A review by abetterjulie
The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser

2.0

This started off strong and then petered out into incomprehensibility. I ended up skimming most of the last half. It feels like a series of unfinished and barely-clothed essays. I really wanted her to extend out her thoughts from the start about how the public distaste for poetry can be traced back to our unwillingness to confront difficult emotions like fear and grief. Or, I'd have loved a deeper look at her claim that art prepares us for thought.
I bought this book because I read about how much of an anti-war activist Rukeyser was, and I wanted to delve more into that through the lens of poetry. I wanted to see how much things had changed (or not) in our time compared to hers.
Anyway, that's not what I got. So, meh.