Searching/Not Searching (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Muriel Rukeyser
- First Published: 1972
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Politicians, Faith, Bombs, Presidents, Technology
The poem “Searching/Not Searching” carries an epigraph attributed to the poet Robert Duncan: “Responsibility is to use the power to respond.” This might almost be taken as Rukeyser's motto, as her entire adult life and most of her poems responded sharply to the world events that she witnessed.
The first of the fourteen sections of “Searching/Not Searching” asks, “What kind of woman goes searching and searching?/ . . . or what man? for what magic?” The answer is that Rukeyser's kind does. Throughout the world, she “searched for that Elizabethan man,/ the lost...
[The entire page is 579 words long]
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