The art and science of form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at mid-century

Daw, Sarah 2020. The art and science of form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at mid-century. Ahuja, Neel, Allewaert, Monique, Andrews, Lindsay, Canavan, Gerry, Evans, Rebecca, Farooq, Nihad M., Fretwell, Erica, Gaskill, Nicholas, Jagoda, Patrick, Gentry Lamb, Erin, Rhee, Jennifer, Rusert, Britt, Taylor, Matthew A., Vadde, Aarthi, Wald, Priscilla and Walsh, Rebecca, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 525-540. (10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_30)

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Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that Muriel Rukeyser’s mid-century manifesto for contemporary poetics The Life of Poetry (1949) is significantly influenced by new twentieth-century scientific advances, including the birth of quantum physics, and by F. O. Matthiessen’s canon-forming reevaluation of Transcendentalist poetics, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I argue that Rukeyser deftly integrates these diverse yet contemporaneous influences and develops a mid-century “ecopoetics” that inflects nineteenth-century ideas of “organic form” with new work in twentieth-century science. The chapter also reveals that Rukeyser’s impact within the field of contemporary ecopoetics has been largely obscured by Charles Olson’s adoption of a number of The Life of Poetry’s principal innovations in his own influential poetry manifesto “Projective Verse” (1950).

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN:	9783030482442
Last Modified:	01 Apr 2025 15:28
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/177264

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