When Miss Rukeyser thinks of energy, she thinks of a dynamo rather than a river, an electric spark rather than a trampling hoof—and that is interesting, too.
Perhaps that makes her verse sound like verse of the “Oh, Grandmother Dynamo, what great big wheels you have!” school—and that, most decidedly, it is not. Witness “Song for Dead Children,” “Breathing Landscape,” and the beautiful and original “Thousands of Days,” with its serene and successful assonance. She can write powerfully; she can also write delicately, to a new and light-footed pattern. Her technique is sure, and is developing in original directions. Her long poem, “Theory of Flight,” is a rather unusual achievement for a girl in her twenties. It has passages of confusion and journalistic passages, it also has passages that remind one of structural steel. There is a largeness of attempt about it which is one of the surest signs of genuine ability. Her later lyrics, particularly the ones I have mentioned, are more successfully and surely integrated. But only an original mind could have accomplished both.
Miss Rukeyser is twenty-one. She was born and brought up in New York City and has attended Vassar, the Columbia Summer School, and the Roosevelt School of the Air (the latter to gather material for “Theory of Flight”). At present, she is on the staff of “New Theatre.” I think we may expect a good deal from her in the future. And it would seem to me that in this first book she displays an accomplishment which ranks her among the most interesting and individual of our younger poets.
Rukeyser addressed the title and themes of TOF in a letter of June 23, 1978, to translator Jan Berg: “The Roosevelt School of Air was the flying school in New York, connected with Roosevelt Field on Long Island. I could not get my parents' permission to study or fly, and I was a minor, so I worked in the school's office…in exchange for my tuition at ground school. The first part of the mechanics' course was called Theory of Flight, the title of my first book. It was a period of radial engines, cowlings, and the cry of “Contact” when the starter took hold. The hope of young mechanics was that there would be mechanical islands at two or three points in the Atlantic to allow for refueling of heavy cargo planes. This was several years after Lindbergh. To me, the image of flight and return to ground was extremely important, particularly in relation to freedom and heresy and to what I felt to be their ancestors and their rhythms” (LCII).
Poem Out of Childhood
1
Not Angles, angels: According to legend, the young Pope Gregory (590–604), when told that the fair-haired young boys he saw being sold as slaves in Britain were called “Angles,” responded, “Non Angli, sed angeli” (Not Angles, angels).
while the syphilitic woman turned her mouldered face / intruding upon Brahms: In 1933, the year of his centenary, the work of composer Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) was being celebrated with frequent performances. Brahms became lovers with Clara Schumann, widow of his mentor Richard Schumann, after Schumann's death by syphilis.
Loeb and Leopold: In June 1924, teenagers Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were tried and convicted of kidnapping and murdering fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks just to see if they could commit the “perfect crime.” Author Kevin Tierney suggests: “Inevitably Leopold and Loeb were regarded as examples of a golden generation gone wrong, symbols of a postwar emancipation that was both envied and feared by their elders” (328).
Not Sappho, Sacco: As an indication of Rukeyser's longstanding interest in Sacco, see Daniel Gabriel's narrative long poem, Sacco and Vanzetti, which has a foreword by Muriel Rukeyser. Also see Rukeyser's essay, “The Flown Arrow: The Aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case.”
2
Prinzip: Gavrilo Princip (alternate spelling), the Serbian nationalist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. Though Rukeyser was actually born in 1913, having been born in December of that year, she often viewed herself as more connected, by birth, to the following year, as illustrated in the poem, “Born in December” (BW).
playing in sandboxes to escape paralysis: A common belief at the time of Rukeyser's childhood was that plenty of outdoor play would deter the chances of a young child contracting polio.
Allies Advance, we see, / Six Miles South to Soissons: the first newspaper headline that the young poet was able to read on her own (see LP 206). The Allies' advance to Soissons took place in the summer of 1918. Rukeyser would have been younger than five years old at the time.
watching / the music and the shoulders and how the war was over: One of the first public events the young Rukeyser remembered from her childhood was the announcement of the end of World War I on November 7, 1918—eleven days before the actual armistice occurred (LP 190).
In a Dark House
Both of the lines annotated below are engraved on the facade of the New York Public Library, a location Rukeyser describes further in the poem, e.g., “the bird-marked stones” and “shallow-carven letters”. In TF and CP, Rukeyser indicated the allusion with an asterisk next to each of these lines, and a footnote that read simply “New York Public Library.”
Beauty Old Yet Ever New: from John Greenleaf Whittier's “The Shadow and the Light,” stanza 21.
But Of All Things Truth Beareth Away / The Victory: From the Apocrypha, 1 Esdras 3:12.
Notes for a Poem
A close reading of this poem suggests that Rukeyser is beginning her work in these “notes” for her great long poem “The Book of the Dead” (US1). The first line, “Here are the long fields inviolate of thought” echoes in the first line of the later poem, where she expresses a similar desire to geographically locate the poem: “These are roads to take when you think of your country”.
Place-Rituals
Tradition of This Acre
Semiramis: Early Assyrian/Babylonian Queen, commonly associated with the beginnings of goddess worship.
Wooden Spring
How horrible late spring is, with the full death of the frozen tight bulbs and The ghosts swim, lipless, eyeless, upward: These images recall key attitudes and images in “The Burial of the Dead” section of T. S. Eliot's “The Wasteland”—“April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land” and “the drowned Phoenician Sailor / (Those are pearls that were his eye
s. Look!).” Rukeyser seems to be, among other things, parodying Eliot's bleak vision of modernity—see, for example, her lines: “but we must strip nascent earth bare of green mystery. / Trees do not grow high as skyscrapers in my town”.
Wedding Presents
2
Where'er you walk, cool gales will fan the glade /…trees, where you sit, will crowd into a shade: These lines are taken from Alexander Pope's, “Pastorals,” (Summer, 73); they are also sung as part of Handel's opera, “Semele.”
The Gyroscope
This poem is an early example of what became Rukeyser's lifelong interest in science and technology and her interest in fusing the exploration of scientific principles and inventions with emotional or psychological explorations (e.g., “All directions are out, / all desire turns outward”).
The Lynchings of Jesus
2 The Committee-Room
Tom Mooney: (1882–1942) Socialist organizer and union activist who was convicted (and later pardoned) of murder as a result of a bomb explosion at a San Francisco parade in 1916. Mooney's initial death sentence resulted in years of agitation and protest by his political supporters.
Hilliard: According to a report titled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, published by the NAACP (New York, 1919), a Henry Hilliard was murdered by lynching in Tyler, Smith County, Texas on October 29, 1895 (96). The details of the lynching represented in this poem seem, in fact, to be from those of a Robert Henson Hilliard, whose lynching in Tyler, Texas in 1897 was described in the same NAACP report. Rukeyser has notes from this report among her papers in LCI, which quotes from a traveling exhibition about Robert Henson Hilliard's lynching advertised in a poster produced by the Breckinridge-Suggs Company. It announces: “We have sixteen large views under powerful magnifying lens now on exhibition. These views are true to life and show the Negro's attack, the scuffle, the murder, body as found, etc. With eight views of the trial and burning…. Don't fail to see this.” The report of the crime, written by an eyewitness, is also recorded in the NAACP report. It documents that Hilliard's lower limbs “burned off before he lost consciousness and his body looked to be burned to the hollow. Was it decreed by an avenging God as well as an avenging people that his sufferings should be prolonged beyond the ordinary endurance of mortals?” (12).
3 The Trial
Godfrey's Jerusalem: The crusader Godfrey of Bouillon (1058–1100), regarded by some as the ideal Christian knight, assumed control of Jerusalem after conquering the city in 1099 and killing its Muslim and Jewish citizens.
Calas: (1698–1762) The French merchant whose execution for allegedly hanging his own son in retaliation for his son's conversion to Catholicism inspired the writer Voltaire to fight for religious tolerance within the French legal system.
Herndon: Angelo Herndon, a nineteen-year-old African American Communist, arrested in June 1932 for attempting to incite insurrection against the state of Georgia. He was convicted in 1934.
Nine dark boys: In March 1931, nine African American teenagers (ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen) were arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama, for allegedly raping two white women. In the subsequent trial, eight were convicted and given the death penalty and the ninth was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. What came to be known as the case of the “Scottsboro Boys” sparked international outrage as many believed that a racist social climate prevented any possibility of a fair trial. At the time of writing this poem, Rukeyser had already traveled to Alabama to cover one of the Scottsboro trials for the leftist student newspaper, Student Review. See Rukeyser's first-person narrative of attending the court hearings: “From Scottsboro to Decatur.”
The Tunnel
2
tiger it may rage abroad: An allusion to ‘“Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. With Notes” by Percy Bysse Shelley, which includes the lines, “And silent those sweet lips, / Once breathing eloquence / That might have soothed a tiger's rage”.
dead and not yet arisen: An allusion to 1 Corinthians 15:15–23.
a bush upon a barren darkening plain: This may be a reference to the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's “Dover Beach” (1867), which read: “Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
Shall we losing our ego gain it: An allusion to Matthew 16:24–26.
dihedral: The angle between an airplane's wing and a horizontal line.
3
cowling: Metal cover of an airplane's engine.
The Structure of the Plane
1 The Structure of the Plane
Peter Ronsard: Pierre de Ronsard (1524–1585), celebrated French Renaissance poet who was recognized for adapting the sonnet form to the French language with great skill and beauty. One of his most famous sonnets is called “Roses,” thus perhaps Rukeyser's phrase, “Peter Ronsard finger-deep in roses”.
3 The Blood Is Justified
This section of TF both participates in and modifies the tradition of the pastoral elegy (e.g., Milton's “Lycidas”). Rukeyser dedicates “For Memory” to Ruth Lehman, a college friend who came from a wealthy family and dedicated herself to helping the poor and disenfranchised.
For Memory
Holy Dying
See “The Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying,” by Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667).
Ritual for Death
See Sir James George Frazier's “The Ritual of Death and Resurrection” in The Golden Bough, chapter 64, section 7.
City of Monuments
This poem is inspired by the events surrounding the Bonus March of 1932, in which thousands of World War I veterans marched to Washington from all over the United States to demand their benefit pay. Veterans and their families camped out in the mud flats of Anacostia before being forcibly dispersed with sabers and tear gas under the order of President Hoover.
Citation for Horace Gregory
Horace Gregory: (1898–1982) Well-known American poet and critic; husband of poet Marya Zaturenska and friend and mentor of Rukeyser. Coauthor with Zaturenska of the significant critical work, A History of American Poetry, 1900–1940 (1946). Rukeyser dedicated her second book, U.S. 1, to Gregory.
Cats and a Cock
Eleanor Clark: (1913–1996) Widely admired as a travel writer, Eleanor Clarke was also a reviewer, essayist, and novelist. As a young woman, she “became a conspicuous part of [New York] City's intellectual left, writing for The Partisan Review, The New Republic, and The Nation” (New York Times 19 Feb. 1996: B5). Clark and her older sister, Eunice, were good friends of Rukeyser's while they were at Vassar, and Rukeyser and Eleanor coedited a literary magazine called Housatonic in the summer of 1932. Eleanor shared Rukeyser's political passions and participated with her in labor marches and protests held in Poughkeepsie and New York City.
Rosa Luxemburg: (1871–1919) Political thinker and revolutionary who contributed significantly to the development of Socialist, Marxist, and Communist discourse. She was killed in January 1919 because of her antiwar declarations, and her body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal.
The Blood Is Justified
Augusta Coller: Rukeyser's paternal grandmother who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
By these roads shall we come upon our country: This line clearly leads into the opening line of “The Book of the Dead” in Rukeyser's next book, U.S. 1.
U.S. 1. New York: Covici Friede, 1938.
Rukeyser's original dedication read: “for Horace Gregory.”
Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:
Some of these poems have been printed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Life and Letters To-Day, Forum, New Caravan, New Masses, Nation, New Republic, New Republic Anthology, Fiction Parade, Common Sense, Partisan Review (1936), Signatures, Transition, Best Poems of 1937, and New Letters in America.
1 The Book of the Dead
Rukeyser provided the following endnote regarding “The Book of the Dead” a
t the end of U.S. 1. The note's reference to “a planned work, U.S. 1.” seems, on first reading, to be an error, appearing as it does at the back of U.S. 1. It is possible, however, that Rukeyser was working at this time toward a larger work that she intended to call, once again, U.S. 1. To date, the editors have not found any archival material to resolve this question.
“The Book of the Dead” will eventually be one part of a planned work, U.S. 1. This is to be a summary poem of the life of the Atlantic coast of this country, nourished by the communications which run down it. Gauley Bridge is inland, but it was created by theories, systems and workmen from many coastal sections—factors which are, in the end, not regional or national. Local images have one kind of reality. U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.
The material in “The Book of the Dead” comes from many sources, the chief of which include:
An Investigation Relating to Health Conditions of Workers Employed in the Construction and Maintenance of Public Utilities. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee of Labor, House of Representatives, Seventy-fourth Congress, Second Session, on H. J. Res. 449, January 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 29 and February 4, 1936. United States Printing Office. Washington: 1936.
Congressional Record, Seventy-fourth Congress, Second Session, Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 1936.
Other documents, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead (in various translations), magazine and newspaper articles on Gauley Bridge, letters, and photographs.
I should like to thank Betty and George Marshall; Glenn Griswold, M.C., Fifth District, Indiana; Nancy Naumburg; Eunice Clark; the work of many investigators and writers, notably Philippa Allen; who made the poem possible.
“The Book of the Dead” focuses on what is now acknowledged to be one of the greatest American industrial tragedies: the building and mining of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, between March 1930 and December 1931 (see Cherniack, The Hawk's Nest Incident). Unsafe drilling conditions resulted in death by silicosis poisoning of many workers, the largest percentage of whom were African American migrant workers from the south. Rukeyser also published a filmscript treatment of this incident in Films: A Quarterly Discussion and Analysis.
Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser Page 57
