BEAST IN VIEW.

by Muriel Rukeyser

This rare and vintage book is a perfect addition to any bibliophile's collection

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".

One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.

Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.

Reviews

[Shoshana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beast in View was the next book of poetry in my book The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser, along with the longer poem Wake Island (1942), which isn't part of a larger book and I also read. I enjoyed this collection because of its focus on the experience of war, specifically in the early 1940s. Some poems were more ostensibly about war and some had a passing line or image. Beast in View had three sections: "Beast in View", "Letter to the Front", and "The Soul and Body of John Brown". I enjoyed many of the short poems in the "Beast in View" section, most notably "Bubble of Air." It was a little simpler, but still in Rukeyser's somewhat dense style, and it's one of her poems that touches on being a Jew in America in the 1940s. Another more famous one, "To be a Jew in the twentieth century" is also in this book, as a section of the long poem "Letter to the Front" (which has 10 sections in all). This section has been published as its own poem, and I'd seen it before, but it was good to see it in the context of this larger work about war. In general, I enjoyed seeing many of the themes and images and word choices that I like in one of her later poems (my favorite, "The Speed of Darkness") show up here in an earlier form.