Muriel Rukeyser

Based on Wikipedia: Muriel Rukeyser

The Universe Is Made of Stories

"The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms."

That single line, written by Muriel Rukeyser in her 1968 collection The Speed of Darkness, has traveled far beyond the poetry world. It appears in the television show Supernatural, quoted by an angel. It captures something essential about how we make meaning from chaos. But the woman who wrote it lived a life that embodied those words completely—a life spent finding the stories hidden inside injustice, hidden inside disaster, hidden inside the silences that power maintains.

Rukeyser was born in 1913 into a Jewish family whose heroes, as she put it, were "the Yankee baseball team, the Republican party, and the men who built New York City." Her father co-owned a sand quarry, one of the many companies literally constructing the metropolis around them. This was the world of money and concrete, of deals and development. Not an obvious cradle for a poet who would spend her life giving voice to the powerless.

Then came 1929.

The stock market crashed and took her family's wealth with it. The world of her childhood—private schools, country clubs, assumptions of security—crumbled. She was sixteen years old, watching the American dream collapse in real time.

From Alabama to Spain

Three years after the crash, Rukeyser did something remarkable. She traveled to Scottsboro, Alabama.

The name Scottsboro had become a lightning rod in American consciousness. In 1931, two white women had accused nine Black teenagers of rape on a freight train. The evidence was thin to nonexistent. The trials were shams. Eight of the boys were convicted anyway, facing death sentences in some cases. The case exposed the raw nerve of American racism, the way the justice system could be weaponized against Black bodies.

Rukeyser went south to cover the appeal trial for the Student Review. She was working with the International Labor Defense, the organization handling the defendants' appeals. On her journey, she saw slogans posted everywhere: "There is terror in Alabama." "Free the Scottsboro boys."

Local police detained her after they saw her talking with Black reporters.

Most twenty-year-olds would have been frightened into silence. Rukeyser documented everything. She wrote that "women must help in the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys as well as help to solve the problems that led to their trial." She understood something many activists missed—that this case wasn't just about race. It was tangled up with labor, with gender, with the way power operates on multiple fronts simultaneously.

A few years later, in 1936, she traveled to Spain. The fascist General Franco had launched his coup, and the Spanish Republic was fighting for survival. Rukeyser had gone to cover the People's Olympiad—a counter-Olympics organized by the Catalan government as an alternative to Hitler's Berlin games. Instead, she witnessed the opening days of the Spanish Civil War.

She fell in love there.

His name was Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists. He was killed shortly after. Rukeyser would carry that loss into her poetry for years, processing the intersection of love and politics, personal grief and historical catastrophe.

The Dead Speak Through Her

But it was a different kind of death that produced her most powerful early work.

In 1936, the same year she went to Spain, Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia with the filmmaker Nancy Naumburg. They had met during the Scottsboro trip as students. Now they wanted to investigate something that corporate America hoped everyone would forget: the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.

Between 1930 and 1931, workers had been hired to drill a tunnel through a mountain for a hydroelectric project. The rock they were drilling through was almost pure silica. The company, Union Carbide, knew this. They also knew that breathing silica dust causes silicosis—a lung disease that is, essentially, suffocation by glass.

They made the workers drill dry anyway. Wet drilling, which controls dust, would have been slower and more expensive.

The tunnel became a death chamber. Workers emerged coughing, struggling to breathe. Many were Black migrants from the South, recruited specifically because they were disposable in the eyes of the company. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred to over a thousand. The company buried bodies in mass graves to avoid attracting attention.

This was industrial murder, protected by law, erased from memory.

Rukeyser refused to let it be erased.

Her response was The Book of the Dead, published in 1938. It was unlike anything American poetry had seen. She wove together testimony, documents, court records, scientific data, and lyric verse. She named names. She quoted the dead and the dying. She traced the flow of money and power that made the killing possible.

In an interview, she explained her method: she wanted "to write a series of poems linked together like the sequences in a movie are linked together." This was documentary poetry before the term existed—journalism transmuted into art, bearing witness while making beauty.

Poetry as Democracy's Immune System

In 1949, Rukeyser published The Life of Poetry, a book of essays that argued poetry isn't decoration. It isn't a hobby for sensitive souls. It is, she claimed, essential to democracy itself.

The timing mattered. America had just helped defeat fascism abroad. Now McCarthyism was rising at home, with its loyalty oaths and blacklists, its suffocation of dissent. Rukeyser had seen this pattern before—in Alabama, in Spain, in West Virginia. Power protecting itself by controlling what could be said, what could be thought.

Poetry, she argued, was the antidote. Not because poems are pretty, but because poetry teaches us to hold contradictions, to live with ambiguity, to resist the simplifications that authoritarian thinking requires. A person who reads poetry learns to tolerate complexity. And complexity is fatal to propaganda.

The book fell out of print. For decades, it was nearly impossible to find. Then in 1996, Paris Press reissued it. The publisher, Jan Freeman, called it "a book that ranks among the most essential works of twentieth-century literature."

That's a bold claim. But Rukeyser's argument has only grown more relevant. In an age of algorithms that feed us what we already believe, her insistence that we need art that complicates us feels almost prophetic.

The Price of Speaking

Rukeyser paid for her politics.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation compiled a thick file on her. They suspected she was a Communist. She had written for the Daily Worker. She had defended the Scottsboro Boys. She had gone to Spain during its civil war. In the paranoid calculus of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, this added up to subversion.

The literary establishment turned on her too. The attacks were often sexist—dismissing her work as emotional, unfocused, hysterical. Critics who praised male poets for their ambition called her ambitious work excessive. The double standard was blatant.

Her publishing opportunities dried up. Her career stalled.

She kept writing anyway.

The Private Life

Rukeyser never spoke publicly about her sexuality, but she had relationships with both men and women throughout her life. Her literary agent, Monica McCall, was her partner for decades. She was briefly married in 1945, then gave birth to a son, William, in 1947—though his father was not the man she had married.

These facts are worth noting not for scandal but for context. Rukeyser lived outside conventional boundaries in her personal life just as she did in her art. In an era when women were expected to be wives and mothers first, she raised a child alone. In an era when homosexuality was criminalized, she loved women. She made choices that could have destroyed her, and she survived.

The cost of that survival is impossible to measure. How much energy went into managing secrets? How much creative work was never written because she was exhausted from simply existing outside the lines?

The Second Wave

Then, in the 1960s, something shifted.

A new generation of feminists discovered her work. Her opposition to the Vietnam War connected her to the antiwar movement. Her decades-old poems about justice and resistance suddenly felt urgent again.

In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, refusing to pay taxes that would fund the war. She was in her mid-fifties by then, a poet who had been marginalized for decades, now becoming a mentor to younger activists.

Anne Sexton called her "beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone."

Adrienne Rich wrote that she was "our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."

Kenneth Rexroth declared her the greatest poet of her generation.

These weren't minor figures offering polite praise. Sexton, Rich, Rexroth—these were major voices in American poetry. They were claiming Rukeyser as a foundational figure, someone whose influence had shaped them even during the years when her work was hard to find.

One of the Great Integrators

What made her poetry distinctive? One critic put it perfectly: "Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair."

Integration. The word matters.

She integrated politics and love, public and private, documentary and lyric. She wrote about miners dying of lung disease and about watching her son grow. She wrote about war crimes and about desire. She refused the boundaries that told poets to stay in their lane, to write either political verse or personal verse, never both.

Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century," written in 1944, exemplifies this integration. It frames Judaism not as burden but as gift—a complicated gift, one that comes with obligation and history, but a gift nonetheless. The poem was so powerful that both the American Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish movements adopted it for their prayer books.

Rukeyser said this "astonished" her. She had been distant from Judaism for most of her life. But here was her work, shaped by her heritage even as she held that heritage at arm's length, now becoming part of religious liturgy. The poem had taken on a life beyond her intentions.

To Korea, Near the End

Her final book, The Gates, published in 1976, centers on a failed attempt to visit a man on death row.

Kim Chi-Ha was a Korean poet. He had been sentenced to death by the South Korean government for his political writings. Rukeyser, as president of PEN America, traveled to South Korea to advocate for his release. She was denied access to him.

The title poem documents that failure—the gates that would not open, the poet she could not reach. It's a poem about the limits of solidarity, the walls that power erects, the way witness itself can be blocked.

But it's also a poem about trying anyway. Rukeyser was in her sixties, dealing with health problems, no longer the young woman who had gone to Alabama or Spain. She went to Korea because that's who she was. You show up. You bear witness. Even when the gates stay closed.

Beyond the Poems

Poetry was her primary art, but not her only one.

She wrote biographies—of the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, of the politician Wendell Willkie, of the mathematician Thomas Hariot. She translated Octavio Paz and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. She wrote plays, including a musical about Houdini. She wrote a fictionalized memoir called The Orgy, about attending an Irish festival. She wrote children's books.

She taught, though she never became a career academic. She worked at Sarah Lawrence College and the California Labor School. In the early 1970s, a young Andrea Dworkin worked as her secretary—Dworkin who would become one of the most controversial feminist theorists of her generation, influenced by this poet who had been making feminist arguments for decades before the movement had a name.

The Afterlife of Words

Rukeyser died on February 12, 1980, in New York. She was sixty-six. A stroke killed her; diabetes was a contributing factor.

But her words refused to stay buried.

The composer John Adams used her poetry in his opera Doctor Atomic, about the creation of the atomic bomb. The composer Eric Whitacre adapted her translation of Octavio Paz for his choral work "Water Night." Libby Larsen set multiple poems to music. An experimental rock band called Sleepytime Gorilla Museum set her poem "Gunday's Child" to music on their 2004 album.

Jeanette Winterson quotes her in the novel Gut Symmetries. The television show Supernatural puts her words in an angel's mouth.

Her documentary poem The Book of the Dead was adapted by composer David Kelley in 2022, nearly a century after the disaster it commemorates. The Hawks Nest Tunnel dead are still speaking, through the poet who refused to let them be forgotten.

The Universe Is Made of Stories

What does it mean, that line about stories and atoms?

Physics tells us that matter is made of atoms—protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks. This is true in the sense that science understands truth. But physics cannot tell you why the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster matters. Physics cannot explain why a young woman would travel to Alabama in 1933 to bear witness for nine Black teenagers she had never met. Physics cannot describe what it means to fall in love with a German athlete in Barcelona and then lose him to fascist bullets.

Stories do that work. Stories are how we make meaning from the atoms, how we transform matter into morality. The universe may be made of atoms, but we are made of stories. The stories we tell determine what we see, what we value, what we fight for.

Rukeyser spent her life telling stories that power wanted suppressed. She told the story of silicosis victims abandoned by their employer. She told the story of her own complicated desires in an era of rigid conformity. She told the story of poetry itself as democracy's immune system, its defense against the simplifications that lead to tyranny.

She was one of the great integrators. She saw the fragments and refused to accept fragmentation. She believed the world could be repaired—not through ignoring its brokenness, but through naming that brokenness precisely, documenting it unflinchingly, and then imagining something better.

The universe is made of stories. She spent her life proving it.