Born in New York City on December 15, 1913, Muriel Rukeyser attended private schools and in 1930╨1932 was a student at Vassar College. Her poems began appearing in Poetry magazine and other periodicals in that period. She worked on the staff of the Student Review in 1932╨1933 and in the latter year drove to Alabama to report on the case of the Scottsboro Boys. Later she edited the Housatonic, a literary journal, was associate editor of the New Theatre magazine, took courses at Columbia University, and learned to fly at the Roosevelt Aviation School. In 1935 her first volume of poems appeared as Theory of Flight in the Yale Younger Poets series.
Her travels over the next few years provided material for the poems in Mediterranean, 1938, U.S. 1, 1938, and A Turning Wind, 1939. Her romantic and often heavily symbolic lyrics attracted considerable, if sometimes bemused, critical attention. The Soul and Body of John Brown, 1940, combined Old Testament themes with contemporary social problems. In 1942 she published Willard Gibbs: American Genius, a biography of the 19th-century mathematical physicist.
She supported herself by lecturing and working in film, but an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1942 and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1943 enabled her to concentrate on poetry. Beast in View, 1944, The Green Wave, 1948, Elegies, 1949, Orpheus, 1949, and Selected Poems, 1951, appeared in rapid succession, along with the prose The Life of Poetry, 1949. Later volumes included One Life, 1957, Body of Waking, 1958, Waterlily Fire, 1962, The Orgy, 1965, The Speed of Darkness, 1968, 20 Poems, 1972, Breaking Open, 1973, The Gates, 1976, and her Collected Poems, 1978. Rukeyser also wrote several books for children, including Come Back, Paul, 1955, I Go Out, 1961, Bubbles, 1967, and Mazes, 1970, and a biography, The Traces of Thomas Hariot, 1971, and she published translations of the Selected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1963, the Selected Poems of Gunnar EkelÜf, with Leif SjÜber, 1967, (which won an award for translation from the Swedish Academy), and Brecht╒s Uncle Eddie╒s Moustache, 1974. Her last volume of poetry, The Collected Poems, was published in 1978.
From 1956 to 1967 she taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and from 1967 she served on the board of directors of the Teachers-Writers Collaborative. She continued also as a lecturer. She was president of PEN American Center from 1975 to 1976.
Having taken up the cause of Spanish loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, Rukeyser remained politically active in her later years. In the 1970s she traveled to Hanoi to protest the US involvement in Vietnam and to South Korea to protest the harrassment of the radical Catholic poet, Kim Chi-Ha, and she protested the execution of Kurdish socialists in Iran in 1979.
Among her honors and awards are the Copernicus Award from the Academy of American Poets, 1977, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society, 1977. She died in New York City on February 12, 1980.
vstyl ` R ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ ! !I ╞ !I ═ !I !I + !I ñ !I « !I α !I ∞ !I !I É !I ┤ 5¬ ╡ !I ⁿ !I !I !I !I # !I 1 !I ½ !I ╠ !I * !I H !I â 5¬ ä !I y !I å !I Ä !I £ !I ñ !I ½ !I │ !I ║ !I ╞ !I ╘ !I !I ! !I A !I I !I Q !I _ !I g !I u !I } !I à !I ì !I ó !I ¬ !I ▓ !I ║ !I ╟ !I ╧ !I ╪ !I Φ !I ≈ !I : !I I !I Q !I Y !I a !I h !I t !I y !I Æ !I ¡ !I █ !I ° !I !I # !I ë !I á !I ─ !I ╫ !I ≡ 5¬ ± !I π 5¬ Σ !I V 5¬ W !I link `
