Willard Gibbs

“Muriel Rukeyser[’s] five-hundred-page prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) [is] a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world.”

—Maria Popova, From the Foreword

“Willard Gibbs is, in my opinion, one of the most original and important creative minds in the field of science America has produced.”

—Albert Einstein

“Willard Gibbs [was] one of the giants of science. Rukeyser’s excellent biography of [this] neglected figure relates him culturally to his time. [Gibbs] made himself the peer of Newton and Einstein. Yet Yale was hardly aware of his existence … It has remained for Muriel Rukeyser, a distinguished poet, to bring Gibbs back to life … Rukeyser has given us a pulsating picture of a living personality … She saw that for all his formal, scientific way of expressing himself, Gibbs was a poet who happened to use equations instead of verses to interpret a highly intricate and mysterious universe, an artist in mathematics who discovered unsuspected beauty in the design of nature … Her biography is bound to remain the standard for years to come.”

—Waldemar Kaempffert, The New York Times

“A Moby Dick of a book in intention and intimations, touching on ‘the sum of things’ … There are passages of rare poetic storytelling quality.”

—TIME

“If this man of mystery, this prophet without honor, had not lived when he did, the first World War might never have been fought … It has remained for a poet, Muriel Rukeyser, to put him into a biography which is also a study of the development of American culture since the beginning … Rukeyser makes Gibbs … a symbol of American greatness, a figure to put beside architects of the American spirit as varied as Walt Whitman and Lincoln … This is a biography which all Americans should read.”

—John Chamberlain, The New York Times

“[Gibbs’s] work gives a key to the understanding of some central tendencies in the intellectual and social history of the past hundred years … [Rukeyser] is almost unique among our poets in her intellectual inquisitiveness. Her Willard Gibbs witnesses to that desire to see all round the objects of her interest which led her to go to aviation school before writing Theory of Flight, and to make both a documentary and a first-hand investigation of certain phases of the social scene before writing U. S. 1.”

—Philip Blair Rice, The Kenyon Review

Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) was a poet, playwright, biographer, children’s book author, and political activist. She won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, Theory of Flight (1935), and became central to both American modernism and Leftist political communities over her five-decade career, mentoring scores of younger poets including Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, and Adrienne Rich, among many others. Rukeyser was born in New York City and attended Vassar College. After her death in 1980, Rukeyser’s work suffered critical and popular neglect. However, Rukeyser’s body of work has emerged as particularly vital and important to poets and scholars in the first decades of the 21st century.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings). She has written some very long books (Figuring and Traversal) and some very short books (The Snail with the Right Heart and The Coziest Place on the Moon), and her show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry—has also become a book the length of a day on Saturn.