Ajanta and the Rukeyser Imbroglio

Muriel Rukeyser's career had more than the usual twists and turns. She began as a child prodigy, winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize when she was only 21, and she continued as a golden girl until the late 1930s and early 1940s. The 1962 publication of Waterlily Fire began her elevation as "our mother Muriel" for a younger generation of feminist poets and critics (Cooper 8; Goldensohn). Between these two phases—golden girl and mother Muriel—was a period in which she was severely battered by the left and right, and her literary reputation declined. Even with today's renewed interest in "Book of the Dead" (1938), the major poem of her first phase, few have examined the poetry of her middle period. To be sure, Rukeyser was always an uneven poet, and the work of the 1940s and 1950s, grappling to find a new balance in her poetics, is often strained as her ambitions outstrip her capacities. Yet the finest of these poems, "Ajanta," which embodies aesthetic values Rukeyser took from Indian art, has been largely overlooked (Raphael Allison's essay is an important exception). Even A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (1994), which includes selections from Rukeyser's entire career, omits "Ajanta." I want to draw attention to this period because this crisis in Rukeyser's reputation can illuminate a wider crisis in American poetry.

The crisis in American poetry has been succinctly put by James E. B. Breslin: "By the late 1940s," he wrote, "the modernist movement, all the instruments seemed to agree, was exhausted" (24). But exactly what exhausted modernism is still a source of controversy. Critics have put forward several explanations. Charles Altieri locates the problem in the increasingly hermetic nature of a revived religious spirit (Catholic conversions were rife) (38). Other critics have located the source of the crisis in the anxiety of influence (Breslin 13; Rifkin 147–48). Jonathan Holden finds it in the fundamental inconsistencies of modernist poetics (51–63). James Longenbach, while dismissing the notion of a wall that certain poets broke through, does not deny that there was a significant change in the poetry that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. Whatever the cause, the crisis still haunts poets today, and such a youthful figure as Adam Kirsch has felt the need to rehearse the problem as a necessary part of establishing his own poetic agenda.

I will look at two causes for the decline in Rukeyser's reputation. The first cause is that she was caught in the crosshairs of the literary politics of the moment. The second is that she developed an aesthetics that put her at odds with the poetic orthodoxies of the period. But the political and the poetical are not easily divided. Rukeyser develops in "Ajanta" as well as her other work in the 1940s aesthetic principles and practices that interweave, interlock, and interlace the interior and exterior, male and female, them and us, popular culture and elite culture, positioning these categories not as opposites held in dualistic tension, but as episodes in a rhythm that binds them all into a dance. The attacks on her for not following the political orthodoxy are, therefore, fused with her failure to follow poetic orthodoxy.

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Rare as it is for a poet to stir controversy, it is rarer still for one to set off an "imbroglio." Yet imbroglio is what the Partisan Review dubbed the 1943 sequence of angry letters and vehement editorial responses that followed its publication of "Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl," its denunciation of Muriel Rukeyser. "Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl" was signed with the initials of the review's three editors—William Phillips, Philip Rahv, and Delmore Schwartz—but it was probably Schwartz who wrote the article and the rejoinders to the letters that followed (Brock 258; Kertesz 180). Not focused on any individual Rukeyser book or poem, although Wake Island (1942) was the immediate occasion, "Grandeur and Misery of a Poster Girl" ranges along a broad personal front. So vile, in fact, was the sneering ad hominem campaign that even those who waged it had to apologize grudgingly...