To enter this [A Muriel Rukeyser Reader] is to enter a life of tremendous scope, the consciousness of a woman who was a full actor and creator in her time. But in many ways Muriel Rukeyser was beyond her time—and seems, at the edge of the twenty-first century, to have grasped resources we are only now beginning to reach for: connections between history and the body, memory and politics, sexuality and public space, poetry and physical science, and much else. She spoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country's psychic geography.

It's no exaggeration to say that in the work of Muriel Rukeyser we discover new and powerful perspectives on the culture of the United States in the twentieth century, "the first century of world wars," as she called it. Her lifetime spanned two of them, along with the Spanish Civil War, the trial of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, the Depression, the New Deal, the Holocaust, the Cold War and McCarthy years, the Vietnam War, the renewal of radicalism in the 1960s, the women's liberation movement of the late '60s and '70s, and, throughout, the movements of African-Americans and other working people for survival and dignity. All these informed her life and her art, as did other arts—film, painting, theater, the music of the blues and jazz, of classical orchestras, popular song. From a young age she seems to have understood herself as living in history—not as a static pattern but as a confluence of dynamic currents, always changing yet faithful to sources, a fluid process which is constantly shaping us and which we have the possibility of shaping.

The critic Louise Kertesz, a close reader of Rukeyser and her context, notes [in The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, 1980] that "No woman poet makes the successful fusion of personal and social themes in a modern prosody before Rukeyser." She traces a North American white women's tradition in Lola Ridge, Marya Zaturenska and Genevieve Taggard, all born at the end of the nineteenth century and all struggling to desentimentalize the personal lyric and to write from urban, revolutionary, and workingclass experience. In her earliest published poetry, Rukeyser writes herself into the public events unfolding from the year of her birth, and into the public spaces of a great, expansive city. "The city rises in its light. Skeletons of buildings; the orange-peel cranes; highways put through; the race of skyscrapers. And you are part of this."

Rukeyser grew up on Riverside Drive in an upwardly mobile Jewish family—her mother a bookkeeper from Yonkers who counted the poet-scholar-martyr Akiba among her legendary forebears, her father a concrete salesman from Wisconsin who became partner in a sandand-gravel company. Both loved music and opera, but the house was sparsely supplied with books—"except in the servants' rooms: what do you hear there? The Man with the Hoe, The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The little five-cent books … read and reread." Rukeyser was sent to Ethical Culture schools and to Vassar, but her father's financial difficulties forced her to leave college. "I was expected to grow up and become a golfer," she recalled—a suburban matron. "There was no idea at that point of a girl growing up to write poems." But she was writing poetry seriously by high school. She was also leading a secret life with the children in her neighborhood, playing in the basements and tunnels beneath the apartment buildings, and noting "the terrible, murderous differences between the ways people lived."

Rukeyser was twenty-one when her Theory of Flight received the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Two crucial motifs of her life and work were already unmistakable: the book's title suggests how early she embraced the realm of the technological and scientific imagination; and the opening "Poem out of Childhood" points to her lifelong project of knitting together personal experience with politics. "Knitting together" is the wrong phrase here; in her words, she simply did not allow them to be torn apart.

Any sketch of her life (and here I have space for the merest) suggests the vitality of a woman who was by nature a participant, as well as an inspired observer, and the risktaking of one who trusted the unexpected, the fortuitous, without relinquishing choice or sense of direction. In 1933, having left Vassar, she went to Alabama and was arrested while reporting on the Scottsboro case (nine African-American youths unjustly convicted of raping two white women, a conviction later overturned by the Supreme Court, and a landmark issue for radicals). In the years to come she traveled as a journalist to Spain on the eve of the Civil War; to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, for hearings on a silicon mining disaster; to the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge; to North Vietnam and to South Korea on political journeys. She was disinherited by her family, had a two-months'-long, annulled marriage, bore a son by a different man and raised him in single motherhood. She worked in film and theater, taught at Vassar, the California Labor School, and Sarah Lawrence College, and was a consultant for the Exploratorium, a museum of science and the arts in San Francisco. A wealthy California woman, out of admiration for her work and recognition of her struggles to earn a living as a single mother, provided an anonymous annual stipend, which Rukeyser gave up after seven years when she once held a steady teaching job. She edited a "review of Free Culture" called Decision, was hunted as a Communist, was attacked both by conservative New Critics and "proletarian" writers, continued productive as writer and filmmaker, underwent a stroke but survived to write poems about it, and to see her poetry rediscovered by a younger generation of women poets and her Collected Poems in print. In 1978 she agreed to speak on a "Lesbians and Literature" panel at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, but illness precluded her appearing.

Rukeyser's work attracted slashing hostility and scorn (of a kind that suggests just how unsettling her work and her example could be) but also honor and praise. Kenneth Rexroth, patriarch of the San Francisco Renaissance, called her "the best poet of her exact generation." At the other end of the critical spectrum, for the London Times Literary Supplement she was "one of America's greatest living poets." She received the Copernicus Prize of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and wrote "The Backside of the Academy," celebrating "my street … the street I live and write in," its raw urban vitality and human potentialities unencouraged by the locked doors and formal rituals of the Academy. In her lifetime she was a teacher of many poets, and readers of poetry, and some scientists paid tribute to her vision of science as inseparable from art and history. But, in fact, she has largely been read and admired in pieces—in part because most readers come to her out of the very separations that her work, in all its phases, steadfastly resists. We read as feminists, or as literary historians, or we are searching for a viable Left tradition, and we sift her pages for our concerns; or we are students of poetry who assume a scientific biography is irrelevant to us; or we are trapped in ideas of genre that Rukeyser was untroubled by: what are passages of poetry doing in a serious political biography? (She called her life of Wendell Willkie "a story and a song.") Or, meeting her only in anthologies, we meet only the shorter poems of a great practitioner of the long poem, and meet her prose not at all. We call her prose "poetic" without referring to her own definitions of what poetry actually is—an exchange of energy, a system of relationships.

Rukeyser was unclassifiable, thus difficult for canon-makers and anthologists. She was not a "left-wing" poet simply, though her sympathies more often than not intersected with those of the organized left, or the various lefts, of her time. Her insistence on the value of the unquantifiable and unverifiable ran counter to mainstream "scientific attitudes" and to plodding forms of materialism. She explored and valued myth but came to recognize that mythologies can rule us unless we pierce through them, that we need to criticize them in order to move beyond them. She wrote at the age of thirty-one: "My themes and the use I have made of them have depended on my life as a poet, as a woman, as an American, and as a Jew." She saw the self-impoverishment of assimilation in her family and in the Jews she grew up among; she also recognized the vulnerability and the historical and contemporary "stone agonies" endured by the Jewish people. She remained a secular visionary with a strongly political sense of her Jewish identity. She wrote out of a woman's sexual longings, pregnancy, night-feedings, in a time when it was courageous to do so, especially as she did it—unapologetically, as a big woman alive in mind and body, capable of violence and despair as well as desire.

In a very real sense, we learn to read Rukeyser by reading her. She "scatters clews," as she wrote of the charismatic labor organizer Anne Burlak, "clews" that take light from each other, clews that reunite pieces of our experience and thought that we have mistrusted, forgotten, or allowed to be torn from each other. Much that we are taught, much that we live, is of this description. When Rukeyser said that she wrote the biography of the physicist Willard Gibbs because it was a book she needed to read, she could have been speaking of her work as a whole. She wanted to be able to read the life and research of a physicist against the background of the slave trade, of nineteenth-century industrial expansion and urban violence, of the lives of women—intellectuals and factory hands—of Emily Dickinson's poetry and Edison's invention, of Gibbs's own resonances with Melville and Whitman. She wanted to be able to write her own poems in full recognition of the language and imagery of the scientific imagination, the "traces" of the splitting she deplored. Her work was always a process of testing, by the written word and in the most concrete and risk-taking ways, her instincts, making their foundations and meanings visible, first to herself, then to the world.

When Rukeyser is, or appears, "difficult," this may be partly due to resistances stored in us by our own social and emotional training. But it's also true that while she can be direct and linear, she often builds on a nonlogical accumulation of images, glimpses, questions, a process resembling the way our apparently unrelated experiences can build into insight, once connected. This can be an accumulation within a given poem or book of poems, within a prose book, or in the undivided stream of her poetry and her prose. She isn't a writer with a few "gems" that can be extrapolated from the rest; of all twentieth-century writers, her work repays full reading.

I myself first read Rukeyser in the early 1950s. Like her, I had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize at the age of twenty-one, and I was curious to see what a woman poet, at my age, now ahead of me on the path, had written in her first book. I remember the extraordinary force of the first poem in Theory of Flight, how it broke over me, and my envy of the sweeping lines, the authority in that poem. But I was not yet ready to learn from her. The Life of Poetry had been published in 1949, the year I began to take myself seriously as a poet, or at least as an apprentice to poetry. No one in the literary world of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a student, spoke of that book as an important resource; young poets were reading Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, I. A. Richards's Practical Criticism. Of my professors, only the brilliant and volatile F. O. Matthiessen spoke of Rukeyser, but the poets he taught in his seminar were Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings. I came to Rukeyser in my maturity, as my own life opened out and I began to trust the directions of my own work. Gradually I found her to be the poet I most needed in the struggle to make my poems and live my life. In the past quarter-century, as many silenced voices—especially women's voices—began to bear witness, the prescience and breadth of her vision came clearer to me—for it is a peculiarly relevant vision for our lives on this continent now.

In the 1960s and early seventies Rukeyser and I, together with other poets, often found ourselves on the same platform at readings for groups like and the Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam. I never came to know her well; New York has a way of sweeping even the likespirited into different scenes. But there was an undeniable sense of female power that came onto any platform along with Muriel Rukeyser. She carried her large body and strongly molded head with enormous pride, and stood with presence behind her words. Her poems ranged from political witness to the erotic to the mordantly witty to the visionary. Even struggling back from a stroke, she appeared inexhaustible.

It's to be hoped that more of her books will soon be back in print, and still-unpublished writings collected for the first time. She was, in the originality of her nature and achievement, as much an American classic as Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, W. E. B. Du Bois, or Zora Neale Hurston.