From Muriel Rukeyser's first volume of poems, "Theory of Flight" …, to her most recent, "Waterlily Fire" …, is a span of twenty-seven years and nine books, the years among the most crucial in the history of the American republic and the books among the most indicative in the history of contemporary American poetry. They animate each other, the years and the books, for the electric vitality of Miss Rukeyser's art stems partially from the tightness with which her poems are plugged into the socket of American experience, and they, in turn, offer the sort of interpretive comment upon that experience which demonstrates that poets do, after all, have something significant to tell us about ourselves.

But there is more to celebrate here than content. One reason why her works have maintained … a certain centrality and stability is that her techniques, her verbal strategies, are at once a statement and—this is important—a solution of the problem which may well decide whether poetry will thrive or perish in this pragmatic, acquisitive, machine-centered world of ours.

The problem, bluntly put, is that the bulk of the reading public cannot understand what modern poets are talking about….

The mixing of comic and tragic moods, ellipsis, startling images, congested metaphors, learned allusions, all the standard puzzles of modern poetry can be amply illustrated on any page of Miss Rukeyser's book, and solved there also, solved by men and women able to unshackle their conception of what human language can be made to do. In "Waterlily Fire" are emblemized all the dangers to the future of American poetry and all the hopes that a future is possible.