Not only is Rukeyser one of those poets American literature would seem impoverished without, but, like William Carlos Williams, she has been an indestructible force for the good of poetry and poets for decades…. For all that the poems have changed over the years, it is impossible to say that there has been a technical development. Miss Rukeyser seems to have been born poetically full-grown, and for this reason it is as rewarding to open ["The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser"] at any point as to proceed systematically from beginning to end.

But wherever you begin, there is no sense in being niggling about Miss Rukeyser's rhapsodies in language. Yes, there are faults of construction. Yes, there are poems—such as "Tree of Rivers"—that begin, so to speak, in one key and end surprisingly in another. Never mind. However surprising, disturbing or rhetorically long-winded Miss Rukeyser's poems seem, they never bore you. It is always the same passionate and compassionate poet writing out of her extraordinary, iridescent imagination who confronts you, and although some of the earlier poems may seem dated (history itself is dated), what textbooks still pigeonhole as "social realism" makes for moving stories. Miss Rukeyser is fortunate in being among those poets who can tell stories in verse.

Miss Rukeyser is most realistic, generally, when she is most bitterly critical. The long sequence at the core of "U.S.I" (1938) called "The Book of the Dead" (concerning the Gauley Bridge disaster in West Virginia in which workers on the tunnel and dam were democratically allowed to die of silicosis) makes a poem out of what in less imaginative hands would be committed journalism. The poems in "One Life" (1957) re-create in an almost Poundian fashion the lives of Wendell L. Willkie and Franklin D. Roosevelt interspersing narrative poems among "pieces of documentary evidence, statistics, quotations used as humor, headlines." Miss Rukeyser's collage method is effective, her indictment of war and American capitalism biting, and her feeling for the American wilderness and man's place in it is as fine as Faulkner's….

[Like] Melville's, Miss Rukeyser's realism is really a bridge to an intensely visionary state of awareness. The line between world and world is indistinct. The threshold of the miraculous and mystical is never far away. It is as if life were always happening to her on two or three levels. Beneath her passion for social justice and her empathy with all sufferers lie deeper apprehensions of what existence and its paradoxes can lead to….

It is inevitable that Miss Rukeyser will be compared with Whitman; indeed, "Leaves of Grass" must have shown her part of the way. Among modern poets she is the equal of Pablo Neruda, and like him, committed to a vision of humanity that acknowledges pain but leaves little room for despair. She is also patently a feminine poet—feminist but not bitchy. Love poems stud the volume. One of the most beautiful is "Song, The Brain Coral" …, which is more than a love poem. It condenses into one lyric a whole philosophy of linked humanity. (p. 12)

"No more mask! No more mythologies!" Miss Rukeyser cries in a poem called "Orpheus"…. But in truth, the coherent body of her poems composes a mythology that poetry cannot do without. The body of symbol and belief which she has nurtured over the years has worn its masks memorably. All have been worth keeping, as Yeats's masks were worth keeping, despite his late resolution to lie down in the "foul rag and bone shop of the heart." That is a shop Miss Rukeyser has not forgotten. For all her political energy, her poetry remains the poetry of the heart. (p. 13)