This article begins by situating Muriel Rukeyser's call for ‘the security of the imagination’ within the highly charged historical contexts of the 1940s, a decade bracketed not only by war but by America's growing obsession with security – from President Roosevelt's ‘Four Freedoms’ speech of 1941 to the rise of McCarthyism at the end of the forties. It then examines how Rukeyser's work as a propagandist, a poet and an essayist in the 1940s was deeply shaped by her involvement with the American security services. It further shows how Rukeyser sought to combine words and images in both her war posters and her poems in an attempt to forge an expansive, inclusive and antifascist mode of representation. In a significant departure from other studies of this period, this article brings original archival sources into contact with Rukeyser's poetry, and reads these literary and archival documents through the theoretical lens of security studies. In the face of an increasingly paranoid, repressive political climate, Rukeyser's wartime propaganda work and poetry offers ways of thinking past dominant assumptions structuring the discourse of security.
An introduction to the Anna Mendelssohn special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. This collection is based on the proceedings of the Anna Mendelssohn Symposium, held at the University of Sussex in February 2017. The symposium took as its epigraph the title of a Mendelssohn poem: ‘Poetry does not deserve evil keepers’. This title sets down a challenge for readers and critics of Mendelssohn’s work, compelling us to ask: what does it mean to be good keepers of (her) poetry? How is the literary critic to deal with the biographical and political contexts – such as her incarceration for anti-capitalist activism, or the precarity of her later life in Cambridge – which intrude upon readings of her texts? We then sketch a brief biography of Mendelssohn, and discuss approaches to reading her complex and elusive poetry. Lastly, we outline the articles and responses that make up this special issue.
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