Quote

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

Muriel Rukeyser

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Muriel Rukeyser
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: December 15
Died: 1980
Died: February 12
Author
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Invented
Hunger
Poetry
Would
World
Intolerable

More quotes by Muriel Rukeyser

Image
Never to despise in myself what I have been taught to despise. Nor to despise the other. Not to despise the it. To make this relation with the it: to know that I am it.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
My lifetime listens to yours.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling. A fine poem will seize your imagination intellectually - that is, when you reach it, you will reach it intellectually too - but the way is through emotion, through what we call feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Reality is the completion of experience.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The heavy sensual shoulders, the thighs, the blood-born flesh and earth turning into color, rocks into their crystals, water to sound, fire to form: life flickers uncounted into the supple arms of love.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Women in drudgery knew They must be one of four: Whores, artists, saints, and wives. There are composite lives that women always live
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Punctuation is biological. It is the physical indication of the body-rhythms which the reader is to acknowledge.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict....We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope at another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the idea of perpetual warfare
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
In time of crisis, we summon up our strength. Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
What three things can never be done? / Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
There is also, in any history, the buried, the wasted, and the lost.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.
Muriel Rukeyser
Image
the truth of a poem is its form and its content, its music and its meaning are the same.
Muriel Rukeyser