Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser’s line works like a piece of body advice disguised as an aesthetic manifesto. It tells you poetry isn’t summoned by suffering in the abstract or by some rarefied “gift”; it’s metabolized. You take the world in as oxygen - raw, unedited, sometimes polluted - and you return it altered, shaped, made shareable. That verb choice is the point: “breathe-in” and “breathe-out” refuse the romantic myth of the poet as lightning rod and replace it with a daily, involuntary rhythm. Art isn’t a pedestal, it’s respiration.

The subtext is political, too, because Rukeyser was never just a lyricist of private feeling. Writing through the Great Depression, World War II, McCarthy-era suspicion, and the long churn of American activism, she treated “experience” as public material: labor, injustice, testimony, bodies in history. To “breathe-in” is to stay porous to what’s happening around you, including what’s uncomfortable; to “breathe-out” is to answer, not with a slogan, but with form. Poetry becomes a way to process reality without letting it calcify into numbness.

There’s also a quiet instruction about craft. Exhalation isn’t a dump; it’s measured. Breath is paced, phrased, controlled - like a line break. Rukeyser turns the mystical into the physiological, making inspiration sound less like divine visitation and more like responsibility: if you’re alive, you’re already participating. The question is whether you’ll turn that participation into language.