“What are sto­ries for?” my four-year-old son asks me before bed­time, eight weeks into our shel­ter-in-place expe­ri­ence. He spends his days dream­ing up adven­tures for his stuffed ani­mals and build­ing elab­o­rate card­board box con­trap­tions. It has been hard for him to leave his beloved preschool and the sched­ule he depend­ed on, but this imag­i­nary play insu­lates him against the disorder.

“We were a gen­er­a­tion of grim chil­dren,” wrote Muriel Rukeyser in her unfor­get­table poem, ​“Out of Child­hood.” She was born Decem­ber 15, 1913, one year before World War I tore the globe apart. When she was the exact same age as my son, the 1918 influen­za pan­dem­ic swept the globe, killing mil­lions. I keep return­ing to ​“Out of Child­hood” dur­ing our COVID-19 cri­sis, haunt­ed by her mem­o­ry of the parades that marked the end of World War I and the begin­ning of the dead­ly pan­dem­ic. She wrote:

“lean­ing over the bed­room sills, watching
the music and the shoul­ders and how the war was over,
laugh­ing until the blow on the mouth broke night
wide out from cover.”

Rukeyser’s gen­er­a­tion endured a dizzy­ing series of cat­a­stro­phes; as soon as one had end­ed, anoth­er would appear with sting­ing sud­den­ness. Now, her work can help us to under­stand our own tur­bu­lent times, and the reshap­ing of our future from these colos­sal events.

Rukeyser wrote her ​“Poem Out of Child­hood” in 1935, as a twen­ty-one-year-old poet­ry prodi­gy who had to drop out of Vas­sar Col­lege after only two years of class­es. She had lived a fair­ly priv­i­leged life in New York City after World War I, but the eco­nom­ic col­lapse of 1929 upend­ed her family’s for­tunes and end­ed her col­lege career ear­ly. Along with child­hood mem­o­ries, the poem describes how her gen­er­a­tion wan­dered through an eco­nom­ic land­scape of shut­tered fac­to­ries, idled con­vey­or belts, and board­ed up util­i­ty com­pa­nies, lis­ten­ing ​“for the affir­ma­tive clap of truth.” More than forty-five mil­lion Amer­i­cans have filed for unem­ploy­ment in 2020, all of them wait­ing for acknowl­edge­ment and lead­er­ship, just like those unem­ployed in Rukeyser’s gen­er­a­tion. Young peo­ple in 1935 and 2020 des­per­ate­ly want to work and, through that occu­pa­tion, find a sense of pur­pose. That ​“affir­ma­tive clap of truth” would help guide them into adult­hood, but it has been silenced by the iso­la­tion of unemployment.

As she took her first steps into adult­hood, Rukeyser saw many peo­ple around her over­whelmed by sad­ness and pain. Through­out all this anguish, Rukeyser held faith in art and com­pas­sion and the hope that they offered. She per­se­vered through­out her long writ­ing career, because she believed in what she once described as ​“a sense of human pos­si­bil­i­ty that would not let us rest in defeat ever.”

After col­lege, Rukeyser began to trav­el and write the sto­ries of vul­ner­a­ble pop­u­la­tions. She used the com­bined tools of jour­nal­ism and poet­ry to retell the nar­ra­tives of hun­dreds of peo­ple harmed by eco­nom­ic injus­tice and fas­cism. She trav­eled to Alaba­ma, writ­ing about the tri­al of nine African Amer­i­can young men false­ly accused of rape; to West Vir­ginia, where she record­ed tes­ti­mo­ny from a min­ing com­mu­ni­ty sick­ened by one company’s neg­li­gence; to Spain, where she wit­nessed the Span­ish Civ­il War trans­form an entire coun­try in a mat­ter of hours. Dur­ing World War II she com­bat­ed the rise of anti­semitism and fas­cism, by work­ing for the Office of War Information.

Through­out these tumul­tuous decades, Rukeyser held fast to her Jew­ish her­itage. ​“Once one’s respon­si­bil­i­ty as a Jew is real­ly assumed, one is guar­an­teed, not only against fas­cism, but against many kinds of temp­ta­tion to close the spir­it,” she wrote in 1944 for a lit­er­ary sym­po­sium spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Com­mit­tee. ​“It is a strong force in one­self against many kinds of hard­ness which may arrive in the war,” she con­clud­ed, res­olute at one of the dark­est moments in history.

Rukeyser har­nessed that strong force inside her­self, forg­ing indi­vid­ual tragedies into pow­er­ful new nar­ra­tives — always look­ing beyond the dark moment to a more civ­i­lized future. Her work also wres­tled with a life­time of per­son­al strug­gles. Rukeyser’s lover died while fight­ing in the Span­ish Civ­il War; her fam­i­ly dis­in­her­it­ed her as she raised her son as sin­gle moth­er; the FBI hound­ed her for her polit­i­cal beliefs; and she suf­fered a stroke and ongo­ing health prob­lems toward the end of her life. ​“In art, of course, the mys­ti­cism of suc­cess and fail­ure will not hold,” she wrote, describ­ing her artis­tic process, ​“One works on one­self; one writes the poem, makes the movie, paints; and one is changed in the process.” Those words bring me a bit of com­fort as we con­front our own epochal uncertainty.

Faced with a dif­fer­ent set of chal­lenges, the anx­i­ety of our present moment will linger in my son’s mind the rest of his life, a child­hood jan­gled by bad news. ​“What are sto­ries for?” he asked me, and Rukeyser offered one answer in ​“The Speed of Dark­ness.” She pub­lished this poem in 1968, far from the tur­moil of her ear­ly life, illu­mi­nat­ing the core idea that helped her endure those tough decades. ​“The uni­verse is made of sto­ries, not of atoms,” Rukeyser wrote. From an ear­ly age, she learned how to weave togeth­er frac­tured ele­ments of her life and moments in his­to­ry into a more mean­ing­ful whole.

In her essay for the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Com­mit­tee, she put it anoth­er way: ​“To live as poet, woman, Amer­i­can, and Jew-this chalks in my iden­ti­ty. If the four come togeth­er in one per­son, each strength­ens the oth­ers.” Through­out her mag­nif­i­cent body of work, Rukeyser showed us how to use sto­ries — the fun­da­men­tal build­ing blocks of per­son­al iden­ti­ty — to rewrite our lives. Through this process, she found a life­long sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty that defeat­ed despair.

That is what sto­ries are for.