Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser doesn’t argue for poetry’s prestige; she argues for its necessity, the way a body argues for food. The line’s power comes from how casually it treats “invention” as inevitability. If poetry vanished overnight, she’s saying, it wouldn’t be mourned as a lost art so much as re-created under pressure. That’s a radical demotion of poetry from museum object to survival technology.

The subtext is anti-gatekeeping. Poetry isn’t the private property of credentialed poets or elite institutions; it’s the form language snaps into when ordinary speech can’t carry the load. “Any day” matters: not an era, not a golden age, just Tuesday. Rukeyser compresses the entire argument for art into a single, bodily metaphor - hunger - which bypasses debates about usefulness. You don’t “justify” hunger; you manage it.

Context sharpens the claim. Rukeyser came of age amid economic collapse, war, and political repression, and spent her career insisting that poems are ways of knowing, not decorative feelings. Her work sits close to documentary, witness, and public address; she wrote as if facts needed a nervous system. So the “intolerable hunger” isn’t only for beauty. It’s for meaning under stress: a pattern strong enough to hold grief, outrage, desire, and the messy data of living.

The intent, then, is almost combative: stop treating poetry as optional. If you remove it, humans will rebuild it from whatever’s left - slogans, lullabies, prayers, protest chants - because we cannot stand raw experience unshaped.