Muriel Rukeyser's The Life Of Poetry

In The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser exposes the human race on our lack of reading engagement. She has seen far too many refuse to have their soul touched by the stories writers and poets slaved over to give us. We have chosen to become passive, to just read to finish, to read without witnessing what the author has brought to the forefront. In her eyes, literature is the “insisting of discovery” (Rukeyser 194). It is to lead us into the unknown and shed light on what we currently do not see. We connect with people we may never met as they expose themselves to us in a rawness that can only be authentic. We grow through literature and she echoes this, “there is an exchange here in which our lives are met” (Rukeyser 195). We begin to learn …show more content…
It has the ability to produce change in existing conditions. The thoughts of one mind to our eyes is a transfer of energy and we need to embrace it. We have the ability to read and discover almost any known problem or story, yet why some choose to cower away from this power remains a mystery to me. With reading, you have the ability to live a life through the countless eyes of authors. You are exposed, this transfer of energy gives you the ability to see what others to keep under lock and key. It is our nature to be curious, to wonder, to ponder. We deny ourselves if we deny this and this is what Rukeyser is getting at. She wants us to embrace the human energy that we experience through reading, to understand it, to ultimately use the newfound knowledge for good. Not every story will be on NBC, some of the most important will never be published in a newspaper. But they are out there. There is literature ready for eager eyes. Once we accept this power we have the ability to open a whole other realm of knowing. Sherman Alexie and Audrey Lorde are the epitome of this argument as they relay the energy of people who are oppressed and just want their stories to be