[Daniels is an American poet, editor, and critic. In the following excerpt, which was originally published in the Cimarron Review in Summer, 1990, she identifies several feminist themes that have characterized Rukeyser's work and have made her a central figure in the women's movement in American poetry during the 1960s and 1970s.]

If there is one poet who can be considered a predecessor—or matriarch—of the women's movement in twentieth-century American poetry, it is Muriel Rukeyser. Born in New York City in 1913, she published her first book, Theory of Flight, in 1935, when she was only twenty-one, a mere "girl," as the critics kept reminding each other even as they marveled at a new and provocative poetry. Rukeyser's first book was a signal work not only for herself but for succeeding generations of American women poets who took its central metaphor of aerodynamics to heart: "Believe that your presences are strong," she wrote in the long and complex title poem, "O be convinced without formula or rhyme / or any dogma; use yourselves: be: fly. / Believe that we bloom upon this stalk of time."

Although the poems in Theory of flight were not launched under the specific aegis of "feminism"—in 1935, a term that still primarily reverberated with connotations of the fight for suffrage—they were nevertheless full of portents of the feminist direction Rukeyser's work would take during the next half-century. Her poems, from beginning to end, celebrate the lives of women as artists, as workers, as political activists, as mothers and daughters and wives. Nevertheless, one could not say—utilizing an archaic terminology still extant in the thirties when she began publishing her work—that Rukeyser wrote a purely "feminine" poetry, for part of the excitement that attended the publication of her early work was the way in which she brought her female consciousness to bear on experiences that had always been considered off-limits for women writers. She refused to be confined within the narrow, nineteenth-century romantic/lyric tradition of women's verse that still dominated the national consciousness when she began to publish her work. And she was never tortured, as some of her contemporaries were, by whether or not her work dealt with "appropriate" female subject matter or utilized the female poet's alleged gift for the lyric. Although many readers were startled by the "unfeminine" nature of her early poems, at least one perceptive critic greeted this new poetry by a woman with relief. Compared to other women writers, observed Willard Maas [in the New York Herald-Tribune Books, January 19, 1936], Rukeyser's approach was "fresh and vital, and her poems happily lack the restricted metaphysical concern with a feminine world decorated with trees and flowers and inhabited by birds on wing—a characteristic peculiar to the verse of women of the last decade."

Over a period of almost fifty years, from the publication of Theory of Flight in 1935 until her death in 1980, shortly after the publication of her collected poems, Rukeyser created a remarkable body of work that continually inspired passionate response from women readers for reasons that were often unapparent to male critics (particularly to those associated with the New Criticism of the forties and fifties, a number of whom attacked her work viciously and in an inappropriately personal manner). What makes Rukeyser such an inspiring figure was her adamant refusal to relinquish any part of her femaleness even as she repudiated society's ideas about what females were and what they should do. Her task was never to be "as good as a man" or "equal" to a man; from the beginning, she had a strong and innate sense of the power and worth of women. She insisted on her right to write her poems about mothers and children, domestic dramas, and romantic love just as she insisted on her right to bring hydroelectric power projects, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, and the Spanish Civil War into her work.

Nevertheless, it was not only the liberated subject matter of her poetry or its feminist legitimizing impulses that attracted women readers to her work. Her highly individualistic and organic sense of form and the freedom she felt to improvise upon or even to totally reject the received forms of English-language poetry found great favor with twentieth-century women who were beginning to poke their heads out of the literary pigeonhole they had historically inhabited. From the very beginning of her career, Rukeyser was preoccupied with ways in which traditional poetic forms could be refashioned or revised to express more mimetically her concerns with female experience (particularly female sexuality), political leftism, and urban life. In search of this, she experimented with montage and documentary techniques, stream-of-consciousness narration, and the prose poem; before her first collection ever appeared, she had created an idiosyncratic system of spacing and punctuation that she absolutely insisted upon. (During the sixties, frustrated by proofreaders, typesetters, and editors who persisted in standardizing the punctuation of her poems, she had a rubber stamp produced that read "PLEASE BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION." She stamped this polite request in red ink all around the margins of all her manuscripts.)

Rukeyser's ideas about form were not always easy to follow. What intrigued her was a nonlinear, inclusive verse form that held greater possibilities, she felt, for recreating some of the physical imperatives that lay at the base of her own urge to poetic expression and that related to the gender-specific nature of her life as a woman. "I write from the body, a female body," she often said. And in 1962, she articulated this belief unforgettably in "To Enter That Rhythm Where the Self Is Lost":

To enter that rhythm where the self is lost,
where breathing: heartbeat: and the subtle music
of their relation make our dance, and hasten
us to the moment when all things become
magic, another possibility.
That blind moment, midnight, when all sight
begins and the dance itself is all our breath,
and we ourselves the moment of life and death.

Muriel Rukeyser was one of the most prolific writers of our century, and her poetic corpus is huge; her collected poems run to more than five hundred pages, and in addition she published translations, children's books, short stories, plays, a novel, and two biographies. Her subject matter and her formal approaches suggest the ambitious and restless nature of her genius, for they change, sometimes radically, from poem to poem. Within the pages of her collected poems, published in 1978, slightly more than a year before she died, one can find sonnets, ballads, elegies, poetic sequences, dramatic poems, a verse play, a full-length poetic biography, free verse, light verse. There are pieces that have been variously classified by the critics as Social Realist, Marxist, Jungian, feminist. Side by side, scenes from classical mythology, the streets of New York City, the squalor of miners' camp towns in Depression-era West Virginia, the dramatic landscapes of northern California, and the marvelous Ajanta caves of India coexist. Thus, any suggestion that an accurate assessment of the nature and range of her work can be made within the confines of any methodology or thematic summary is ludicrous. Still, at the risk of being reductive and of not giving full credit to a remarkable body of work, it is possible to isolate several specifically feminist themes and subjects that characterized Rukeyser's work throughout her career and that caused her work to be highly regarded by the women's movement of the sixties and seventies. These include the pain of a lost female history and subsequent efforts to retrieve and articulate it; the documentation of gender-specific female experience; the celebration and affirmation of a new woman-identified consciousness; a strong impulse toward pacifism and nonviolence that is explicitly related to the life-giving powers of the female; and, finally, the exploration of androgyny. These recurring themes in Rukeyser's work became particularly important to many of the women poets who followed her and who regarded her work and the example of her life as instrumental in facilitating a greater acceptance of the female voice in literature. The importance of Rukeyser to the contemporary women's movement is suggested by the fact that several of the first feminist anthologies of literature by women borrowed their titles or epigraphs from her work or bore an introduction that she had written. The title of No More Masks! an anthology of poetry published in 1973, referred back to her poem "The Poem as Mask" (1968), which explored the notion of female myths of identity (such as those inherited from Greek mythology) and rejected the use of unexamined, male-inscribed versions of the received myths. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America, published in 1974, also took its title from Rukeyser's "Käthe Kollwitz" (1968).

Some examples from Rukeyser's poetry throughout the fifty years of her career will illustrate the early feminist themes within her own work and suggest through example, perhaps, the profound meaning and peculiar relevance younger women writers and feminist activists have located in her work.

The pain of a lost female history. Rukeyser had an early awareness of the absence of female voices from literary history, and when she was only sixteen years old, in 1930, she wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem, "Ballad of the Missing Lines," in which she suggested that our entire view of history might be radically different if we had had access to Eve's and Helen's versions of their well-known stories, along with Adam's and Paris's. Her published poetry is full of this awareness, and from her very first book she set herself the task of restoring to the literature the women's voices that had been left out. Although she was never reluctant to celebrate the lives and achievements of men (both of her biographies and a number of her long portrait poems she called "Lives" took men as their subjects), she could be sarcastic and ironic on occasion about the ways in which men have convinced both men and women that it is only men's histories and men's lives that are significant, as in "Along History" from 1973:

The documentation of gender-specific female experience. Rukeyser wrote many poems that dealt matter-of-factly and unsentimentally with the corporeal aspects of female existence. She wrote repeatedly of pregnancy and childbirth; she wrote of menstruation, of sex and sexual desire, of nursing, of masturbation and orgasm. In many cases, she was the first American woman poet to break the silences that had surrounded women's own expression of their sexuality in literature. Still, it was not an inevitable, biologically based femininity that she embraced; her poems argue for a full range of experience for women that will take them beyond the nursery worlds and "interminable girlhoods" they have historically inhabited. Rukeyser herself led a life of extraordinarily committed (and sometimes life-threatening) political activism, and in another section of "Letter to the Front" she warns against the solipsistic dangers of motherhood that can turn women, who create the world through giving birth, away from it. She felt strongly that women's lives, though deeply enhanced by motherhood, extended far beyond the confines of the nursery world.

In attempting to bring female sexuality within the range of literary expression, she found, like many of the younger women writers who followed her, that it was often necessary to work with traditionally "unpoetic" language in order to overcome powerful cultural taboos and sexual stereotyping and get to the point. In "The Speed of Darkness" (1968), she wrote:

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis
Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt
Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection music, silence, and surf.

In 1948, her "Nine Poems for the Unborn Child" documented her own dangerous pregnancy, which she undertook alone, without the support either of marriage or of the welfare system that single mothers benefit from today. The poem was remarkably successful in suggesting not only the various physiological symptoms and bizarre physical changes of pregnancy, but also in communicating the extraordinary psychic experience of pregnancy, which is at once specifically and narcissistically personal and overwhelmingly public and historical, linking the pregnant woman with all of history and the survival of the species.

The celebration and affirmation of a new, woman-identified consciousness. From her early poems where she sought a voice that was authentic and capable of transmitting the specifics of female experience—"I want to speak in my voice! / I want to speak in my real voice!" she demanded in "Suicide Blues" in 1944—to her final poems which sometimes dealt with real issues (like male-inscribed language) confronted by the contemporary women's movement, Rukeyser explored joyously and often with humor the transforming possibilities of feminist conscience and consciousness. The following poem, "Myth," exemplifies her exploration of male-inscribed language:

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question. Why didn't

I recognize my mother?" "You gave the wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman." "When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you included women too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what you think."

She held a deep and reverent belief in women's capacity for love and nonviolence, and although she did not believe that these qualities were not present in men, she clearly felt that, as far as history was concerned, it was women who had been on the side of life more often than on the side of death. The unexplored potential of female solidarity and the breaking of centuries of silence imposed on women by patriarchal systems excited her, and she envisioned in numerous poems the revolutionary effect of the liberation of women. Perhaps her most famous expression of this occurred in the third section of her well-known long poem "Käthe Kollwitz" (1968), whose extraordinary, concluding couplet became a slogan of the contemporary women's movement:

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open

A strong impulse toward pacifism and nonviolence specifically related to the life-giving powers of women. Rukeyser often spoke of herself as having been "born into war" (she was born six months before World War I erupted in Europe), and some of her earliest poems document the deforming influence of the mass-media images of death, dismemberment, and destruction that are a by-product of modern war. She felt strongly that such precocious awareness of the aggressive, bloodthirsty side of human nature inhibited the mind's natural, optimistic tendency to make generative metaphors of experience. Although World War I had concluded by the time she entered grade school, another international conflict was brewing when she left college in 1932. She affiliated herself rather openly with the Communist party throughout the thirties, editing and publishing in their cultural organs. Many facets of Marxism appealed strongly to her—the abolishment of capitalism and hierarchical bourgeois society, the fraternal spirit and communal sense of the Communists' mission—but she could not go along with the Party's implacable acceptance of the inevitability of violence and warfare in achieving the revolution. She envisioned a nonviolent revolution accomplished by the spiritual and political solidarity of millions, informed by the power of a liberated female consciousness, and she expressed this from the beginning through metaphors and tropes that were laden with a female sense of procreation. "Split by a tendril of revolt / stone cedes to blossom everywhere," she wrote in "City of Monuments" in 1935. By the time World War II began, she had articulated clearly her position of passionate pacifism. During the sixties, when the country was embroiled in the war in Vietnam, she became an active participant in the antiwar movement, an involvement that culminated in a visit to Hanoi in 1972, with Denise Levertov, as an invited representative of the American peace movement.

Many of the poems from Rukeyser's final volumes of poetry—The Speed of Darkness (1968), Breaking Open (1973), and The Gates (1976)—concern themselves with the expression of her opposition to war and with her belief in the transformative powers of individually enacted nonviolence. In "Waking this Morning" (1973), she speaks of herself as "a violent woman in the violent day" who "will try to be nonviolent / one more day." And in "Rational Man," a section of the long poem "Breaking Open" (1973), she produced a piece that was both profoundly eloquent and profoundly disturbing. It is worth remarking that although Rukeyser had by this time begun her explorations of male-inscribed and male-signifying language, she declined to attribute any of the atrocities she described in the poem to women. "Rational man" is the object of her meditation:

The exploration of androgyny. From an early age, Rukeyser was exploring through her work the sex roles available to her and attempting to create a poetic language that would bring together the female and male possibilities inherent in human experience. In this, her life imitated her art, for, although she had experienced a "conventional" heterosexual adolescence (experimenting with boys in the boathouse at the country club), she soon found exclusive sexual liasons with men ultimately unfulfilling—both physically and emotionally. Although perhaps her most committed relationships were with women, she was involved with numerous men throughout her life, was once married for a brief time, and bore a child. Her feminist politics were adamantly not those of sexual separatism, and the whole impulse of her work is an androgynous one: her concern was to liberate female power and consciousness and integrate them with the male principle for the mutual benefit of both men and women.

Although she said many times that she wrote to break out of imposed silences and to overcome destructive sexual stereotypes, Rukeyser found it difficult—perhaps because of deeply ingrained post-Victorian generational mores—to speak directly of her sexual love for women. Like many other twentieth-century women writers, she often obscured that portion of her narrative by using non-gender-specific pronouns. As she grew older, perhaps empowered by the openness of the feminist dialogue about lesbianism and new social mores that were (relatively speaking) more accepting of alternative lifestyles, Rukeyser began to approach the subject of her own bisexuality somewhat more directly, as in this excerpt from "Käthe Kollwitz":

In 1911, two years before Muriel Rukeyser was born, Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), one of the most celebrated women poets of the generation that preceded Rukeyser's, had expressed the prevailing attitudes of American society about that "damned mob of scribbling women" (as Nathaniel Hawthorne had even earlier characterized American women writers): "A woman ought not to write. Somehow it is indelicate and unbecoming. She ought to imitate the female birds, who are silent—or if she sings no one ought to hear her music until she is dead." Fortunately for the history of our literature, Rukeyser was as uninclined to follow Teasdale's advice as she was incapable of suppressing her genius for poetic expression.

"Why does a woman write a poem?" Rukeyser often asked. She never faltered in her belief that (at least during her historical moment in time) women wrote to break out of silence, to overcome weakness, to escape invisibility. Her own strong constitution and indomitable will enabled her to prepare the way for a younger generation of women poets who would follow her: more radical and less disposed to give men the benefit of the doubt.