private school in the Bronx, the Fieldston School,
and then went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie
before moving back to New York City to attend
Columbia University. After finishing college, she
returned to Poughkeepsie, and her passion for
progressive politics began to show. Rukeyser,
along with Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy,
and Eleanor Clark, created a new literary mag-
azine,Student Review, to compete with the main-
streamVassar Review.In1932Rukeysertraveled
south as a reporter forStudent Reviewto cover
the trial of nine black men in Scottsboro, Ala-
bama, who were accused of raping two white
women in what was to become one of the most
famous civil rights cases in the country’s history.
For the rest of her life, Rukeyser was committed
to social issues, giving her vocal and financial
support to the underdogs and dissidents in causes
ranging from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s
to the Vietnam War in the 1970s. She wrote
columns for theDaily Worker, a newspaper pub-
lished by the American Communist Party. She
also wrote extensively about feminism and Juda-
ism. Because of her strong political beliefs and
her willingness to stand up for what she believed,
Rukeyser was a divisive figure, often criticized by
those on all sides of the political spectrum.
Her career as a poet started with acclaim
when her first collection,Theory of Flight, won
the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was then pub-
lished by Yale University Press. Over the next
forty-one years she wrote constantly, publishing
poems, novels, translations, television scripts,
biographies, and essays. Her notable works
include the poetry collectionsU.S. One(1938),
Elegies(1949), andThe Speed of Darkness(1968)
as well as the novelThe Orgy(1965) and several
unpublished plays. Almost all of her work
reflected her social concerns and political situa-
tions of the times they were written in. She sup-
ported herself, first with office jobs and then, as
her career developed, by teaching at Sarah Law-
rence College in Bronxville, New York. Over the
years, her writing won several prestigious
awards, including the Harriet Monroe Poetry
Award in 1941 and the Levinson Prize for poetry
in 1947. She also received a National Institute of
Arts and Letters grant in 1942 and fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation and the
American Council of Learned Societies.
Rukeyser suffered a stroke in 1964, at the
age of fifty-one. The event did little to inhibit her
writing or political activism, however, as she
went on to travel to Hanoi during the Vietnam
War and to South Korea to protest the planned
execution of the poet Kim Chi-Ha. That visit, in
1975, inspired the poems in Rukeyser’s collec-
tionThe Gates, in which ‘‘St. Roach’’ was pub-
lished. Rukeyser suffered another stroke in 1978
and was permanently disabled by it. She died in
New York City in 1980.Poem Text
‘‘St. Roach’’ comprises three stanzas of varying
lengths; at twenty-two lines, the first stanza is by
far the longest, followed by the five-line second
stanza and the four-line third stanza.Stanza 1
The poem begins with a form of address that
implies that readers are joining the speaker in
the middle of an ongoing conversation. The
actual subject being addressed is not even iden-
tified within the poem, such that it must be
assumed to be the roach, or cockroach, men-
tioned in the title.
The first two lines of the poem use negative
observations to draw attention to how little the
speaker has been taught about the cockroach.Muriel Rukeyser(AP Images)
St. Roach