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Muriel Rukeyser, America, and the “Melville Revival”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2010
Abstract
Whilst Muriel Rukeyser's poetic affinity with Walt Whitman is generally acknowledged, the close relation of her work and poetic sensibility to the thought and writing of Herman Melville has somehow gone relatively unnoticed, and almost wholly unexamined. In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks called for the creation of a usable past that would energize America by recasting its cultural tradition. His plea addressed the need to rebuild a national heritage via the rediscovery of culturally “great” figures. By the late 1930s, many scholars and writers had answered the call, and the new discipline of American studies was beginning to take shape, aided by a reclamation of one of the country's greatest, most neglected, writers – Herman Melville. This was also the period in which Rukeyser “came of age”; a time when political and international conflicts and economic crises generated both the stark, documentary representation of present social realities and the drive to retrieve or reconstruct a more golden age that might mobilize a dislocated nation. The following article examines the importance of Melville to Rukeyser's work, and situates her within the “Melville revival” as an important figure in the movement throughout the first half of the twentieth century to reconstruct an American cultural character.
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References
1 Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming of Age (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1915), reprinted in Claire Sprague, ed., Van Wyck Brooks, The Early Years (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1968, rpr. 1993), 79–158, 149–50.
2 Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” Dial LXIV (11 April 1918), reprinted in Sprague, 219–26, 223.
3 Ibid., 224.
4 Several sources agree on this point, for example, Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival (Kent, OH and London: The Kent State University Press, 2001); and Sprague's Van Wyck Brooks. Essays and books partaking in the revival included D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (London and Toronto: William Heineman Ltd, 1922); Lewis Mumford's The Golden Day (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926) and Herman Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929); William Thorp's anthology Representative Selections of Herman Melville (New York: The American Book Company, 1929), and Weaver's volumes of Melville's collected works and journals; F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); William Ellery Sedgewick's Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1947); Richard Chase's Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949); Newton Arvin's Herman Melville (New York: Sloane, 1950); Jay Leyda's The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951); and C. L. R. James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (New York: C. L. R. James, 1953).
5 Wise, Gene, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement” (first published in American Quarterly, 31, 3, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar), reprinted in Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 166–210, 176, original emphasis.
6 Forsyth Hardy, ed., Grierson on Documentary (London: Collins, 1946), 11
7 Waldo Frank, The Rediscovery of America (New York, 1929), 318.
8 Jane Cooper, “Foreword: Meeting-Places,” in Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 1996; first published 1949), xviii.
9 Ibid., xix. Italics mine.
10 The Life of Poetry, 83; for Rukeyser and Whitman critiques see James E. Miller's “Whitman's Multitudinous Progeny: Particular and Puzzling Instances,” in E. Folsom, ed., Walt Whitman: Centennial Essays (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994); Adrienne Rich, “Beginners,” in Anne F. Herzog and Janet Kaufman, eds., How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet? (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 61–69.
11 During the 1940s, Rukeyser corresponded with her publisher regarding her wish to edit a selection of Melville's writings. Although the book never went to print, Rukeyser's preparatory notes for the projected publication indicate that she read widely both primary and secondary material, including Parrington, Chase, Thorp, Olson, Matthiessen, Leyda and Mumford.
12 Rukeyser, Muriel, “The Usable Truth,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 58 (July 1941), 206–9Google Scholar, 206. The article derived from a series of lectures that Rukeyser had given at Vassar College in 1940, which were subsequently compiled and edited to produce the book The Life of Poetry in 1949.
13 Stott discusses this in Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 131.
14 Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” 206.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 206, 207.
17 Ibid., 207, 208.
18 Ibid., 208.
19 Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs: American Genius (New York: Doubleday, 1942), 354; idem, The Life of Poetry, 27, under the subheading “The Usable Truth.”
20 Rukeyser, Gibbs, 354.
21 Hayford, Harrison, “Melville's Usable or Visible Truth” Modern Language Notes, 74, 8 (Dec. 1959), 702–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Ibid., 703; the letter originally appeared in Julian Hawthorne, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Volume I (Boston, 1884), 387.
23 Ibid., 702. Unpublished PhD thesis for Yale (1945).
24 Matthiessen, American Renaissance; Sedgewick, Herman Melville; The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell Davis and William Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), letter 83; republished under the name Herman Melville: Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
25 Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” 208.
26 A copy of the letter is in the Rukeyser Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Box II: 8, Folder 12.
27 Rukeyser, “The Usable Truth,” 207.
28 Louise Kertesz's book The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) remains the only publication to examine the poem in any detail, awarding it two (160–62) pages of analysis.
29 Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York (Urbana and London: University of Illinois Press, 1966; first published 1924), 10, 5.
30 Muriel Rukeyser, “Ryder,” in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, ed. Janet E. Kaufman and Anne F. Herzog (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 187 (hereafter abbreviated to CP).
31 Rosenfeld, 16–17.
32 CP, 185.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 187.
35 Ibid., 185–87.
36 Death on a Pale Horse or The Race Track (1895–1910), Cleveland Museum of Art; CP, 186.
37 CP, 186.
38 Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 26.
39 Rukeyser preferred the term “witness” over “reader,” “listener,” or “audience.” Ibid., 175.
40 CP, 186.
41 Rosenfeld, Port of New York, 16.
42 The MR Papers, Box 1: 30, Folder 3.
43 More recent criticism on the subject of identity in Moby-Dick after that of the “myth and symbol” school may be found in Eric Mottram's “Grown in America: Moby-Dick and Melville's Sense of Control,” in A. Robert Lee, ed., Herman Melville: Reassessments (London and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 90–115; and Kimball's, Samuel “Uncanny Narration in Moby-Dick,” American Literature, 59, 4 (Dec. 1987), 528–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 CP, 185.
45 Ibid.
46 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or The Whale (New York: Penguin, 1992; first published 1851), chapter 38: “Dusk,” 185.
47 CP, 186.
48 Melville, Moby-Dick, 551.
49 Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 73.
50 CP, 186.
51 Ward, John, “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick,” American Literature, 28, 2 (May 1956), 164–83, 173CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 Ibid., 165, 167.
53 Ibid., 170; CP, 110.
54 CP, 186.
55 Frederic Newlin Price, a writer and friend of Ryder, actually lists “eggshells” among the contents of his room in Ryder [1847–1917]: A Study of Appreciation (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1932), xiii. Rukeyser utilized Price's biography of Ryder in her own account of the painter and his work.
56 Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 20.
57 Ibid., 40.
58 Rukeyser, Gibbs, 353, 354.
59 Ibid., 355.
60 Ibid., 356–57.
61 Ibid., 357.
62 Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 67.
63 Ibid., 68.
64 Ibid., 63.
65 Muriel Rukeyser, “The Education of a Poet” (an essay adopted from a talk given by Rukeyser under the auspices of the Academy of American Poets in December 1976), published in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternberg (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2000), 217–30, 226. I expand upon his idea in my unpublished PhD thesis (King's College London, 2008).
66 Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 71–72.
67 Ibid., 74, 70–71.
68 Ibid., 75.
69 Rukeyser, Muriel, “Under Forty,” in Contemporary Jewish Record, VII (Feb. 1944), 4–9Google Scholar, 8.
70 Anne F. Herzog, “‘Anything Away from Anything’: Muriel Rukeyser's Relational Poetics,” in Anne F. Herzog and Janet Kaufman, eds., How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet (New York, 1999), 32–44, 42. Cooper, ‘Meeting-Places’, xxv, quoting The Life of Poetry, 78.
71 Rukeyser, “After Melville,” CP, 500–1, 500.
72 Ibid., 500.
73 Ibid., 501.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid., 182.