“Negative Entropy and the Energy of Utopian Potential in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead”

Energy: Constant, but entropy, the spending tends toward a maximum—a “mixed-up-ness,” and in this end of levels to which we drive in isolation, to which all systems tend, Withdraw, he said clearly.

— Rukeyser, “Gibbs,” Collected Poems, 185.

In her biography of Willard Gibbs, the preeminent nineteenth-century scientist and mathematician, Muriel Rukeyser remarks on “key words” that unlock truths upon which new systems are made: “They are a key that belongs to art, science, philosophy, and religion” (366). These “keys” are the organizing principles that can explain and remake the world as they indicate new relationships that establish new imaginative responses and possibilities for the future. Rukeyser understood energy as one of those key concepts arising out of the nineteenth century because “every act depends upon the exchange and transformation of energy” (239). The utility of energy as a key concept derives not only from its applicability for understanding “every act,” but also from its revolutionary possibilities in re-shaping art, science, philosophy, and religion: “Revolutions had already been brought about by the idea of energy—definitions, criticisms, recastings had been underway. New departures had been made. . . . The underlying unities of every gesture of the universe had been detected” in the exchange of energy (239). In Gibbs’s work on energy, particularly on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Rukeyser found a clear and usable theory that “correlates all forms of energy” and reveals its dynamic utopian capabilities (239).¹ Rukeyser viewed Gibbs as the paradigm for a rare kind of abstract thinker “of the pure imagination” with “the system-building spirit” of both the poet and the scientist, whose communication of new imaginative order signaled the potential for restoring vital energies of a degrading system (7). Rukeyser positions Gibbs as a purely theoretical scientist who was little concerned with either the era’s middle-class appetite for invention and industry or its prevailing tendency to think “of energy in terms of labor, and of progress in terms of labor-saving devices” (129). In her estimation, Gibbs’s effort to illuminate the foundational laws of energy freed him to pursue his investigations as a poet and gave rise to a new language in the service of building new relational systems of essential ideas, progressive ideas that lead to the free-use ordering of future systems for the benefit of all. In this essay, I explore the concerted effort in Rukeyser’s early works to promote Gibbsian scientific principles of thermodynamics in order to explain her thoughts on the connections between the utopian functions of science and poetry.²

Gibbs’s influence on Rukeyser’s early work is profound. Rukeyser devoted first a poem to him, “Gibbs” (1939), and then the lengthy biography Willard Gibbs (1942), written as a “footnote” to the poem.³ In 1949, her commentary on his work, entitled “Josiah Willard Gibbs,” was published in Physics Today. In addition, she frequently referred to Gibbs in her aesthetic treatise on poetry’s form, use, and function, The Life of Poetry (1949), assembled from a series of lectures given at Vassar College, the California Labor School, and Columbia University throughout the 1940s. In these works, Rukeyser sought to recuperate Gibbs as a major American thinker. Why did this forgotten professor of mathematical physics deserve all this attention? Gibbs served as a touchstone for Rukeyser’s argument that false barriers erected between art and science inhibit the possibilities for establishing new imaginative systems and meaningful approaches to change. Rukeyser decried the narrow application of scientific principles in industry and business as a vulgarization of science’s potential for preparing new systems of thought with the power to change people’s consciousness. As an abstract thinker in theoretical science, Gibbs worked with “pure imagination” to arrive at his theories on energy and entropy; he provided Rukeyser an exemplary figure to illustrate how the mutual drives underlying the arts and sciences work to establish new orders and desires for progressive social change in a system tending toward a state of decay.

While critics have discussed Rukeyser...