Next article FreeBook ReviewUnfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century. Rowena Kennedy-Epstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+209.Christine FroulaChristine FroulaNorthwestern University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Rowena Kennedy-Epstein, the American writer and social justice activist Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) has found a posterity any writer might envy. Coming to voice amid decades of devastating global and civil war, in a world contending with rising dictatorships, Rukeyser addressed herself with unwavering faith to the challenge of how to create it anew. In 1935, when she was twenty-two, her first book, Theory of Flight, won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award. Her radical—and radically optimistic—political sensibility was already formed, yet this experimental prophecy of the future of literature, politics, and sexuality in the aeronautic age was not propaganda but a poem—in William Rose Binet’s words “a living thing.” This early recognition opened the path for Rukeyser’s later writings—poems, plays, essays, life writing on real and imagined subjects (Käthe Kollwitz, Charles Ives, Franz Boas, Willard Gibbs, Thomas Hariot, Wendell Willkie, Orpheus), television screenplays, children’s books, letters. Her works respond to national and international issues, from the Scottsboro trial, the Spanish Civil War, and Judaism and the Holocaust (“To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century” [1944]) to Vietnam war protests, civil and women’s rights, and the cultural costs of gender and other biases across social institutions. For Rukeyser, as for women writers from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Prince to the present, the personal is political. She explores intimate experiences—mothers, daughters, children (she raised one son), sexuality (she was bisexual), creative process, dreams, illness, death, loss, waste, regret—as a citizen of and in a world never confined to its apparent conditions. More like those of Whitman than Plath or Sexton in their buoyant spirit, her works bear witness to the American century. She was widely recognized and honored during her lifetime, receiving the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, the American Academy of Poets Copernicus Prize, Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. PEN America named her president in 1975.In 2013 Kennedy-Epstein added to Rukeyser’s published oeuvre her autobiographical coming-of-age novel, Savage Coast (Costa Brava), having found its rejected manuscript misfiled in Rukeyser’s papers at the Library of Congress. Rukeyser, aged twenty-two, had been commissioned to report on the 1936 People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, planned in protest of Hitler’s Berlin Olympics. The People’s Olympiad was canceled just before opening, when Franco, backed by Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, launched the Spanish Civil War. Rukeyser turned her aborted reportage into richly detailed witness, part fiction part documentary, of the first days of a war that reverberated around the world. In Savage Coast, after a general strike and fascist violence halt their train from Paris, the protagonist Helen continues on to Barcelona by truck with other travelers and falls for Hans, an anti-Nazi German athlete. After they reach the city, held by Loyalists and under martial law, Hans resolves to join the fight and Helen heeds the Catalan organizer of the People’s Games, who tells the crowd in a public square: “It is your work now to go back, to tell your countries what you have seen in Spain” (Savage Coast, 269). Savage Coast owes its well-deserved if belatedly won place in the literature of the Spanish Civil War to Kennedy-Epstein’s superb recuperative scholarship. Published by the Feminist Press, it joins a considerable body of witness by women writers: “Mercè Rodoreda, Simone de Beauvoir, María Teresa León, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy Parker, Josephine Herbst, Martha Gellhorn, Genevieve Taggard, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Louise Thompson, and more” (Unfinished Spirit, 41).Besides its historical and literary value, Savage Coast opens the path for Kennedy-Epstein’s new study of how social and political biases in the publishing industry have worked to block women’s and other voices from making their way into, and in, the world—and how recovering lost texts can lead to reimagining the terrain of literary history. In Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser’s Twentieth Century, Kennedy-Epstein extends her sociological inquiry to other texts in Rukeyser’s archive, “lost” to what publishers’ letters and reviews reveal to be exclusionary practices against midcentury American women, queer, Black, and politically radical writers. Finding “a series of large-scale projects that were rejected for publication and that remain unfinished”—a collaboration with American photographer Berenice Abbott, a biography of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, “suppressed” lectures on women writers, “canceled plays and unproduced films and television and radio shows”—she argues that Rukeyser’s “theoretically ambitious, multi-genre, sometimes collaborative … texts continued the radical avant-garde project of modernism and traced a polyphonic American tradition that challenged an increasingly hegemonic Cold War culture” (6).Unfinished Spirit takes its epigraph from Rukeyser’s 1949 poem “First Elegy: Rotten Lake”: the lines “the future depended upon my unfinished spirit… . [T]here was no choice, only regret for waste, and the wild knowledge: growth and sorrow and discovery” provide the key analytic—“regret for waste”—that underwrites Kennedy-Epstein’s expansion of her archival study. Following a well-researched and elegant introduction, “Waste/Archives/Feminism,” Unfinished Spirit presents three chapters that detail the formative and enduring influence of the Spanish Civil War on Rukeyser’s work (pt. 1). Part 2 offers three further chapters on Rukeyser’s unfinished works. Chapter 4 reads her 1949 essay collection The Life of Poetry in light of her rejected 1957 essay “Many Keys” and her brief 1949 radio series “Sunday at Nine”—all models of “willful subjects” that persist in face of rejection. Chapter 5 focuses on Rukeyser’s unfinished “scientific” collaboration with Abbott—inventor of a “Super-Sight” camera—conceived as a photograph-and-text work. Unable to find a publisher, their interdisciplinary modernist exploration of “the thing” exists only as drafts, descriptions, correspondence, and fragments across several archives. Chapter 6 describes Rukeyser’s twelve years of work toward an authorized biography of Boas. Although the biography ran aground on anticommunist harassment of publishers and writers, it brought Rukeyser (then a new single mother unwelcome in her own New York family) to live among and interview the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of Vancouver Island, whose ways of thinking and being profoundly influenced her own experimental work. This chapter is a substantial contribution to scholarship on the influence of Indigenous thought on midcentury feminism and modernist aesthetics. Altogether, Rukeyser’s archive of “waste,” Kennedy-Epstein argues, comprises “aesthetically rich” and “intellectually rigorous” texts that are “unique in their focus on marginalized peoples and voices”; it “discloses a history of revisions, pitches, and rejections” by “an often hostile and sexist readership”; and it provides a cross-sectional view of “the gender norms of publishing practices, aesthetic dictates, literary canons, and disciplinary categories … during the Cold War period” (7).Beyond these works’ intrinsic interest, Kennedy-Epstein stakes a bold claim for the value of Rukeyser’s cultural vision. “I think a lot of June Jordan, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde,” Rukeyser mused to Louise Bernikow. “Black women know how to rebel. I try to hold in my mind somebody who sees it all—some future unborn black woman poet… . Woman’s own music will emerge. I think we also will find the lost poems of this—these secrecies and these rebellions” (quoted on 112). What if Rukeyser, not Adorno, had shaped our postwar thinking about culture and art and fascism? wonders Kennedy-Epstein. What if we understood the twentieth century not as Hugh Kenner’s “Pound era” but as “the Rukeyser era” (8, 160–68)? In a draft of a 1940 lecture, “The Usable Truth,” Rukeyser calls for work that inspires “more freedom, more honesty”—and then envisions a “twenty-fifth century” that will “discard our work, … reject our time. Our Poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond them” (9). In our moment, when any idea of a literary canon can only be ad hoc, plural, contingent, ephemeral, “the Rukeyser era” envisions cultural history as comprised not of static monuments but of inclusive, dynamic social processes as artists respond to their times and an ideal public consumes their works and, with consciousness transformed, recycles the waste, moving “beyond them” toward a utopian future. Adventurous, painstaking, and thought-provoking, Unfinished Spirit will draw students of Rukeyser and twentieth-century American culture to think outside familiar literary historical boxes, if perhaps not to dismantle them entirely. Next article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724735HistoryPublished online March 13, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.