Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.

Muriel Rukeyser
The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

Muriel Rukeyser
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

Muriel Rukeyser
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.

Muriel Rukeyser
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.

Muriel Rukeyser
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
Call off your black dog, death,
it cannot bark me down:
I'll travel past these wounds
and speak another breath!

Muriel Rukeyser
How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?
How can we meet the judgment on the poet,
or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run?
All those beginning to run?

Muriel Rukeyser
The statement of ideas in a poem may have to do with logic. More profoundly, it may be identified with the emotional progression of the poem, in terms of the music and images, so that the poem is alive throughout.
Another, more fundamental statement in poetry, is made through the images themselves — those declarations, evocative, exact, and musical, which move through time and are the actions of a poem.

Muriel Rukeyser