[Williams was one of America's most renowned poets of the twentieth century. Rejecting, as overly academic, the Modernist poetic style established by T. S. Eliot, he sought a more natural poetic expression, endeavouring to replicate the idiomatic cadences of American speech. In the following review of U.S. 1, he praises Rukeyser's use of documentary evidence in her political poems.]

[U.S. 1] is all to the good, three longish, subdivided poems and a group of lyrics relating almost without exception to the social revolution. There are moments in the book that are pretty dull, but that's bound to be the character of all good things if they are serious enough: when a devoted and determined person sets out to do a thing he isn't thinking first of being brilliant, he wants to get there even if he has to crawl—on his face. When he is able to—whenever he is able to—he gets up and runs.

Muriel Rukeyser doesn't know everything about writing—Lorca, Pound, Eluard—but she does show that she has a respect for some of the battles won for it in the recent past. So much so that her book is strong enough to stand up to critical attack.

In her first poem, "The Book of the Dead," her material, not her subject matter but her poetic material, is in part the notes of a congressional investigation, an x-ray report and the testimony of a physician under cross-examination. These she uses with something of the skill employed by Pound in the material of his "Cantos." She knows how to use the language of an x-ray report or a stenographic record of a cross-examination. She knows, in other words, how to select and exhibit her material. She understands what words are for and how important it is not to twist them in order to make "poetry" of them.

This poem relates to big business and its "innocent" effects on the men it employs. If drills in silicate ore can work twice as fast dry as wet but, if dry, the dust they raise ultimately kills the men from a disease known as silicosis—then it still remains good business (if you can get away with it by bribery and other felonies of the sort) not to wet the drills. Inspired by her moral indignation Miss Rukeyser seizes upon the documentary facts of the cases in such a way as to make her points overwhelmingly convincing, so much so that a very real beauty results.

Miss Rukeyser's work is still very uneven. In some of her descriptions of natural loveliness in this poem and later she appears to forget that the beauty of a poem is not in what the poet sees but in what he makes of it. Plain statement is not quite enough in that case; nothing results but a piling up of words.

To me the best writing of the book aside from the use of the documentary evidence referred to above, is in the shorter poems of the second section. Here, because of the compactness, perhaps, the artist has been forced to select her words more carefully. The effect is satisfying. The third section, of the ship without a port, is an allegory too hastily written for my taste. The poet, possibly Hart Crane, is better handled than most of the other characters, but the effect of the whole is unenlightening. I prefer the newspapers for that sort of thing. They at least have the correct date at the top. Nothing comes up clear to me; it seems insufficiently studied. The same for the fourth section, the removal of the group of foreign athletes from Barcelona for France at the outbreak of the fascist rebellion. Harder, sharper pictures are required. We see the man left behind on the dock, we get a glimpse of the Russian sailors, but we do not get them sharply enough to make their significance vocal; they are lost in a tangle of intervening words.

I hope Miss Rukeyser does not lose herself in her injudicious haste for a "cause," accepting, uncritically, what she does as satisfactory, her intentions being of the best. I hope she will stick it out the hardest way, a tough road, and invent! Make the form that will embody her rare gifts of intelligence and passion for a social rebirth the chief object of her labors. Her passion will not be sacrificed, on the contrary it will be emphasized, by the success of such attention to technical detail. So will the revolution.