Effort at Speech Between Two People (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Muriel Rukeyser
- First Published: 1935
- Type of Work: Lyric
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Love or romance, Gender roles, Autobiography, Communication, Women, Speech
The Poem
“Effort at Speech Between Two People” appeared in Muriel Rukeyser’s first book of poetry, Theory of Flight, which was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize when Rukeyser was twenty-one years old. The poem is a lyric meditation on the difficulty of communication. Its thirty-six lines are divided into seven unrhymed stanzas; four stanzas of six lines each alternate with three stanzas of four lines each. The colons that appear at the beginning of each stanza give an illusion of alternating speakers, but the content of the stanzas does not seem to...
[The entire page is 1514 words long]
