Life & Wisdom Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

A poet saying poetry comes from "the spirit seeking completeness" is staking a claim against the idea of art as ornament. Rukeyser frames the poem as a pressure system: something inside us pushing toward wholeness because fragmentation hurts. The phrasing matters. "Sources" suggests springs, not just influences; poetry isn’t manufactured so much as tapped. And "the spirit" keeps it bodily-adjacent without getting religiously tidy: an inner life with appetite, conscience, trauma, desire. She implies that poems begin where ordinary language fails to reconcile what we know with what we feel.

The word "seeking" does the heavy lifting. Completeness isn’t achieved; it’s pursued. That makes poetry less a trophy than a method, a way of testing connections between experiences that arrive in shards. In Rukeyser’s era - Depression, war, political violence, ideological certainty marketed as salvation - "completeness" reads as a rebuke to simplifiers. The spirit wants the whole truth, including contradictions; propaganda offers clean narratives and demands you amputate whatever doesn’t fit.

Rukeyser’s larger project often braided the personal with the public, insisting that an authentic inner life has social consequences. In that light, "completeness" is ethical as much as aesthetic: to write a poem is to refuse the partition between private grief and public history. The subtext: if you feel unfinished, that’s not a personal failure; it’s the engine. Poetry is how the spirit keeps reaching for a world where the pieces can touch.