Muriel Rukeyser’s biblical parallelism

Abstract

From the 1940s, Muriel Rukeyser was censured on formal grounds by a New Critical aligned poetic establishment, which complained about her prosodical looseness and failure to write to accentual syllabic norms. This article argues, however, that Rukeyser’s poetry is not undertheorized or inexpert but instead takes its cues from an alternative tradition: the parallelism of the poetic books of the translated Hebrew Bible. Rukeyser’s volume Body of Waking (1958) can be read as a response to her New Critical doubters; its title poem resists the closed forms of mid-century formalism, while deploying a raft of recurrent rhythmic and clausal parallelisms. I explore how Rukeyser’s parallelism interacted with Walt Whitman’s, broadening their well-established relationship into a network of sources with which Rukeyser shaped her prosody, including Johann Herder, F. O. Mathiessen, Herbert Spencer and his acolytes, and the phase rule of Willard Gibbs. I also follow recent critical arguments that have understood Rukeyser’s troubles with the New Critics as not only aesthetic quibbles but political schisms, parallelism’s music of ebb and flow offering a suitable expressive mode for Rukeyser’s progressive humanism. I argue that, to Rukeyser’s mind, the association of parallelism with the movements of ocean waves enabled her verse forms to communicate something of the underlying rhythms of the world, expanding her poetic ambitions beyond what she saw as the conservative circumscription of her critics.