The Book of the Dead (poem)

Last updated

The Book of the Dead is a long narrative poem written by Muriel Rukeyser, appearing in her collection US 1. Published in 1938, the poem deals with the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, also known as the Gauley Tunnel Tragedy, in which predominately poor, migrant mine workers in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia succumbed to death caused by the occupational mining disease known as silicosis. [1]

Over the course of twenty poems, beginning with "The Road" and ending with "The Book of the Dead," Rukeyser takes her readers onto a journey into the disaster. The poem mixes and intersperses in a modernist and documentary manner testimony from the disaster, lines from the ancient Egyptian text Book of the Dead, along with lines from the Biblical story of Absalom. [2] The poem's title emerges from the Egyptian text, with Rukeyser quoting or referencing the ancient work throughout her poem. [2] As part of her experiential research for the poem, Rukeyser visited Gauley Bridge with Nancy Naumburg in 1936. [3]

Since its publication in 1938, The Book of the Dead has helped to establish her as an important poet of the twentieth century. It is a key example of the 1930s and 1940s tradition of documentary poetry and poetics, [4] a tradition which documentary poetics practitioner Mark Nowak describes as "lefter-than-liberal." [5] Among various other influences, one key influence for the poem is "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Epic poetry</span> Lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily detailing extraordinary and heroic deeds

An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poetry</span> Form of literature

Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T. S. Eliot</span> US-born British poet (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virgil</span> 1st-century-BC Roman poet

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems, collected in the Appendix Vergiliana, were attributed to him in ancient times, but modern scholars consider his authorship of these poems to be dubious.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Callimachus</span> 3rd-century BC Greek poet, scholar and librarian

Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which do not survive, in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">H.D.</span> American poet and novelist (1886–1961)

Hilda Doolittle was an American modernist poet, novelist, and memoirist who wrote under the name H.D. throughout her life. Her career began in 1911 after she moved to London and co-founded the avant-garde Imagist group of poets with American expatriate poet and critic Ezra Pound. During this early period, her minimalist free verse poems depicting Classical motifs drew international attention. Eventually distancing herself from the Imagist movement, she experimented with a wider variety of forms, including fiction, memoir, and verse drama. Reflecting the trauma she experienced in London during the Blitz, H.D.'s poetic style from World War II until her death pivoted towards complex long poems on esoteric and pacifist themes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernist poetry in English</span>

Modernist poetry in English started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. Like other modernists, Imagist poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, and its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Madeline Gleason</span> American poet

Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild. In 1947, she became the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (1960).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Muriel Rukeyser</span> American poet, writer, and political activist (1913–1980)

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

<i>Paterson</i> (poem) Poem by William Carlos Williams

Paterson is an epic poem by American poet William Carlos Williams published, in five volumes, from 1946 to 1958. The origin of the poem was an eighty-five line long poem written in 1926, after Williams had read and been influenced by James Joyce's novel Ulysses. As he continued writing lyric poetry, Williams spent increasing amounts of time on Paterson, honing his approach to it both in terms of style and structure. While The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Bridge by Hart Crane could be considered partial models, Williams was intent on a documentary method that differed from both these works, one that would mirror "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster</span> Tunnel in West Virginia where hundreds of workers contracted silicosis

The Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster was a large-scale incident of occupational lung disease in the 1930s as the result of the construction of the Hawks Nest Tunnel near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, as part of a hydroelectric project. This project is considered to be one of the worst industrial disasters in American history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sharon Olds</span> American poet

Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.

The volta, or turn, is a rhetorical shift or dramatic change in thought and/or emotion. Turns are seen in all types of written poetry. In the last two decades, the volta has become conventionally used as a word for this, stemming supposedly from technique specific mostly to sonnets. Volta is not, in fact, a term used by many earlier critics when they address the idea of a turn in a poem, and they usually are not discussing the sonnet form. It is a common Italian word more often used of the idea of a time or an occasion than a turnabout or swerve.

The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian funerary text.

<i>The Waste Land</i> Poem by T. S. Eliot

The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important English language poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's magazine The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".

Hawk's Nest is a novel written by West Virginia author Hubert Skidmore, published in 1941. A fictionalized account of one of America's greatest industrial disasters, it is an account of the Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster in which hundreds or thousands of men were sickened and died as a result of silicosis they contracted while digging the tunnel under unsafe conditions. The novel follows the lives of many representative characters as their health begins to fail, and as their health complaints are ignored by Union Carbide, the contractor which dug the tunnel and installed the hydroelectric plant.

<i>Heavenly Questions</i> Ancient Chinese poem rich in mythological references

The Heavenly Questions or Questions to Heaven is a piece contained in the Classical Chinese poetry collection of Chu Ci, which is noted both in terms of poetry and as a source for information on the ancient culture of China, especially the area of the ancient state of Chu. Of all the poems attributed to Qu Yuan, "Tianwen" contains more myths than any of the other pieces which may be attributed to him; however, due to the formal structure of "Tianwen" as a series of questions, information regarding the myths alluded to appear more as a series of allusive fragments than as cohesively narrated stories.

Feminist revisionist mythology is feminist literature informed by feminist literary criticism, or by the politics of feminism more broadly and that engages with mythology, fairy tales, religion, or other areas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Song for Simeon</span> Poem by T.S. Eliot

"A Song for Simeon" is a 37-line poem written in 1928 by American-English poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). It is one of five poems that Eliot contributed to the Ariel Poems series of 38 pamphlets by several authors published by Faber and Gwyer. "A Song for Simeon" was the sixteenth in the series and included an illustration by avant garde artist Edward McKnight Kauffer. The poems, including "A Song for Simeon", were later published in both the 1936 and 1963 editions of Eliot's collected poems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Francesco Levato</span> American poet

Francesco Levato is a poet, a translator, and a new media artist. He received his MFA in Poetry from New England College and is currently working on his PhD in English Studies, Poetry, at Illinois State University. He is the founder and director of The Chicago School of Poetics, served as executive director of The Poetry Center of Chicago from 2007 to 2010, and currently serves as Cinépoetry Editor for Poetry International.

References

  1. Green, Chris (2010). The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan Press. pp. 172–173. ISBN   9780230610934.
  2. 1 2 Dayton, Tim (2003). Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. pp. 24–27, 47–50. ISBN   9780826220639.
  3. Thurston, Michael (2006). Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 172–173. ISBN   9780807849798.
  4. Lowney, John (2006). History, Memory, and the Literary Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935-1968. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. p. 37. ISBN   9781587295089.
  5. Nowak, Mark (2010). "Documentary Poetics". poetryfoundation.org. Poetry Foundation.
  6. Däumer, Elisabeth (2018). "'Wanting more from Mr. Eliot': Muriel Rukeyser, T. S. Eliot, and the Uses of Poetry". Textual Practice. 32 (7): 1181–1183. doi:10.1080/19306962.1945.11786232.