Muriel Rukeyser: Quotes about life

Muriel Rukeyser was poet and political activist. Explore interesting quotes on life.
Muriel Rukeyser: 84   quotes 0   likes

“Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.”

Muriel Rukeyser

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 221
Context: Experience taken into the body, breathed-in, so that reality is the completion of experience, and poetry is what is produced. And life is what is produced.
To stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry. In that sense, there is no lost Eden, and God is the future. The child walled-up in our life can be given his growth. In this growth is our security.

Life , Reality

“However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.”

Muriel Rukeyser

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling, and what is the use of truth!
How do we use feeling?
How do we use truth! However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.
If we use the resources we now have, we and the world itself may move in one fullness. Moment to moment, we can grow, if we can bring ourselves to meet the moment with our lives.

Life , Appearance

“How can I look back and not speak of the stupid learning about birth? Of the stupid learning that people make love, and how it seemed the reason for all things, the intimacy of my wondering, the illumination that — to an adolescent — was the cause for life around me, the reason why the unhappy people I knew did not kill themselves?”

Muriel Rukeyser

Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), p. 222

Love , Life , People , Stupidity

“To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages. The gift is torment.”

Muriel Rukeyser

To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century (1944)

Life , Death , God

“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.”

Muriel Rukeyser

Note, on "The Book of the Dead"
U.S. 1 (1938), The Book of the Dead

Country , Hope , Communication , Reality