Darwin & The Writers: Muriel Rukeyser
Darwin & The Writers: Muriel Rukeyser
$8.00
Editor: Stefania Heim
34 pages, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
Darwin and the Writers is an unpublished essay written by Muriel
Rukeyser in 1959. The piece is an exercise in the discovery, collection,
and exposition of “meeting-places” between scientific and literary
imaginations, extending the intellectual work Rukeyser started in works
like Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry. An intricate web uncovering
passionate influence across disciplines, this essay is an exemplary
instance of her method, in which she does more than locate debts owed,
but excavates linked structures, the building blocks of innovative
thinking pitched on relationships, feeling, and chance.
Author Biography:
MURIEL RUKEYSER was born in New York City in 1913. After winning the
Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1935 for her first collection, Theory of
Flight, Rukeyser’s poetic output would go on to span 14 volumes. Many of
her books incorporate documentary material, notably, “The Book of the
Dead” series in her 1938 collection U.S. 1, an examination of the Gauley
Bridge industrial disaster, in which approximately 1,000 men died of
silicosis. Rukeyser’s wide-ranging body of work also includes
biographies of American physical chemist Willard Gibbs (Willard Gibbs:
American Genius, 1942) and English Renaissance explorer and astronomer
Thomas Hariot (The Traces of Thomas Hariot, 1971), a book-length “story
and song” about the life of 1940 Republican presidential candidate
Wendell Wilkie (One Life, 1957), a musical about Harry Houdini (Houdini:
A Musical, published 2002), a personal exploration of the pagan goat
festival Puck Fair (The Orgy, 1965), a collection of lectures about the
uses and possibilities of poetry (The Life of Poetry, 1949),
translations (of Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf), children’s books, film
scripts, and criticism. Rukeyser begins The Life of Poetry with her
experience in Spain at the start of the Civil War, framing her talks as
an answer to the question posed to her, “And poetry—among all this—where
is the place for poetry?” Both her writing and her life
experiences—witnessing the 1933 Scottsboro trials as a student
journalist or traveling to Hanoi to protest America’s involvement in
Vietnam—are a testament to their deep interconnectedness. Rukeyser died
in New York in 1980.
Selected Archives:
- The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, New York, NY