Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem,” published in 1968 with its simultaneously modest and ambitious title, is among the most restrained of American antiwar poems, and among the most resonant. No rage, no arguments or campaigns or names, just a portrait of a person struggling to cope in “the first century of world wars,” reaching out to the like-minded, living in the moment of contact, trying to “construct peace,” or more simply “to wake.”
Rukeyser (1913–1980) grew up in Manhattan, went to Vassar and founded an undergraduate leftist journal there, attended the Roosevelt School of Aviation and learned to fly, wrote about that experience in “Theory of Flight” in 1935, in a volume that W. H. Auden selected to receive the Yale Younger Poets prize. Her own political life was more explicitly committed than “Poem” might suggest. At nineteen she was arrested for talking with African American reporters at the Scottsboro trials; at twenty-three she was reporting on silicosis in West Virginia miners. She worked with the Spanish Medical Bureau during the Spanish Civil War and spoke for the Loyalists when she returned to the United States. After World War II she taught at the California Labor School, then at Sarah Lawrence (Alice Walker was one of her students). Her opposition to the Vietnam War led her to protest in Hanoi and in Washington, D.C., where she was arrested.
Like Denise Levertov, and for some of the same reasons, Rukeyser was disparaged by some critics—for didacticism, for emotionalism. But she mattered to Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich; Kenneth Rexroth called her the greatest poet of her “exact generation.” She died in Greenwich Village.
I lived in the first century of world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.