Success Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

A poem that ends on the page, Rukeyser implies, is a kind of polite failure: technically accomplished, maybe even moving, but sealed off from consequence. The line carries the gentle threat of a manifesto. It refuses the museum-model of poetry as a self-contained object to admire. Instead, it imagines the poem as a threshold technology, a device that changes the reader's angle of vision and sends them back into life with new pressure behind the eyes.

Rukeyser's phrasing is slyly relational. "Our poems" makes authorship communal, less lone-genius than shared civic labor. "Brought" suggests motion and responsibility: the reader is not merely invited; they are carried, escorted, maybe even compelled. The destination matters more than the vehicle. "Beyond the poems" is not anti-art; it's anti-complacency, a refusal to let aesthetic pleasure substitute for moral or political attention.

Context sharpens the stakes. Writing across the Depression, World War II, and the long churn of American injustice, Rukeyser treated poetry as witness and connective tissue. Her work insists that the lyrical and the factual are not enemies: the poem can hold documentary grit and still sing. This quote distills that ethic into a test that still stings. If a reader closes the book unchanged - not necessarily converted, but activated into sharper perception, deeper empathy, fuller agency - the poem hasn't done its job.

It's a standard aimed not at perfection, but at reach. Art isn't an escape hatch; it's an ignition.