Re-reading Langston Hughes poem, Let America Be America Again, I realized there is much overlap with Rukeyser. Not necessarily in tone or presentation, but in the vision they each have.
In Hughes poem, the narrator states, “Let it be the dream it used to be.” And later, “O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.” In Rukeyser’s poem, The Soul and Body of John Brown, she writes “O my scene! My mother! / America who offers many births.” They are both speaking of a vision of freedom that has yet to be realized, but exists in the foundations of the United States (and for Rukeyser, as a potential for the world).
Hughes narrator also states, parenthetically, “America never was America to me.” Here, the narrator is talking about being excluded from the very possibilities of equality and freedom America is meant to offer. Certainly in Rukeyser’s poem of John Brown, just by selecting him as a figure, she is aware of this same duplicity.
They also each address oppression in the modern day. Hughes writes, “I am the worker sold to the machine.” Rukeyser echoes this sentiment when she writes, “Slaves under factories” and “a slave’s mechanical cat’s-claw reaping sky.”
Finally, they both end on notes of optimism, in spite of all that precedes it. Hughes writes, “And yet I swear this oath – / America will be!” This declarative statement is soon followed by “Its dream / Lies deep in the heart of me.” Meanwhile Rukeyser ends her piece by referencing “more life” and giving the reader a directive, “challenging this hatred … risk it upon yourselves. … clear the image of freedom for the body of the world.”
While I did not initially consider Rukeyser’s poem a work of “witness” – it is certainly on the periphery. Both poems address an issue of inequality prevalent in their lifetime and demand the reader not only absorb the text, but react to it.
joolse 
Both poems, if you like, are witnesses to the vitality of the Dream–the Dream of America, the dreams dreamed by America. Perhaps, as prophetic witnesses, they keep alive for their readers the Dream in its potentiality–they keep alive what “can be” and “ought to be,” even though it is not.
Okay, I am really glad you told me about this post. I never really considered how these works could be read together, but I think you have a really interesting take on them.I think both works are optimistic, but in a way that reflects the sadness of their present times. It’s also interesting to think about The Book of the Dead (the Egyptian one) as a kind of metaphor for these attitudes. How can we move on from the tragedy of one or many deaths without thinking about the future and its redemptive or regenerative possibilities? Even in the basic act of witness, there is a sense of the salvation of something positive out of loss.