The Humble,the Simple And The Fragmented:Ruth Stone’s Poetics Of Life

Ruth Stone (1915-2011), a prominent contemporary American woman poet, won the WallaceStevens Award in Poetry, one of the two highest national prizes for poetry, National Book Award,National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors and awards by virtue of thirteenpoetry collections. By observing ordinary and real things in everyday life, Stone discussessurvival, poverty, loneliness, desperation, senility, death, desolation, love, memory, nature andmany other topics closely related to everyday life. In her poetry, she highlights humble livesfrom which she extracts a modest but confident passion and a positive and optimistic attitudetowards daily life, manages to resolve bitterness in simple life by means of humor, and embracesthose long-neglected and fragmented others with universal love and humanity, thus deepeningpeople’s self-identification and actively presenting and inquiring the eternal meanings and valuesof life.For a long time, literary research has been focused on big issues of society and history, andignored grassroots’ trivial, mechanical mundane life. However, since the21st century, with thewide spread and acceptance of Henri Lefebvre and his student Michel de Certeau’s theory on“everyday life”, daily life has drawn attention from many critics. They start to observe trivialthings in everyday life which contains the whole social relations, to capture some momentflashing in everyday life which carries miraculous and transcendental nature and to discover theresistance against the dominated power hidden behind nobody’s mechanical and chaotic dailybehaviors. Therefore, everyday life becomes a foundation of the whole social relations and socialstructures, and a dialectical unity of ordinariness and extra-ordinariness. Stone’s poetry embodiesthe change that poets depart from grand narrative to daily ones and corresponds to the currentideas of focusing on everyday life and ordinary lives, ushering American poetry into everydaylife, which shows an important academic and social significance by its poetic concept and valueorientation.Ruth Stone describes many humble lives in her poetry, like travel-stained passengers,impoverished wanderers sleeping out on the streets and weeping wives missing the loved onesby the door. All these transient visitors in life are so humble that their life, death and emotionsare too insignificant to make a riffle in life, but it is just from these humble lives that Stone seestheir courage and uprightness and feels the strength of loving others and loving themselves bywhich the humble seek and capture the beauty of life. In the poem “Mother”, Stone pictures afrustrated and exhausted mother lying in a dark room while listening to her kids’ playing andlaughing outside the room. Although day-after-day laboring wrinkles the mother’s forehead, themother finds comfort and happiness in her kids’carefree playing.“Curtain” separates Stone from her suicide husband by death, suddenly pushing death in front of life and swallowing her withpains and memories. Life is so fragile that almost everyone has been overwhelmed by the lost ofthe loved ones, but Stone captures and magnifies flaming love and sweet memories of the lovedones in this unbearable pain, and finds love in life and spreads love to appreciate the beauty oflife.Life of the humble is simple, mechanical and repeating. Bored people waiting at the casher’sand taking out the trash day after day gradually push the meaning of life away, but Stoneobserves simple pleasures in this simple life, and uses humor to unveil extra-ordinariness ofsimplicity, thus bringing back the sparkle of values and meanings of life. In the poem “AtEighty-three She Lives Alone”, repeatedly boring life of the old lady dilutes her sense of being,and highlights the lonely, boring, and neglected life of the old. However, a paper folded swan,though small, colors this everyday life and calls back happy memories and long-lost hope, thusencouraging her to transcend sufferings and live actively.The pretentious idea of “man can conquer nature” expels nature and the lifeless from life,and the utilitarian pragmatism prevents science from entering into art and life, so life whichshould have been complete is cut into fragmentation. However, Stone pays attention to alienatedbut beautiful nature, experiences vitality of the lifeless and presents life and art contained inscience with her universal love and respect so as to unite fragmented life into a whole. In thepoem “Speculation”, life is injected into corpse who cannot see and speak even with eyes andmouth, by which Stone calls people’s attention to these ignored inanimate objects and integratesthem into life again, thus guiding people to realize the meaning of the lifeless which in returnhelps them to identify their own sense of existence and to find the power and hope of life. Theamazing Klein bottle perfectly intertwines science with art, spanning a rift between science andlife and art. Therefore, science shakes off its utilitarian and shows the nature of life and art, solife appears in whole. In spite of fragmentation of life, the return of nature, science and thelifeless re-unites life, and makes life continue in a rewarding and healthy way.Ruth Stone’s poetics of life illustrates that people’s aesthetic pursuit can find meanings ineveryday life, thus seeing aesthetic elements in everyday life and elevating its quality andalleviating its depression and monotony. Stone’s poetry and her poetic pursuit provide peoplewith a model which urges people to think how to find meaning from the physical reality ofeveryday life, to find self from sensuous richness of everyday life, and confirms people’sphysical ontological existence. Stone’s poetics of life has reconstructed the values and meaningsof life from and in people’s everyday life.