Hymns Among Ruins; or, Modern Poetry’s Midcentury Inflation

Abstract

During and after World War II the Mexican poet Octavio Paz (1914–98) and two of his first English-language translators in the United States, Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80) and William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), expatiated on poetic form’s existential significance and political utility. Williams crusaded for a “new measure” that would govern the structure of human lives as surely as the structure of poems. Rukeyser developed an impassioned apology for poetry as a “meeting-place between all the kinds of imagination.” Paz expounded poetry’s split historicity, its existence both in and out of time. This discourse is easy enough to historicize, and easy enough to critique, especially when one draws connections with cognate ideas in the philosophy of a figure like Martin Heidegger. But this essay uncovers the inevitability, or historical truth, of this poetic theorizing. By turning to the translation of Paz’s “Hymn Among Ruins,” which stages the inextricability of poetry’s being and function in a world hostile to both, this essay shows that for Rukeyser, Williams, and Paz, poetry’s midcentury inflation is driven by a resistance to its ruination.