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5 books match the query '1913-1980'

cover of Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser

Beyond Ourselves

Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser

Catherine Gander

West Virginia University Press, 2026

Muriel Rukeyser has many faces: poet, biographer, theorist, playwright, novelist, story-writer, filmmaker, translator, ethnographer, and innovator of social, documentary poetics; feminist, queer, Jewish, single mother, and social justice activist. Yet above all, she was a poet. Threaded through her work, politics, and life was the conviction that poetry is an animating force that connects people and disciplines. Recent years have seen a surge of renewed interest in Rukeyser’s work, bringing her back into public consciousness as a crucial voice on the relations between poetry and social life in America and beyond. 

Beyond Ourselves is the first volume of its kind to comprehensively consider the continued urgency and lasting legacy of Rukeyser’s work as a key source and inspiration for poets working today. Volume editors Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim—both scholars and poets—have gathered critical and creative contributions from some of the most innovative, exciting, and socially engaged poets writing today. In lyric and braided essays, scholarly critique, hybrid investigations, documentary collages, and collaborative poetry, these poets dive deeply into Muriel Rukeyser’s work and life to interrogate, explore, and challenge the models she provides for thinking and writing in our own social, political, and poetic moment. These essays address a range of themes, from the transhistorical politics of motherhood and contemporary relational and feminist poetics of war to communal history via documentary film and the possibilities of coalition-building beyond borders. As in Rukeyser’s own work, the forms of these texts animate their inquiries.

Beyond Ourselves is a volume at the intersections of creative and critical thought, reflecting on how Rukeyser’s expansive body of work offers a vision for, as she writes, “a kind of imagination with which to meet the world.”

Contributors: Daniel Borzutzky, Susan Briante, Catherine Gander, Stacy Hardy, Stefania Heim, Erika Meitner, Philip Metres, Jena Osman, Deborah Paredez, Khadijah Queen, Solmaz Sharif, and Nomi Stone.

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cover of Jesse Owens: An American Life

Jesse Owens

An American Life

William J. Baker

University of Illinois Press, 2006

Born the tenth child of a poor Southern sharecropper and barely able to read or write, Jesse Owens used his astonishing drive and athletic ability to win an unprecedented four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He became an international superstar overnight and exploded Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy in the process. This Press edition of the William J. Baker's acclaimed work offers the most complete and probing biography of Owens ever written, vividly detailing the successes and failures of this complex and troubled but ultimately indomitable figure.
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cover of Muriel Rukeyser's the Book of the Dead

Muriel Rukeyser's the Book of the Dead

Tim Dayton

University of Missouri Press, 2003

The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser was published as part of her 1938 volume U.S. 1. The poem, which is probably the most ambitious and least understood work of Depression-era American verse, commemorates the worst industrial accident in U.S. history, the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. In this terrible disaster, an undetermined number of men—likely somewhere between 700 and 800—died of acute silicosis, a lung disorder caused by prolonged inhalation of silica dust, after working on a tunnel project in Fayette County, West Virginia, in the early 1930s.
After many years of relative neglect, The Book of the Dead has recently returned to print and has become the subject of critical attention. In Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” Tim Dayton continues that study by characterizing the literary and political world of Rukeyser at the time she wrote The Book of the Dead. 
Rukeyser’s poem clearly emerges from 1930s radicalism, as well as from Rukeyser’s deeply felt calling to poetry. After describing the world from which the poem emerged, Dayton sets up the fundamental factual matters with which the poem is concerned, detailing the circumstances of the Gauley Tunnel tragedy, and establishes a framework derived from the classical tripartite division of the genres—epic, lyric, and dramatic. Through this framework, he sees Rukeyser presenting a multifaceted reflection upon the significance, particularly the historical significance, of the Gauley Tunnel tragedy. For Rukeyser, that disaster was the emblem of a history in which those who do the work of the world are denied control of the vast powers they bring into being.
Dayton also studies the critical reception of The Book of the Dead and determines that while the contemporary response was mixed, most reviewers felt that Rukeyser had certainly attempted something of value and significance. He pays particular attention to John Wheelwright’s critical review and to the defenses of Rukeyser launched in the 1980s and 1990s by Louise Kertesz and Walter Kalaidjian. The author also examines the relationship between Marxism as a theory of history governing The Book of the Dead and the poem itself, which presents a vision of history.
Based upon primary scholarship in Rukeyser’s papers, a close reading of the poem, and Marxist theory, Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” offers a comprehensive and compelling analysis of The Book of the Dead and will likely remain the definitive work on this poem.
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cover of Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era

Robert Hayden in Verse

New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era

Derik Smith

University of Michigan Press, 2018

This book sheds new light on the work of Robert Hayden (1913–80) in response to changing literary scholarship. While Hayden’s poetry often reflected aspects of the African American experience, he resisted attempts to categorize his poetry in racial terms. This fresh appreciation of Hayden’s work recontextualizes his achievements against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement and traces his influence on contemporary African American poets. Placing Hayden at the heart of a history of African American poetry and culture spanning the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip-Hop era, the book explains why Hayden is now a canonical figure in 20th-century American literature.

In deep readings that focus on Hayden’s religiousness, class consciousness, and historical vision, author Derik Smith inverts earlier scholarly accounts that figure Hayden as an outsider at odds with the militancy of the Black Arts movement. Robert Hayden in Verse offers detailed descriptions of the poet’s vigorous contributions to 1960s discourse about art, modernity, and blackness to show that the poet was, in fact, an earnest participant in Black Arts-era political and aesthetic debates.

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cover of Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry

Robert Hayden

Essays on the Poetry

Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2013

This collection of essays by leading critics and poets charts Robert Hayden’s growing reputation as a major writer of some of the twentieth century’s most important poems on African-American themes, including the famed “Middle Passage” and “Frederick Douglass.” The essays illuminate the themes and techniques that established Hayden as a modernist writer with affinities to T. S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca, and W. B. Yeats, as well as to traditions of African-American writings that include such figures as Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.

Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetryis the first and only book to collect significant essays on this distinguished poet. Covering sixty years of commentary, book reviews, essays, and Hayden’s own published materials, this volume is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the poet’s vision of experience, artistry, and influence. The book includes forty different works that examine the life and poetry of Hayden, the first African-American to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (the post now called Poet Laureate) and to receive the Grand Prix de la Poesie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.

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