Planes, Politics, and Protofeminist Poetics: Muriel Rukeyser’s “Theory of Flight” and The Middle of the Air

Lexi Rudnitsky, a budding scholar and poet, was at work on a biography of Muriel Rukeyser when she died suddenly of a cardiac arrhythmia in 2005, at the age of 32. This article was accepted for publication after (but without knowledge of) her death, and could not benefit from her final revisions. It has been edited, as lightly as possible, by David Goldstein, a friend of Lexi’s and a former member of the University of Tulsa’s English faculty, in consultation with Lexi’s husband. [The editors of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature request the reader’s forbearance with any errors in the current text.]