In her 1949 book of essays,
The Life of Poetry,
Muriel Rukeyser embraces poetry as an essential agent of change. The book begins with an exploration of resistance, most notably in an essay on "The Fear of Poetry." In the Foreword,
Jane Cooper writes: "Why is poetry feared? Because it demands full consciousness; it asks us to feel and it asks us to respond. Through poetry we are brought face to face with our world and we plunge deeply into ourselves, to a place where we sense, [as Rukeyser wrote] 'the full value of the meanings of emotions and ideas in their relations with each other, and... understand...in the glimpse of a moment, the freshness of things and their possibilities.'"
