Muriel Rukeyser and the Poetics of Specific Critique: Rereading "The Book of the Dead"

t is an instructive paradox that in the divisive milieu of the Depression era, the sign of a poem's cultural power lay not in its widespread acclaim, as it does today, but instead in the critical conflict it provoked. Indeed, entire careers of this period record in their twists and turns the historical pressures that writers were compelled to negotiate. Most notably, of course, Archibald MacLeish went the full gamut of interbellum political life. Graduating from Harvard Law School in the early 1920s, he was throughout the next two decades alternately vilified and valorized by such writers on the left as Mike Gold, Stanley Burnshaw, Malcolm Cowley, Rolfe Humphries, and Carl Sandburg. With the publication of "Invocation to the Social Muse" in 1932, the year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Conquistador, MacLeish became something of a lightning rod for the period's turbulent intellectual tempests. His anti-Semitic and anti-proletarian stereotypes portrayed in poems such as "Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City" and "Comrade Levine" drew heavy fire from leftist poets and intellectuals at the time.1 Yet in only one short year, as the Com-