This essay reads Muriel Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry (1949) as a vital account of pragmatist aesthetics in the vein of John Dewey's Art as Experience (1934). It argues that Rukeyser's treatise is an exercise in embodied cultural experience that draws upon the key pragmatic aesthetic tenets of pluralism and naturalismi.e. the understanding that knowledge is derived from a living organism's mind-body interaction with its environment. Further, it explores Rukeyser's understanding that 'aesthetics', as contemporary philosopher Mark Johnson has argued, must move beyond the compartmentalised study of art and its a/effects to 'become the basis of any profound understanding of meaning and thought … to explore how meaning is possible for creatures with our types of bodies, environments, and cultural institutions and practices'. Highlighting recent studies in neuroscience, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of embodied mind that are grounded in pragmatism, this essay demonstrates Rukeyser's foresight in constructing a cross-disciplinary, multivalent aesthetics of human meaning-making that anticipated such advances by decades. The Life of Poetry suggests a practical philosophy of the art of living that breaks down the traditional binaries of mind/body, science/ art, self/other by positioning poetry pluralistically to encompass the social and personal potentialities of embodied human experience.
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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