[Kertesz is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, she compares Rukeyser's poetry to the work of several postmodern and contemporary poets.]

"Postmodernism" was first noted among the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance of the late fifties ([Allen] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso, [Robat] Duncan, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, and others.) Critics identified postmodern sensibilities as those which departed from the ironic aloofness of the alienated poets of the forties and fifties who followed Eliot. In the San Francisco Renaissance the poet, aware of and often detailing the insanities of a superabundant yet repressive society, became again the person with a special vision into the wholeness, joy, and potential of life. Ginsberg's Howl (1956) became the manifesto of the new poetry now called postmodernist. But as Rukeyser offered in an interview in 1977, "It isn't post anything. It's the moment. It's believing in the reality of the moment." For Rukeyser, to give the "full reality, the full texture of reality, one must give the potential of the moment." To do less is to respond less than fully to reality. Among her working papers of the forties Rukeyser wrote, "To see the thing—not only in itself, but in its direction … to balance perception with hope." Without such balance we have, as she wrote in The Life of Poetry, "the poetry of the sense of annihilation, of the smallness of things, of aversion, guilt."

"Wish" and "desire" for potential and fullness recur in her poetry again and again until she says most effectively in "Song of Another Tribe" "I feel guilt when my desire finds no way." Wish in Rukeyser and in poets associated with postmodernism is often expressed in incantatory style. But Rukeyser believes that before focusing on stylistic terms such as "incantatory" one should recognize that her own poetry involves the age-old question of "the amount of faith and validity you allow for the potential in life." She says, "I hope always to deal with the potential as as real as any other part of life." … Rukeyser herself says, "I think of it as going as far back as we go. People have been comparing me to Whitman, and although I love and adore and am a child of Whitman, both of us come from the Bible and from the religious writings where the parallelism enables contradictions to be contained and synthesis to be achieved. We are talking about the endless quarrel between the establishment and the prophets, and I hope to be forever on the side of the prophets." To be a prophet in poetry and utter "unverifiable facts" running counter to prevailing dark moods was to be sneered at in the forties and fifties. "It seems to be a question of the times, more than anything," says Rukeyser….

"Body of Waking" appeared within two years of Howl (in 1958) and contains the same agonizing protest at the insanity of our culture as well as great, prophetic hope for

Bodies exchanging life.
Where the belief flows somewhere
Uncorrupt, hidden, under violence,
Making its own and dawn-announcing act,
River of daybreak, where the waking is,
Still to be sung among the deaths and days.
These meanings become the light we breathe,
The breathing of a theme; in our own time.

Of course Ginsberg's language is wildly different from Rukeyser's. But both poets defy, in Ginsberg's words in Howl,

The poets of San Francisco discovered the spirit Rukeyser has been identified with since the thirties and which she has clarified in her increasingly open and direct poetry. Rexroth explains that these poets "write much like the Proletarians of the Thirties…. Practically all revolutions in poetry since time began have been nothing but reassertions, after a period of academic sterility, of the abiding principles of all poetry everywhere." This particular revolution came to flower in a community that had been vigorously independent of the Eastern literary establishment in the forties and fifties. Postwar San Francisco had "its own magazines, its own presses, its own literary reputation, but the rest of the country was unaware of this far-away ferment." Poetry readings, which became popular in the coffeehouses of New York in the late fifties, abounded in San Francisco even before the war. Rukeyser began Body of Waking toward the end of her stay in San Francisco where she bore a child, "was writing my head off," and participated as much as a new, single mother could in the artistic and intellectual life of the community….

Many postmoderns share Rukeyser's interest in primitive beliefs which reinforce the vision of unity of the sacred world. Rukeyser discussed the cultural resources of American Indians in The Life of Poetry, urging poetry as a means for civilized people to achieve the primitives' integration of body and mind. With Paul Radin she translated songs of the Marquesans and of the Eskimo. She loved the Indians of Vancouver Island, whom she visited with her small son when she began her study of Franz Boas (another subject for the "Lives" series.) She has found the unifying primitive vision helpful in her own imagining of the world. As a poet her interest in anthropology stems from her discovery as a young woman that "the fantasies that I was afraid to tell people and that I was afraid of in myself were not at all unique but were things that were common in many tribes. It was a happiness to me to find that I was like others."

In his introductory note to Turtle Island Gary Snyder says his poems

speak of place, and the energy-pathways that sustain life. Each living being is a swirl in the flow, a formal turbulence, a "song." The land, the planet itself, is also a living being—at another pace. Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions—African, Asian, or European. Hark again to those roots, to see our ancient solidarity, and then to the work of being together on Turtle Island.

When The Life of Poetry was reissued in 1974, Grace Schulman reviewed it in The Hudson Review [Spring, 1976] along with The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. In this insightful piece Schulman explained the "unexpected resemblance" she found "between two … books that would seem to be worlds apart." She noted that "Dr. Thomas returns over and again to the theme of unity, finding connectedness to be the principle of living things: 'The new phenomenon of cell fusion … is the most unbiologic of all phenomena, violating the most fundamental myth of the last century for it denies the importance of specificity, integrity, and separateness in living things. Any cell—man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect—given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it.'" Schulman recognized that Rukeyser's vision as a poet and critic was borne out by the scientist's findings. "According to Rukeyser, the human quest is not for truth as isolated phenomena but for the reality of relationships, a method she has learned from biology. The poet's perception of truth is comparable, she believes, to the scientist's apprehension of facts not as isolated things but as phenomena that interact, feeding or destroying one another…. What emerged from my reading of both works was the staggering truth of unity, the conviction that all life is part of the same fabric. Together, the writers have a mysterious, insisting, latent voice murmuring, 'ONE WORLD, ONE WORLD.'" This voice is heard in much postmodern poetry.

Postmodernist critics have found the mainspring of the new poetic sensibility to be eros, the pleasure principle: the focus on inhabiting or the great wish to inhabit the world in delight, as opposed to the focus on various codes and systems that propose to hold eros in check in the name of "higher" values. [In the Journal of Modern Literature, July, 1974] Richard Wasson noted that in the sixties Norman O. Brown and Herbert Marcuse were "the chief spokesmen for Eros." This "wish for fulfillment in love and unity, in work" informs the poetry of Rukeyser, Levertov, Snyder, Rexroth, and other contemporary poets. It is the liberating force that abjures specialization, domination, despisal. Wasson explains that Brown and Marcuse clarify Freud's inadequacy to our times by arguing effectively that the reality principle is not as rigid as Freud and capitalism would have us believe. We do not have to relinquish the sense of union we enjoyed at our mothers' breasts and turn to various forms of often destructive gratification.

Freud, they say, made the mistake of assuming that the reality principle of his time was right and rational, when in fact it was destructive and irrational in its severe limits and restrictions on the pleasure principle. A capitalist industrial society not only reduces to a minimum the possible satisfactions of the wishes of the pleasure principle, but releases dangerous forces of aggression and finally death. An individualist industrialism encourages the child to channel his wishes for pleasure not only into productive work, but into a struggle for dominance over the world and other men. The world becomes not something one takes pleasure in, but something one dominates and controls…. Other men are not beings with whom one establishes a community, but creatures against whom one struggles and over whom one exercises control…. What is called health then is disease; what is called sanity is a justification for an insane system.

Eros, denying this false reality principle, is the energy of postmodernist literature, and Rukeyser everywhere celebrates it:

Power never dominion.
Some other power.
Some force flaking in light, avalanches of lilies,
Days and the sun renewed in semen, pure
Among the uncorrupted fires.
…..
Wish at the center of growth
We feel as peace.

The imagination, especially through art, can allow eros back into the world and encourage a liberation of which society is much in need. "In its refusal to accept as final the limitations imposed upon freedom and happiness by the reality principle," says Marcuse [in Eros and Civilization, 1966], "in its refusal to forget what can be, lies the critical function of phantasy." Since the thirties Rukeyser has written in defense of a wider, more intense imaginative and emotional life, for eros and its embodiment in poetry and in human relations.

For if we lived in full response to the earth, to each other, and to ourselves, we would not breathe a supernatural climate; we would be more human. The tendency of art and religion, and the tendency of poetic meaning, is toward the most human. It is a further humanity we are trying to achieve, at our most conscious, and to communicate. The thinning-out of our response is the weakness turning us inward to devour our own humanity, and outward only to sell and kill nature and each other…. The outward and predatory are glorified by business society, and the young are brought up in conduct leading toward aggression surrounded by strict tabus.

From her first published poems, Rukeyser has been imagining the power of desire or wish for what can be in human relations. An early symbol of desire was the gyroscope. Another was the miracle of the plane in flight, which mirrored the human personality's full, joyful exercise of unrepressed powers. In "Theory of Flight" the energy of desire leads to a sense of fruitful communion with others and a resolve to work for human progress. In the shorter poems of that volume the young poet is seen achieving communion with those who share her vision. In "Diary of a Change," among her unpublished papers, she

writes on Christmas Eve, 1943, after learning of Otto's death, "I believe in faith and resistance. Not: faith, meaning belief in that which is against rational processes, but an extension, the conclusion to which the images lead me." She has placed utter faith in her imagination's power to envision a more satisfying human condition. As the poems become more direct and personal it is apparent that her creative energy as poet springs from her "untamable need" ("First Elegy"), from her sense of a full sensual and sexual self ("Ajanta") which offers itself to others in quest of communion; after the crushing disappointment of war and loss, "World, not yet one, / Enters the heart again." Rukeyser even retells the Freudian story with a happy ending for eros. From Body of Waking:

He is born; and asleep, awake, and soon the warm
Taste of the second world calls him to understand
Power drawn on the tides of sweetness in.
…..

Not now, but much later, does the world fall away.
This is myself, says the child. My self, we all did say.
There is my mother, whose pleasure, whose deep need

It was to feed me singing, or recoil.
And then the fable, the terrible forgetting.
A cold distortion twisting past the leaves.
Was there a Garden? Was there a Tree of Sin?
What was my exile but from memory?
Refusal, flowering, was the only tree.
…..

Dream and the sea open.
All things find their change.
The child remembers: the child is the tree;
The tides, the leaves, the city, the true relation.
The world was the mother, the world; it was always the world
Pure, fierce, all moving and all reconciled.

Thus for Rukeyser original sin is the refusal to dream, to remember, to imagine. Marcuse, analyzing a passage of Valéry's Narcisse Parle in explaining the hero of eros, says: "The climate of this language is that of the 'diminution des traces du péché originel,'—the revolt against culture based on toil, domination, and renunciation. The images … [evoke] pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death; silence, sleep, night, paradise—the Nirvana principle not as death but as life."

In "In the Underworld" (Breaking Open) Istar, goddess of love, acknowledges the power of eros as savior, particularly in the love of a woman:

Now I remember love
who has set my being on me,
who permits me move
into all being,
who puts on me perceiving
and my bones
in a live chain
and my flesh that perceives
and acts
and my acknowledging skin
my underdress, my dress
and my robe
the jewels of the world
I touch and find.
—I know him and I know
the breast speaking
out of a gone woman
across distances.

After reading Orpheus (a supreme hero of eros, according to Marcuse), Hallie Flanagan wrote to Rukeyser, "No poetry of our own age moves me as yours does. I never understood it with my mind—but with my blood, my pain, and my love…. To me there is in everything you have written, the strongest possible erotic power, as if your womanhood had taken pain, rapture, beauty—and through physical experience 'dissolved into the body of song.'" In her contemplation of Willkie's journey Rukeyser recognizes that the force that moves all creation through time, process, and change in the vast sea of possibility is love: eros is the divine creative energy. It can explode the most frozen rigidities—even in Spain. "Has the dragon died? /… O love. Make the song start" (The Gates). Love is our core: "ripples of change out from the center / of me, of you, of love the inventor" (The Gates).

Rukeyser is a poet of liberating eros, of the unembarrassed, vulnerable admission of need. She admits that there is a needing child in her who cannot be repressed: "And the child I among my veins / Sings and says with every breath." In a startlingly personal idiom for a book which is categorized as "literary criticism," she writes in The Life of Poetry, "My one reader, you reading this book, who are you? What is your face like, your hands holding the pages, the child forsaken in you, who now looks through your eyes at mine?" She recognizes eros in its wish, born in infancy and yearning ever to find its object, what Northrop Frye calls "the more abundant life that the social structure fears and resists." Thus she has always urged communication, "more freedom, more imagination, more poetry with all its meanings."

The divine energy of desire in human beings is celebrated by poets such as Rexroth, Snyder, and Levertov in the same spirit that has impelled Rukeyser, as in the conclusion to Rexroth's long poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn (1952):

Deep in myself arise the rays
Called Artemis and Apollo
Helios, Luna, Sun and Moon,
Flowing forever out into
The void, towards the unknown others.
The heavens and hells of man,
The gods and demons

…..

are more or less successful
Mythological descriptions
Of knowing, acting, loving—
You are Shiva, but you dream.

In that poem Rexroth also wrote, "insanity is the crippling / Of the organ of reciprocity," for when eros is not allowed freedom, there is aggression (including economic aggression), brutality, the insanity of Rukeyser's "Rational Man." As in "Body of Waking," Rexroth in "Thou Shalt Not Kill" (1956) details the insanity of an "Age of Abundance," greed, and repression which has murdered the young men and women of eros: Dylan Thomas, Lola Ridge, all poets and revolutionaries.

Gary Snyder has written of his "life with his family and comrades in the foothills of the California Sierras," a life lived in what Marcuse calls the "Great Refusal" of the insanities of the age, a life in which, the poems show, eros reigns. In images that recall Rukeyser's (gates, spiral, music, seed, body) he celebrates the unity of life:

Denise Levertov, close personal friend and great admirer of Rukeyser ("One of the things I most admire her for is her continuing growth"), writes often of the force of eros. Reading through Levertov's volumes chronologically, one finds an increasing use of the term waking. This is what Rukeyser celebrates in Body of Waking, our physically grounded great wish for and awareness of love and unity.

Waking or the wish to awaken and praise gives these contemporary poets the optimism that repudiates the alienated stance. Waking, they are aware of the possibility of transformation, of a vision of the world other than the repressive and hopeless one we are familiar with in our opaque moments. (It will be recalled that Rukeyser sought "a language of transformation" as far back as the thirties when she turned to the study of Gibbs.) Levertov writes often of eros released into a new phase.

Speak to me, little horse, beloved,
tell me
how to follow the iron ball,
how to follow through to the country
beneath the waves
to the place where I must kill you and you step out
of your bones and flystrewn meat
tall, smiling, renewed,
formed in your own likeness
Marvelous Truth, confront us
at every turn,
in every guise

…..
Thrust close your smile
that we know you, terrible joy. (The Jacob's Ladder)

One poem especially recalls Rukeyser's focus on blocked lives changing phase and growing again. From "The Novel":

Yet they do have—
don't they—like us—
their days of grace, they

halt, stretch, a vision
breaks in on the cramped grimace,
inscape of transformation.
Something sundered begins to knit.
By scene, by sentence, something is rendered
back into life, back to the gods. (O Taste and See)

Levertov's central poem on this theme, "The Unknown," is dedicated, not surprisingly, to Muriel Rukeyser. The poem explores the difficulty of attaining "enlightenment," where one's anxiety or "fury" passes into "quiet praise." Before one can attain the miracle of that state one must accept a "decent" routine of daily work—in her case, housework and writing. The awakening is then, unexpectedly, "to transformation, word after word" (The Sorrow Dance). Waking is not easy, according to Levertov, and a vision of our possibilities is not easily held by the imagination.

How I woke to the color-tone
as of peach-juice
…..
How I seemed a woman tall and
full-rounded
…..
but continued to awake
further, and found myself
myself, smaller,
not thin but thinner, nervous,
who hurries without animal calm
…..
and it was not morning. (The Sorrow Dance)

could there be
a reversal I cannot
hoist myself high enough
to see,
plunge myself deep enough
to know? (Footprints)

Rukeyser's poems show the desired "reversal" or changed phase more often than those in the later volumes of Levertov. Nevertheless she (like the postmoderns as a group) repudiates what William Hamilton quoting Saul Bellow calls "the cheap mental stimulants of Alienation … Forlornness," despair. In "City Psalm," detailing the "pain and misfortune" of a contemporary city, "walking the thronged / pavements among crippled lives, jackhammers / raging," Levertov has a vision of transformation, engendered by the same deep wish of the elegies:

Nothing was changed, all was revealed otherwise;
not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,
not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessed, that was bliss.
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street. (Sorrow Dance)

Here is precisely the sort of "unearned conclusion" Rukeyser was castigated for in the forties and fifties. What postmodernist critics see in such conclusions, in Moses Herzog who refuses to go mad, in Denise Levertov who says in "The Freeing of the Dust," "I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness,'" is what William Hamilton calls [in Radical Theology and the Death of God, by Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, 1966] "the new optimism." It is in fact the triumph of eros, the life instinct, the free imagination. Postmodernist writers reaffirm again Keats's "holiness of the heart's affections," what Northrop Frye calls "the total dream of man" [Anatomy of Criticism, 1957]. From Body of Waking.

Then from the mountains of the lost,
All the fantasies shall wake,
Strong and real and speaking turn
Wherever flickers your unreal.
And my strong ghosts shall fade and pass
My love start fiery as grass
Wherever burn my fantasies,
Wherever burn my fantasies.

Thus acknowledging and following eros leads to an optimistic, liberating body of poetry which yields continual visions of possibility. In "Waterlily Fire," "But it is hell" becomes "Or it could be a foundation." In "Breaking Open" Rukeyser writes of people beginning to change, open, and grow:

But this music is
itself
needing only other selving
It is defeated but a way is open:
transformation

Levertov in "The Freeing of the Dust" presents a striking vision of unity by jettisoning notions of polarity, despisal, and rejection:

Unwrap the dust from its mummycloths.
Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus

Poets of postmodernism have shown their optimism in "documentary" poems like those in Rukeyser's volumes. Snyder, Rexroth, and Levertov have all written powerful poems protesting war and injustice. But always their vision is, like Rexroth's in "The American Century," of the possibility of peace, of the hope and beauty of children or of resisters "in the century of horror." While describing bombed villages and crumbling neighborhoods, they sing their celebration of life, their homage to eros. They insist that our wish will find a way.

The new poets of eros who admit and explore their need for "fulfillment in love and unity, in work" believe concomitantly that form in art and life is organic, evolving, not superimposed but discovered. Almost all the poets influenced by the San Francisco Renaissance have made statements about discovering form in the writing of poetry. Gary Snyder's statements carry this attitude into life: "Discipline of self-restraint is an easy one; being clear-cut, negative, and usually based on some accepted cultural values. Discipline of following desires, always doing what you want to do, is hardest. It presupposes self-knowledge of motives, a careful balance of free action and sense of where the cultural taboos lay—knowing whether a particular 'desire' is instinctive, cultural, personal, a product of thought, contemplation, or the unconscious." (Compare Rukeyser's "I feel guilt when my desire finds no way.") Form will arise through the following of deep wish and the admission of all meanings. "Do I move toward form, do I use all my fears?" (The Gates). Robert Duncan, whose poems Rukeyser says she feels very close to, wrote, "In one way or another to live in the swarm of human speech. This is not to seek perfection but to draw honey or poetry out of all things. After Freud, we are aware that unwittingly we achieve our form. It is, whatever our mastery, the inevitable use we make of the speech that betrays to ourselves and to our hunters (our readers) the spore of what we are becoming." Recalling Duncan's images are those in Levertov's "Second Didactic Poem":

In our gathering, in our containing, in our
working, active within ourselves,
slowly the pale
dew-beads of light
lapped up from flowers
can thicken,
darken to gold:
honey of the human. (The Sorrow Dance)

Snyder, Rukeyser, Levertov all write of the responsibility of the poet to the tribe. Snyder calls the poet a shaman who "is simply the man whose mind reaches easily out into all manners of shapes and other lives, and gives song to dreams." (Rukeyser's "Dream Drumming" from The Gates is a perfect title.) The shaman heals with the power of dreams. So do these poets who offer us again a vision of life's possibilities. Rukeyser writes several times of the priestly, tribal function of poetry, saying she makes her work for the "unborn." Levertov has said, "The poet—when he is writing—is a priest." In "February Evening in Boston, 1971," she looks to future generations as Rukeyser does in "Poem" ("I lived in the first century of world wars….") from The Speed of Darkness. Levertov writes:

It was the custom of my tribe
to speak and sing;
not only to share the present, breath and sight,
but to the unborn.
Still, even now, we reach out
toward survivors. It is a covenant
of desire.

Rukeyser's work will continue to encourage many to keep this covenant.