Muriel Rukeyser Quotes

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.

There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

I think that its an artist's responsibility to have a point of view. Society takes its cue from popular art. People need something to look to, something to provoke them into questioning whether they completely hate something or completely love something.

All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing, like poetry, their own assumptions.

By the creative act, we are able to reach beyond our own death.

Genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies and animates.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

There's that weird and cool line that music can cross where it still gives you the goosebumps and you think it's cool but on the other hand it's sort of like also letting you off the hook a little bit with the ironic aspects of the thing. I think that's the inexplicable, the smell of a movie. That's the taste of the movie.

I wasn't raised to not write about issues, and I'm just living in really politically charged times. You know, I'd rather write songs about girls, but it's just hard to do right now.

Some have the temperament and tastes of genius, without its creative power. They feel acutely, but express tamely.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

To create anything… is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.

To a poet nothing can be useless.

I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, - and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" - my "dews" - my "breezes" - my bloom and freshness, - no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they're not used to? Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.

Look, do you see that poem?' she said suddenly, pointing.