The Collected Works of Ruth Whitman: Personas and Personhood

by Ruth Whitman, Jennifer Kronovet (Foreword by), David Houghton (Editor)

Overview

Positioning poet Ruth Whitman as a necessary and radical voice within the American poetry canon.

Ruth Whitman's poetry and other creative work have left an undeniable mark on twentieth-century literature. Known as a poet and a translator of Yiddish poetry, Whitman was intensely interested in gender and women's stories. For the first time in a single volume, readers can engage with her eight published books of poetry as well as the never-before-seen Atlantic Light and her prose practicum, Becoming a Poet. The first half of the collection contains persona poems of fascinating women—from Tamsen Donner of the ill-fated Donner Party, to Egyptian pharaoh Hatshepsut, to modern dancer Isadora Duncan. The second half takes up many themes, including Jewishness, domestic life, and motherhood. Whitman's distinctive methods and influences, alongside her unique poetic technique, make clear her commitment to expanding the boundaries of poetic form as well as exploring gender, family, the self, creativity, mortality, and memory in poetry. This text firmly positions Whitman as a necessary and radical voice within the American poetry canon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814352458
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	12/02/2025
Pages:	488
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ruth Whitman (1922–99) was a renowned poet, translator, and performer. She published fourteen volumes of poetry—original works and several translations of Yiddish poetry, including An Anthology of Modern Yiddish Poetry (Wayne State University Press). Whitman won numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a 1984–85 Senior Fulbright Writer-in-Residence Fellowship to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a 1974–75 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. During her career, Whitman taught at many universities, including Harvard, Radcliffe, and MIT. David Houghton is an adjunct professor of English in New England. He coauthored The Chinese of the Mendocino Coast with Dorothy Bear and teaches writing, rhetoric, and literature. He is the son of Ruth Whitman.

What People are Saying About This

William Packard

Her control of craft, her fine wit and intuition create poems which are breathtaking.

Maxine Kumin

The woman who shines out of these poems is large-hearted and full of feeling. The new poems are stunning. Her fourteen-part elegiac sequence, 'The Drowned Mountain,' swept me away.

Alicia Ostriker

Ruth Whitman joins the ranks of women writers exploring the deep past, where myth and history, sexuality and politics meet. This is a visionary book.

Edwin Honig

It has a sweeping and dramatic concision. I accept Tamsen fully and believe in her boggling trip to that pass in California. Maybe she has finally been made into American history.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

For those who love Hanna Senesh, Ruth Whitman's biography, written in the form of a diary, will be a new source of inspiration.

Carole Simmons Oles

With wrenching power, Whitman revives Hatshepsut against the backdrop of her culture and time. Arias, recitatives, and interludes form the dialogue between Hatshepsut and the poet Ruth, mutually confiding their lives—the women and men they loved, their work, their children. Whatever else this richly layered book is about, it is also about time: the poet 'racing to leave behind / a few words arranged in a pattern / that will touch the living.' These Ruth/Hatshepsut poems do, and will.

David Ignatow

It's simplicity and directness; its concrete evocation of time and place is just as vivid as can be. . . . It's a beauty.

Stanley Kunitz

Whether she is probing the lyric mysteries of flesh and its bondings, or exploring her Jewish heritage, or celebrating—in an unprecedented series of long narrative poems—the witness-lives of heroic women, Ruth Whitman's work of almost thirty years exemplifies in all its phases her lively intelligence and the honesty and bravery of her spirit.

Editorial Reviews

With this book . . . she takes her place as a notable poet on the American scene.

The Boston Globe

A work of beauty and force . . . a major achievement.

Booklist

Becoming a Poet is an exciting, instructive, readable guide to the poetic process, from its inception to the finished poem.

The Writer

She celebrates rich emotion yielding the most meaningful love—the verse itself has a deceptive simplicity, hiding allusiveness behind a straightforward style and unaffectedly uniting rhythm and subject matter.

The Saturday Review