Theory of Flight

by Muriel Rukeyser

With a foreword by Steven Vincent Benét
Volume 34, Yale Series of Younger Poets

Genres: Poetry

86 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1935

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

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few decent poems in Muriel Rukeyser’s first collection, such as “The Lynchjng of Jesus,” but for the most part I was turned off by her style. For those who don’t know, poetry (i.e., verse) is meant to be written in complete sentences — subject, verb, object, and punctuation marks. Of course, a poet is free to get crazy with the structure of his or her lines, but a grammarian should never scoff at one. If you removed all the line breaks from a poem, it should still be coherent as prose, no matter how intricate. Nevertheless, it seems that Rukeyser was among the progenitors of the style that has plagued poetry for 100 years, one that ignores this simple rule in favor of grammatical chaos and “artistic freedom,” which is really just artistic ignorance. Despite what Rukeyser would have you believe, an enjambed line does not denote a finished sentence. Neither does a new line begin a new sentence, nor does a colon dropped in the middle of a line. No matter how many line or stanza breaks you add, your sentence lasts from its first word down to its closing punctuation mark. I’m not going to correct your syntax or punctuation for you in my head. If your verse doesn’t make any sense when I read it, that’s on you, not me. I already know how to read poetry — I’m not going to reteach myself based on your own imagined rules for writing it.

Rant aside, I also wasn’t convinced by the main theme of this collection: the connection of sex and the invention of flight. Several poems end in the word “FLY,” which seemed brazenly pretentious — is there a worse metaphor for freedom than flight? One poem even includes a stanza of interlocking scenes between a man preparing to penetrate a woman and an airplane making contact with ground control. What is this, Crash?

[Samira Abed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best poem is the titular one. Loved reading it aloud at my kitchen table. I recommend to any one craving detail. There's nothing like an older poet to remind me how nice it is to settle into aphorisms and details. You can paint a scene and also observe the implications. Long lines in these poems I sometimes stumbled to read. Like one syllable too many, and I was surprised and grateful for the random rhymes. It makes me feeling like there is true connective tissue to my experience and others. Some beautiful language that sometimes gets bogged in a little boring-ness for this old sick crow.

Love you, Samira

[Shoshana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muriel Rukeyser has been my favorite poet since I stumbled upon two lines of her poetry on NYC's Library Walk some 15 years ago. In 2013 I bought her book of collected poems, but it was so big I didn't know how I would tackle it. It sat on my nightstand, and I thought I'd pick it up every now and then and read a poem. I did that, like, twice. Finally this year I decided that for my "at least one poetry book a year" requirement I would section off this huge book into the various smaller books it's broken into, and each one would be a book I'd read each year. I started with the first one, Theory of Flight, which she published in 1935. I know a few of her poems, and one, "The Speed of Darkness" very well, but I was still not prepared to be immersed in her poetry for 70 pages. Theory of Flight is broken into three sections, and the second one, called Theory of Flight, beautifully uses airplanes and plane flight as a metaphor for all kinds of things. Sometimes the poetry gets technical, sometimes more narrative. I found this section the most stunning, and I kept picturing it as an avant-garde short film full of images and small narratives and lots and lots of airplanes. There are some terrific poems in the first and third sections as well, including the opening lines of the first poem, "Poem out of Childhood": "Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry." And the last lines of the last poem, "The Blood is Justified," about how we have to fight what the previous generation gave us: "We focus on our times, destroying you, fathers/ in the long ground : you have given strange birth/ to us who turn against you in our blood/ needing to move in our integrity, accomplices/ of life in revolution, though the past/ be sweet with your tall shadows, and although/ we turn from treasons, we shall accomplish these."

[Amber Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

1930s modernist poetry is hard--but Rukeyeser's work is interesting!

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1935, Theory of Flight was Rukeyser’s first collection, which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize and garnered notice from well-established poets like Benet, who wrote the glowing introduction. It’s hard to imagine that Rukeyser wrote such mature poems as a senior at Vassar.

Favorite Poems:
“Notes for a Poem”
“The Gyroscope”
“The Lynchings of Jesus”
“Sundays, They Sleep Late”
“Citation for Horace Gregory”
“The Lover”

“If you must have pilgrimages
go traveling to balance need with answer
suiting the explosion to the ensuing shock
the foil to the airstream running over it
food to the mouth, tools to the body, mind
to the bright mind that leaps in necessity
go answering answering FLY”
—“III. The Lover”