This chapter further explores Rukeyser's use of the human portrait, analysing her methods of documenting what she termed ‘exemplary lives’, and examining the extent to which the 1930s documentary impulse towards the aesthetic, ethical and iconographical representation of human beings informed Rukeyser's own methods of biographical representation. Rukeyser said, ‘[t]he poem seems to me a meeting place just as a person's life is a meeting place.’ By investigating the ways in which Rukeyser depicts human lives as ‘meeting places’, I will demonstrate now the biographies, individually and as a group, represent the coming together of several of the figures who helped to shape her aesthetic. They may therefore be regarded as a combination of portraiture and self-portraiture, simultaneously charting the lives of those people whose stories Rukeyser believes need to be heard, and providing multiple voices with which to communicate her own philosophical and political concerns.

Biography in 1930s America

The Depression climate of economic instability and political isolationism generated a renewed interest in biographical forms in America, as writers and artists sought to reaffirm American values to bolster national morale. Those who had chosen to leave America for Europe a decade before returned to their homeland intending to unearth and reassert traditional cultural practices in the hope of defining and uniting America. The critic Edgar Johnson commented in 1938 that biography had taken the form of a ‘vast exploration … of the heroes of American history and folklore’, seeing the reason as a renewed appreciation of the fact that ‘what we are is the product of the America that was’.