Muriel Rukeyser and American feminist poetry in the 1950s

What is it about?

In the late 1950s, American poet Muriel Rukeyser was commissioned by the magazine The Nation to write an essay about women and poetry. Ultimately, the editors decided not to publish what she wrote. It is no surprise: Her essay, "Many Keys," is a critique of how the cold war literary establishment devalued women's experience and the poetry written about and out of that experience. Her essay is published for the first time here, along with a critical introduction that explains its significance as a lost or suppressed forerunner of second-wave feminist poetry.

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Why is it important?

For readers familiar with her work, "Many Keys" disproves common misunderstandings that Rukeyser, a single mother, was largely inactive as a writer or a public intellectual during the 1950s and after her son's birth. This essay gives us a stronger sense of how she was--and how she knew she was--suppressed as a progressive woman. For readers who don't know Rukeyser, "Many Keys" supplies a "missing link" in the lineage of second-wave feminist literary writing. It is a lost predecessor to the better known work of writers from the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich and other admirers of Rukeyser.

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