Emancipation through Modern Poetics: History, Politics, and Aesthetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser represents a collection of poetry riddled with a history of “relative neglect and obscurity.”1 For this reason, discourses surrounding the docupoetic collection often grapple with the ambition required when approaching a complex work addressing temporal tragedy. To contribute to this discourse, the literary research in this paper traverses an intersection with three primary angles: the political, the aesthetic, and the emancipatory. The analysis centers on The Book of the Dead and the modernist poetry that the author of the collection utilizes when portraying a uniquely chilling perspective of one of the most catastrophic industrial disasters in United States history. Understanding the poetry from Rukeyser, however, faces several obstacles given the rejection of literary convention within each stanza. This paper therefore provides necessary historical, sociological, and aesthetic background to contextualize the important discussions on literature and culture that are underscored within The Book of the Dead. Ultimately, the research contends that Rukeyser’s work not only calls for emancipation for the dead, but also the freeing of readers from literary convention in order to confront a tragedy much of society would rather leave behind in history.