[As] the twelve books of verse now gathered in this important edition of Collected Poems suggest, Miss Rukeyser's work has never been easy to place…. Miss Rukeyser has offered an often jarring mix of communicative possibilities: colloquial diction together with formal; the reportorial with the visionary; didactic melodramas with philosophic meditations; extreme privacies and public proclamations: poems whose structures tremble under the weight of rhetorical gesture and poems that are little more than catalogues of names, things, places; lines tense with imagistic spareness and diffuse with shimmering implications. Reading through these nearly six hundred pages is by turns irritating, exhilarating, exasperating and extraordinarily satisfying.

Miss Rukeyser's literary "sins" of discomforting variety and extravagance are, in fact, her saving graces…. Miss Rukeyser's songs of self and society are unprotected, honest, charged with passionate intensity that widens and deepens our knowledge of human pains and pleasures. From beginning to end her poems offer the qualities she often praised in the works of her master poets Melville and Whitman: "the truths of outrage and the truths of possibility."

Miss Rukeyser has always been fascinated by biography; and some of her most telling poems ("Double Dialogue: Homage to Robert Frost," "Akiba," "Kathe Kollwitz," "Ryder") are short lives which become illuminating images. (pp. 385-86)

Oskar Kokoschka once said that "there will be no portrait left of modern man because he has lost his face and is turning towards the jungle." Miss Rukeyser, a master portraitist, puts back the human lines. And in exploring such subjects as a visit to an imprisoned poet in Vietnam, war in Spain, a tunnel tragedy in West Virginia—in giving us the "Place-Rituals" of New York City, New England, California, together with a good many "Poems Out of Childhood," poems of old age and death, works expressing the full sexual, psychological and public dimensions of men and women—she has created a broad and moving tableau of our times. In her poems the "risen image shines, its force escapes, we are all named." (pp. 386-87)