This chapter addresses Muriel Rukeyser’s Depression-era poetics in the context of documentary photography and claims that her poetics rejects the logic by which language became complicit with photography in rendering aestheticized and therefore consumable images of the modern world. Instead, Rukeyser’s poetics envisions a new, hybridized mode in which language, in this case that of the poem, exists in a critical tension with the photographic image. This chapter also argues that “extension,” a concept that relates Rukeyser’s work to commentaries by Lewis Mumford, Vannevar Bush, and Marshall McLuhan, among others, functions as a critical concept describing the process by which poetic language becomes a counterpoint to the public archive of images generated by emerging commercial media and a technocratic state. The final section examines the thematization of photography in “The Book of the Dead” to claim that Rukeyser’s epochal 1936 long poem, which documents a mining disaster in Depression-era West Virginia, scrutinizes the prerogatives of photographic seeing by rendering the photographic apparatus into a visible component of the industrialized rural landscape the poem surveys.

The book’s Introduction addresses the ways in which the notion of crisis functions conceptually to name not only moments of economic and cultural rupture, which become normalized within capitalist modernity, but also moments of epistemological doubt, when the taken-for-granted relationship between language and the social is called into question and subjected to critique. The Depression represented not only a breakdown of the smooth functioning of modernity and its market-based social organization, but also a parallel breakdown in a collective investment in the idea that language can represent the social, as language came to be regarded with suspicion for its role in perpetuating forms of commodification and appropriation associated with a crisis-ridden modernity. In response to this crisis, poetic language was forced to reconfigure its relationship to a society that was itself always in flux. The book’s Introduction thus establishes a basis for its survey of a broad cross-section of the poetic idioms associated with the Depression as both critiques of the idea of market modernity as a progressive, developmentalist force, and efforts to shore up language’s efficacy as a social and cultural form.