American Literary History

In 1935, a young poet won a prestigious literary prize for a book of poems about learning to fly a plane over New York City. She had dropped out of college and, at 19 years-old, travelled to Alabama to cover the Scottsboro case. Later, she wrote a long poem about the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster and the deaths by silicosis of mine workers, mainly Black Southerners, in a case of murderous profit extraction. She then visited Spain to report on the People's Olympiad, a protest against Hitler's Berlin Games. Her train to Barcelona was stopped in Montcada as the military coup began, and the poet witnessed the outbreak of war. When she returned to the US, the FBI began to surveil her, as it would do until 1974. She was a lesbian, a single mother, a biographer, a novelist, a critic, and always a poet. A 1943 report in her FBI file described Muriel Rukeyser as "against everything in any organisation which represents the brutal life of enforced regimentation and national slavery, and she is against war, conscription, and the forcing of others to fight."

It is a dramatic, fascinating life story, brought vividly to life in Rowena Kennedy- Epstein's Unfinished Spirit: Muriel Rukeyser's Twentieth Century. The book is a valuable contribution to a growing, but still slender, body of scholarship on Rukeyser that includes Catherine Gander's Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary (2013), scholarship by Stefania Heim and Eric Keenaghan, and Sarah Ehlers's excellent Left of Poetry (2019). As these studies make clear, Rukeyser is a major poet who deserves more attention than she has received before now.

Kennedy-Epstein takes us deep into the Rukeyser archive. The Introduction situates Rukeyser within contemporary feminism and articulates the book's key claim: that women writers can be ignored, disparaged, and denied visibility in their own time, and subsequently recovered as prescient and important. Kennedy-Epstein introduces the value of Rukeyser's "wasted" texts—those that were rejected, unfinished, unpublished, or declared a "waste of time" by readers and editors. Their recovery, she writes, enables us to understand better "how twentieth-century ideologies of exclusion have been formed through literary and academic values; but it is also through these texts that we can uncover the kinds of complex feminist approaches necessary for dismantling the very same values" (7). The book is subsequently organized in two halves. The first half is on Rukeyser's writing about the Spanish Civil War, especially her forgotten, rejected novel Savage Coast, which Kennedy-Epstein recovered and edited for The Feminist Press in 2013. The short first chapter, "Costa Brava," describes the genesis of Kennedy-Epstein's [End Page 1952] fascination with Rukeyser, which involves a narrative about parallels she finds in her own experiences in college, travel, and protest cultures. In Chapter 2, Kennedy-Epstein turns to Savage Coast itself, which she examines for its textual and generic hybridity and formal innovation, which, she suggests, is the basis on which the novel was rejected. Chapter 3 goes even more deeply into Rukeyser's writing about Spain and her later writing that links Spain to the Civil Rights movement in the US.

The book's second half is more varied, encompassing Rukeyser's writing about poetry, her photographic-textual collaborations with Berenice Abbott, and her unfinished biography of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Chapter 4 is primarily focused on Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry (1949); as well as "Many Keys," an article solicited and then rejected by The Nation; and a radio broadcast, "Sunday at Nine. Rukeyser emerges from this chapter as a robust historian and observer of US poetry who theorized her own self-exclusion while contributing to the queer reclamation of Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson.

In subsequent chapters, Kennedy-Epstein studies two uncompleted projects, the collaborative photo-text project with the photographer Berenice Abbott and, perhaps the most interesting and troubling case, the authorized biography of Boas, which she never finished. She did, however, travel to Vancouver Island...