One dominant subject of Muriel Rukeyser's Breaking Open is that life is one's attitude towards it, and the attitude Rukeyser promotes through these many and varied poems is positive affirmation without sentimentality…. Rukeyser's diction is often abstract, her imagery unadorned. Whatever the occasion for the poem (often autobiographical, as in the poems about her emotionally withholding parents or the many poems stemming from her experiences protesting the war in Vietnam), the important image-ideas are the need for stroking, touching, sharing, transforming, making. Her concerns are those of a mature Jewish intellectual woman writing in the American tradition (see "After Melville"), frequently in response to the Vietnamese conflict. At the same time, in many poems Rukeyser generalizes these concerns; as a Jungian, she is after the archetypal in the particular ("The Running of the Grunion," in which the image of the grunion procreating despite imminent death becomes a symbol of archetypal perseverence/creativity/life is a good example of this and a powerful poem). (p. 46)