Wreath of Women
Vesalian: Refers to the work of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), a key figure in the development of modern anatomy. His De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) marks the beginning of a more scientific understanding of the human body, based as it was on human cadaver studies.
Walpurga: See also “Mrs. Walpurga” (GW). Name of Benedictine missionary from England (c. 710–779) who served as the abbess for an eighth-century monastery in Heidenheim, Germany. Her name seems to have been conflated with that of the pre-Christian “Waldborg” who was a fertility goddess. The name “Walpurga” (also “Walburga”) is also associated with a traditional witches' celebration of German origin on the eve of May 1, Walpurgis Night.
The Minotaur
Rukeyser's endnote in BV dedicates this poem to “Charles Naginski, who shortly before his death wrote the music for a ballet of the same name” (98). Rukeyser was friendly with Naginski (1909–1940) and may have met him at the Yaddo Writer's Colony.
from “To the Unborn Child”
Rukeyser's endnote reads, “The translation from Hans Carossa is a fragment of a long poem. The two lines which begin the last verse are addressed, in the original, to the unborn child. This poem was first printed as a Christmas poem by Norman Holmes Pearson.” In BV, the note following the poem read “Written in Germany in 1936, Translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Muriel Rukeyser.”
Long Past Moncada
The title of this poem refers to Moncada, Spain, Rukeyser's last train stop on her journey to Barcelona, July 1936, where she went to report on the People's Olympiad. To read Rukeyser's first-person account of the chaotic days during which her train was held over in Moncada due to the outbreak of fighting fifteen miles away in Barcelona, see “Barcelona on the Barricades.”
Chapultepec Park—1 and 2
Chapultepec Park: In Mexico City, where Rukeyser spent the latter half of 1939.
Letter to the Front
See Schweik, “The Letter and the Body: Muriel Rukeyser's ‘Letter to the Front.’”
7
To be a Jew in the twentieth century: This section was reprinted as a stand-alone poem in BO, immediately following “A Louis Sonnet,” with both poems appearing under the heading “Two Sonnets.” In BO, Rukeyser included an endnote indicating that this poem “was written during World War II” and had been included in what was then the new Reform Jewish prayer book, The Service of the Heart (1967). The poem is currently included in Gates of Prayer, the contemporary Reform prayer book. See Kaufman, “‘But not the study’: Writing as a Jew,” and Mort, “The Poetry of Muriel Rukeyser.”
8
Malicioso King: Rukeyser's nickname for Generoso Pope Sr. (1891–1950), business partner of her father's in Colonial Sand and Stone. Pope late became a prominent publisher of one of the largest circulation Italian-language newspapers in America, Il Progresso, and a strong supporter of fascism.
Wheeler, Nye, Pegler, Hearst,…/…McCormick: Senator Burton K. Wheeler, Senator Gerald P. Nye, journalist Westwood Pegler, and publisher William Randolph Hearst. Rukeyser was critical of each of these individuals due to each one's noninterventionist stance in response to the growing threat of Nazism.
The Soul and Body of John Brown
On her final note page for BV (98), Rukeyser pointed out that the first version of this poem “appeared as the text (with the old song) of a portfolio of etchings by Rudolf C. von Ripper. The portfolio was published in 1940 by Lee Ault and R. C. von Ripper, and was first shown at the Bignou Galleries, New York City, in January 1941.” While copies of this book are rare, interested scholars or readers will be rewarded for their efforts to view it. Ripper's etchings are both extraordinary and disturbing. The setting of Rukeyser's poem alongside of the folk song “John Brown's Body” (“John Brown's body lies a-mould'ring in the grave…”) is moving and very much in sympathy with Rukeyser's regard for folk music as poetry of the “public domain” (LP 97). Explaining her fascination for John Brown, Rukeyser wrote: “In this country, one man who cut through to the imagination of all was John Brown, that meteor, whose blood was love and rage, in fury until the love was burned away” (LP 36).
According to William L. Rukeyser, the poet's son, Baron Rudolf Carol von Ripper was a painter and lithographer and an early anti-Nazi who served time in a concentration camp. The Austrian prime minister intervened with the German government to have von Ripper expelled rather than executed. Von Ripper served and was wounded while flying with the Spanish (Republican) Air Force during the Spanish Civil War. He then came to the United States where he met Rukeyser and collaborated on the John Brown project.
The Green Wave. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1948.
Rukeyser dedicated this book to Marie de L. Welch (Marie West after her marriage), a California poet who was a friend and supporter of Rukeyser's work. She lived in Los Gatos, south of San Jose, and moved in Leftist literary circles.
Rukeyser's original acknowledgments read:
I wish to thank the Guggenheim Foundation for a fellowship which helped with the time of this book, a play, and poems in my book Beast in View.
Some of these poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poetry, Twice a Year, Tomorrow, and the California Poetry Folios. The play, The Middle of the Air, was produced in Iowa City in 1945 by Hallie Flanagan.
The tenth elegy originally appeared in GW in its own section of the book between “Private Life of the Sphinx” and “Nine Poems for the unborn child.”
Song, from “Mr. Amazeen on the River”
Amazeen: Luther Amazeen was a lobsterman who owned a home in New Castle, New Hampshire. He had a small house on the river and rented a room in it to Rukeyser. She liked to go to his home often and was there on at least two occasions with May Sarton in the early 1940s.
“And the sea / Gave up its dead”: See Revelation 20:13.
His Head Is Full of Faces
Bernard Perlin: (1918–) New York artist who worked for the Office of War Information Projects Administration during and prior to World War II creating post office mural posters related to the war effort. Rukeyser knew Perlin from her work affiliated with the OWI. Rukeyser had been hired in December 1942 as a “visual information specialist” for the Domestic Branch of the Graphics Division (Design and Services section). Along with many other writers and artists, she was hired to design posters to support the war's anti-Nazi effort. She resigned under pressure in 1943, at which point she had become uncomfortable with a growing tendency to demonize the enemy at OWI.
The following, dated October 27, 1943, was written by Thomas D. Mabry, formerly Assistant Chief, Bureau of Publications, Graphics Division, Office of War Information, to the Partisan Review in response to their “rebuke” of Rukeyser:
Miss Rukeyser was invited to join the staff of the Office of War Information, Domestic Branch, in July 1942, where she remained until July 1943. The OWI Publications Bureau asked Miss Rukeyser to act as liaison between poster (graphic) production and writers outside OWI. She also wrote captions for posters and more generally helped develop the entire OWI graphics program. The Publications Bureau employed Miss Rukeyser not only because it respected her talent for incisive imagery and the unambiguous use of words—essential to the joining of words and images together in a popular medium like war posters—but also because of her experience in writing continuity for photographic stories, editing photographic sequences and in writing documentary films. (LC, OWI file)
Mrs. Walpurga
Rukeyser included an endnote for this poem when it was published in WF: “Dr. Rene Dubos saying to me, ‘Pasteur said, “La vie, c'est l'oeuf et son devenir.’”” (Editor's translation: Life, it's the egg and its becoming.) Dubos was a French-born, American Pulitzer Prize–winning bacteriologist whose work led to the development of penicillin and other antibiotics. Walpurga is also mentioned in “Wreath of Women” (BV).
When first printed in Poetry, February 1947, this poem was presented as a series entitled “Mrs. Walpurga: Five Poems,
” which were called “Mrs. Walpurga,” “Foghorn in Horror,” “A Charm for Cantinflas,” “A Certain Music,” and “Motive.” These became separate poems in GW, reordered and sometimes separated by other poems but titled the same way in each case except for “Motive,” which became “The Motive of All of It.”
A Charm for Cantinflas
Cantinflas: Born in Mexico City as Mario Moreno (1911–1993), the hugely popular Latin American entertainer performed during various points of his life as a musician, acrobat, clown, and other roles. Rukeyser may have seen Cantinflas perform in Mexico while she was there in 1939.
Traditional Tune
Godfrey King: the Crusader Godfrey of Bouillon (1058–1100) assumed control of Jerusalem after conquering the city in 1099 and murdering all of the Muslim and Jewish citizens.
Summer, the Sacramento
Rukeyser lived in California from 1944–1949. This poem refers to the Sacramento River.
Speech of the Mother, from The Middle of the Air
The Middle of the Air: Hallie Flanagan was director of the WPA Theatre Project, and Rukeyser first knew her in her capacity as a faculty member at Vassar College. They maintained a lifelong friendship and, as Rukeyser notes in the prefatory pages of GW: “The play, The Middle of the Air, was produced in Iowa City in 1945.” Rukeyser's play in verse focuses on the corruption of an idealistic young aviator by power. This poem is taken directly from the play, produced and directed by Hallie Flanagan.
Translations: Six Poems by Octavio Paz
Rukeyser met Octavio Paz in California in 1944. She became one of his first English translators and translated his Selected Poems: 1935–1955 and Sun Stone, in addition to numerous other individual poems.
In GW, Rukeyser included the following introductory note to the “Six Poems”: “Octavio Paz was born in Mexico in 1914. His collected works (1935–41) appeared in 1942; after a while in this country, he is now with the Mexican Embassy at Paris. These translations are by Octavio Paz and Muriel Rukeyser.”
Rari from the Marquesas
In GW, the following note by Rukeyser preceded this poem:
The rari, or love-chant—as Samuel Elbert has pointed out—is now a museum-piece revived only on July 14. Until 1935, it was the popular song, the poetry, of the Marquesas; but it was fought relentlessly by the missionaries because of the “erotic symbolism of some of the words.”
Rari means tie or bind, love spell. Rari kou fau means love spells accompanied by hibiscus batons. The vocabulary of these poems is a picture language, like those of the American Indians. The images are clear, but interchangeable. Samuel Elbert speaks of the use of “mists gathering about a mountain” for a person garlanded with leis; of the following words for “lovers”: night-moths, birds, mists, mountain, wreaths; of these male images: root, comet, sun, stick, fruit-pole, trade-winds; and these female images: glittering leaf, garland of red pandanus keys, fruit, bud, flower, sea-shell conch.
The ancient chants were simple and direct: “A god constant as sunlight is her lover…”
“The leading poet” of the nineteenth century “was Moa Tetua.” He was a blind leper who could neither read nor write; he was so popular as a composer-poet that “natives gathered illegally every night outside the leprosarium to listen” to these songs. He sings of the loves of his son, Piu, he sings stories brought to the wall by lovers and those who mourn.
The first four rari are by Moa Tetua. The others are later.
These translations are by Samuel Elbert and Muriel Rukeyser.
These songs are like the songs that Melville heard.
Private Life of the Sphinx
Ella Winter: Longtime Left journalist and activist and the second wife of Lincoln Steffens. Winter and Rukeyser shared a sustaining friendship over many years, beginning in the 1930s.
Nine Poems for the unborn child
Rukeyser wrote this sonnet sequence about her experience of pregnancy. Her only child, William L. Rukeyser, was born on September 25, 1947, in Berkeley, California. See Eisenberg, “‘Changing Waters Carry Voices’: ‘Nine Poems for the Unborn Child.’” In a typed draft for the 1978 CP table of contents, Rukeyser titled the nine sections of this poem according to the first lines of each section and then added a typed margin note: “These subtitles are not to be used in the body of the book. Keep numerals only.”
Orpheus. San Francisco: Centaur Press, 1949.
Orpheus was first published in a special edition of five hundred copies, with a frontispiece drawing by Picasso. The poem was reprinted in Rukeyser's SP in 1951 and then in the 1978 CP. In LP Rukeyser describes her process of writing Orpheus (182–86); a version of this description was reprinted in Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets under the title “The Genesis of Orpheus.” In a letter to Frank Baron dated February 16, 1963, Rukeyser requested—for a possible second printing—that the title she initially gave the essay, “A Way of Writing,” be restored: “The editor put on the very pretentious title it now has” (LCII).
Elegies. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1949.
When Rukeyser included these elegies in SP, she included a footnote for them: “Ten poems whose development is based on growing connections of images and processes, over a period of ten years.” The publication history of these poems is discussed in the Editors' Notes.
Rukeyser included the following endnote for elegies six through nine when they appeared in BV:
The elegies are of the same group as those in A Turning Wind (Viking, 1939). They are the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth, of ten poems. I have no wish to change the structure of these poems, and so I shall not add the explanatory notes that often mean that something should have been added or taken away from the poem itself. But a reader might be glad to know this of the “Dream-Singing Elegy”: that there was a religious revival among the American Indians as they were defeated, as there is likely to be a revival of faith among the deprived, and that this story is told in a paper by Philleo Nash. And of the “Children's Elegy,” that these cries of loss are among us in American children and refugee children here, that they may be seen in newsreels of Spanish and English and Chinese and countless other children, and that some of these stories are told with finality in Anna Freud's book, Children and War.
Third Elegy. The Fear of Form
Comtesse de Noailles: Anna-Elisabeth de Brancovan, Comtesse de Noailles (1876–1933), a French poet, of noble Romanian lineage.
Tenth Elegy. Elegy in Joy
I feare, and hope : I burne, and frese like yse… and I find no peace, and all my warres are done: See the sonnet called “I find no peace” in Tottel's miscellany. Songes and Sonettes by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Elder, Nicholas Grimald, and uncertain authors, which reads: “Description of the contrarious passions in a louer. / I Find no peace, and all my warre is done: / I feare, and hope: I burne, and frese like yse”.
Body of Waking. New York: Harper, 1958.
Rukeyser dedicated this book to Frances G. Wickes. Wickes was a leading Jungian analyst in the United States with whom Rukeyser corresponded from 1958–1967, the year of Wickes's death. Rukeyser described her work with Wickes as follows: “The work I did for Frances Wickes was a combination of expert ‘evoking’ and editing…. Mrs. Wickes' writing nor my writing are commercial; this, however, was exacting, concentrated, one-to-one work with professional publication as an end.” Rukeyser worked on both the revised edition of Wickes's The Inner World of Childhood and The Inner World of Choice (LCI). “Voices of Waking” (BW) and “The Blue Flower” (SD) are both dedicated to Wickes.
Rukeyser's original acknowledgements read:
Some of the poems in this volume were first published in: Poetry, The Saturday Review, The Nation, Tomorrow, and Montevallo Review.
Others were published previously in One Life, Simon and Schuster, 1957.
One poem entitled “Night Feeding” was published originally in Mid-Century American Poets, 1950, Twayne Publishers, Inc., edited by John Ciardi.
&
nbsp; Several of the poems originally appeared in Discovery, No. 3, Vance Bourjaily, editor, published by Pocket Books.
Eighteen of the poems in section four of this book first appeared in One Life (for more on this 1957 work, what was included, and how selections from that book were made for this one, please see the introduction to this volume). Five of the poems appear to have been previously unpublished, and their placement in this section suggests that Rukeyser saw them as connected to the OL poems: “The sky is as black as it was when you lay down”; “On your journey you will come to a time of waking”; “This is the net of begetting and belief”; “Body of Waking”; and “Then full awake you will recognize the voice”.
Phaneron
This endnote appeared with the poem in BW: “Phaneron—anything over the threshold of sense; a perception word first used by Charles S. Pierce.”
Ringling
Toni: Antoinette Willson, a San Francisco friend who was a writer and taught English and writing at San Francisco State College (now University).
Night Feeding
In 1947, Rukeyser gave birth to her son, William L. Rukeyser. This poem is among the first American poems on the subject of breastfeeding. While Rukeyser did not comment in prose about nursing, in her 1949 review of Charlotte Marletto's book, Jewel of Our Longing, entitled “A Simple Theme,” she asserted, “There is no poetry of birth in the literature that reaches us. In our own time, we can count the poems on our fingers; there is a great blank behind us, in our classic and religious literature. There we might expect to find the clues to human process and common experience.”
F. O. M.
Rukeyser read and commented on F. O. Matthiesen's writing, and in 1944, Matthiessen defended her after she had been attacked in Partisan Review (see Kertesz 175, 180). Matthiesen was himself criticized for his spirit of internationalism and accused of being a naive intellectual. He committed suicide in 1950, leaving the following note, “How much the state of the world has to do with my state of mind, I do not know. But as a Christian and Socialist, believing in international peace, I find myself terribly oppressed by the present tensions” (Kertesz 271).
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