The early poems of Muriel Rukeyser are often flawed in ways which diminish their impact. In these poems, written from the 1930's to the mid-fifties, the poet tends to speak in a transcendental language which on analysis may seem merely vague. At the same time, Rukeyser's goals and values are stated or implied so incessantly that one's response to the poetry may depend greatly on how one reacts to the poet's relentless identification with causes and principles. Frequently in these poems, assuming the role of representative of humanity, Rukeyser orates and preaches. [In Poetry and the Age, 1953] Randall Jarrell "with dismay and delight" sensed her to be "the Common Woman of our century," and William H. Pritchard [in the Hudson Review, Spring, 1979] has recently complained that "this Every-woman feels obliged to put her finger on Everything and render it significant." Pritchard does have a point, but the quality he identifies is mainly a problem in the early poetry, in which Rukeyser often appears to be trying to make whole the fragmented world of her experience by the force of her own will. It is a problem of tone and voice. The reader may feel that she overreaches herself, and reaction against her presumption may cancel out admiration for her goals and the successes among her early poems.

Taking Whitman in particular as her model and guide, Rukeyser insists on the underlying unity of all life, the power of imagination and creativity to help us live more fully, and the poet's capacity to regenerate society. She has in fact been called (unhappily—for who can survive such a comparison?) "a female counterpart to Walt Whitman" [Virginia R. Terris, in American Poetry Review, 1974]. Her sense of oneness with the American destiny, with humanity, with the entire universe never lacked intensity, nor did her faith in the poet's social function ever waver. But to express this vision in a prophetic, often mystical, often Whitmanesque voice, it does help to be Whitman; and to the extent that Rukeyser attempted such a voice, she courted failure. Her most authentic and effective poetic voice is reflective, personal, often self-critical, normally achieving its greatest intensity when it most understates. Rukeyser could speak in this way from the start, as in parts, at least, of poems like "Four in a Family" (1935), "Boy With His Hair Cut Short" (1938), and the tough-minded "Then I Saw What the Calling Was": "Nothing was speaking to me, but I offered and all was well." Before she consented to speak regularly in this voice, however, she undoubtedly caused readers to miss or reject what is most valuable in her poetry—the personal presentation of her values, experience, and reflections—out of a sense that she was not quite up to the transcendental task she was undertaking. I believe that this difficulty largely accounts for the lack of serious critical attention paid to her. And the reception of her later books has evidently been limited by the reputation of her earlier ones. Nevertheless, the maturing of her poetic voice—by which I mean its movement away from an oratorical, mystical, self-consciously prophetic tone to one that is personal, meditative, based directly on her experience—this maturing is evident in her poetry from the later fifties on.

Appalled at the hostility toward emotion and creativity that she saw in modern America, Rukeyser sought various sources of help for the individual and communal life of the imagination: in particular the American democratic tradition, science, and art. She took Whitman as the main inspiration for a healthy social tradition which assumed a unity under life's diversity, valued imagination, and looked to the poet for creative inspiration. She was not, however, among the first to appropriate Whitman's vision for twentieth-century use. When she started writing in the 1930's Waldo Frank, for example, had been advancing Whitman's vision for a generation. Frank's first book, Our America, uses Whitman for authority and inspiration in arguing that only the "creative impulse" that "must proceed from love" can save the world. "We must begin to generate within ourselves," he concluded, "the energy which is love of life. For that energy, to whatever form the mind consign it, is religious. Its act is creation. And in a dying world, creation is revolution." If there is a mystical, not to mention an oratorical, tone to this writing, it is nevertheless effective because the whole book leads up to it; thus he earns his conclusion. Similarly, in Virgin Spain, Frank undertakes an extended historical and geographical tour of Spain in order to support his conclusions.

A passage in Virgin Spain from which Rukeyser borrowed both phrasing and ideas can help us compare the effectiveness of their presentations. "There are indeed permanent forms of spiritual incompleteness, and one of these exists in every energetic people," Frank argues. These "forms" in a society are its social structures which prevent individuals from achieving complete fulfillment of their goals. A positive tension, energy, is thus generated in the society: "There is no energy unemployed; and it is precisely the excess energy of man, the energy that is unable to find its goal within the organism, which creates intellect and which creates creation." One may certainly question ideas, but they are solidly set in the context of the book. When Rukeyser used these ideas, however, in "Ninth Elegy: The Antagonists," she did not establish them in a context. As a result both intensity and clarity are lost, their derivative quality is emphasized, and the poet's voice, strained and vague, merely calls attention to itself rather than to the ideas:

But all these forms of incompleteness pass
out of their broken power to a place
where dream and dream meet and resolve in grace.

…..

Man rises, in the mass contained;
and from this growth creation grows.
The fire through all the spiral flows:
Create the creative, many-born!
And use your love, unreconciled!

These ideas, which in Frank are intelligible, are in Rukeyser unclear because they are not prepared for. The effect is that of a transcendental tone without clear substance, and the speaking voice appears stridently oratorical. A related difficulty, also resulting from Rukeyser's tendency to generalize without adequate preparation, is her habit of making parallels and connections where the reader may see only incongruity or accident. Her poem about the American scientist Willard Gibbs, for example, guides a set of symbols from his life and work—entropy, withdrawal, discovery—to the conclusion that Gibbs

Later she made her case in her biography Willard Gibbs, but it took her more than 400 pages to do it. In the poem the reader is badly at a loss to make the connections that the poet asserts or assumes to be there. Her tone of triumph, therefore, seems greatly forced.

Rukeyser's difficulty in the early poems in making relationships clear, so that parallels and conclusions are established, is especially harmful to her longer poems. Despite the success in this regard of a few early poems, notably "Ajanta" (1944), it is only in her later work that she solves the problem with consistency. Such long poems as "The Outer Banks" (1968), "Searching/Not Searching" (1973) and "Breaking Open" have internal coherence that makes them far more unified and satisfying than almost any of the early long poems. "The Gates" (1976) is a notable illustration of Rukeyser's ability to resist forcing parallels and conclusions. The poem combines a narration of her attempt to help free an imprisoned South Korean poet with her meditations on the links between the attempt and the rest of her life. The poem does imply several parallels, such as that between the child of the imprisoned writer and Rukeyser's own son. It does so directly, however, as reflections by the poet on her experience; no automatic universal value is claimed for them, and the reader is free to examine their implications. Moreover, the poem does not lead toward any triumphal conclusion; the absence of one is, in fact, its point. Although the poem implies the unity of experience, the concept is not forced on the reader. At the end the speaker is left standing by the prison gates, unsure that her efforts will have any effect, uncertain what to make of what has happened, unclear even as to what has happened. Nowhere else in Rukeyser's poetry are we drawn so deeply into an experience and then left to make our own connections. So strong, in fact, is this effect in "The Gates," which concludes the Collected Poems, that we may suspect that Rukeyser decided to publish her collected poems while living in order to impart a sense of incompleteness, to prevent the reader from shutting the door and assuming all the poetry—and all the poet—is contained in the book.

If Rukeyser's development of a more personal, individualized, reflective speaking voices owes much to her ability to refrain from abstract generalizations and forced connections, both qualities reflect a complex view of experience which comes from her sustained effort over many years to explore consciousness: hers and society's. This effort can be seen in all her poetry, and her venture into literary criticism and poetics, The Life of Poetry, is largely a guide to developing one's consciousness by means of art. But only in Body of Waking (1958) does consciousness become a pervasive subject and theme. In this book the poet seems to have achieved a more directly self-analytical perspective on herself. A calmer, more reflective voice appears in poems like "Tree," in which the speaker learns to see a tree not as a symbol but directly, just as a tree, in "Born in December," a conversational meditation on what it is like to be born late in the year ("We are always/a little younger than they think we are"), and in "Pouring the Milk Away," a self-critical meditation on living alone. These explorations of personal consciousness present the individual voice of the poet in a way that her earlier generalizing could not. In subsequent poems she extends her exploration to the relations between the self, society, and history. The title poem of Breaking Open (1973) concerns one of the classic "consciousness-raising" experiences of the period: anti-war demonstrations which result in her trial, conviction, and jailing. In the poem she includes this note, written on a plane after her trial:

What is meant by the unconscious is the same as what is meant by history. The collective unconscious is the living history brought to the present in consciousness, waking or sleeping. The personal "unconscious" is the personal history. This is an identity.

We will now explore further ways of reaching our lives, the new world. My own life, yours; this earth, this moon, this system, the "space" we share, which is consciousness.

The optimism of this passage is evident. In its intention to explore links between the individual, society, and history, it indicates a movement in Rukeyser toward a more positive and accepting perspective on all of life, which is a moderating influence on the tone of her later poems. But it took her a long time to achieve this perspective.

The sense of rejection, of her and by her, pervades Rukeyser's early writing. As a Jew, a woman, a leftist radical, a poet, a poet largely ignored by the literary establishment, she was susceptible to rejection; and I think that the prevalence of fear as a theme in her poetry indicates her concern with rejection and exclusion. One of the fears she mentions is "fear that the world will not allow your work" ("The Gates"). In The Life of Poetry she tells how her Jewish background caused resistance to her effort to write Willard Gibbs' biography (the first chapter of which is suggestively called "On Presumption"): "Later he wrote to a scientist who had worked with him to say that he, Wilson, had looked into my origins, and that for me to be writing about Gibbs, my ancestry being what it is, was as bad as for a Negro to be writing about a Southern gentleman." And the impulse of rejection was strong in her, stimulated by unhappiness regarding parents and family, by her sense of society's indifference to poetry, by social outrages such as the miners' silicosis described in U. S. 1, by her voyage to Spain in 1936 and the outcome of the Spanish Civil War. Though she resisted, the desire to withdraw was powerful in her. The magnificent early poem "Ajanta" describes a journey-retreat to caves in India whose walls are covered with ancient Buddhist painting. There, she notes, "reality is fully accepted, then, the function of such an art is to fill with creation an accepted real world." In the caves she feels whole and secure, but at the moment of fulfillment

crawls from the door
Black at my two feet
The shadow of the world.

World not yet one,
Enters the heart again.
The naked world, and the old noise of tears,
The fear, the expiation and the love,
A world of the shadowed and alone.

But always Rukeyser's primary hero and model was Whitman, and feeling conflict in herself, she would hardly forget what she said of him: "Before Whitman could be, in his own words, likened and restored, he must deal completely with himself; and I think there has been no conflict deeper than the nature of that self ever solved in poetry" (The Life of Poetry). The goal is to be restored; the means is to deal completely with the self; the specific tool is poetry. Her progress in this direction is evident from the later poems. The process included, for example, making peace with her dead mother, and several poems describe the course of this reconciliation. "The Question" (1973) involves her son's asking her about sex and thus reminding her of a similar question she had once asked her mother, whose inability to answer had caused a sense of separation between them that was not healed during her mother's lifetime. Rukeyser explores other aspects of her relation to her parents in "More Clues" (1973) and "Double Ode" (1976), finally coming to terms with her mother in "Trinity Churchyard": "I come alone / To you, Mother, I walk, making our poems."

By this time, during the writing of her last book, Rukeyser was in her sixties and in failing health. So an emphasis on being "restored" could easily lead to desperation or despair. Her poems on sickness, however, are testimonials of her acceptance of life's conditions. "Resurrection of the Right Side," "The Ward," and "Recovering" (all 1976) present a personality that without losing optimism has learned to examine and present herself objectively and precisely.

But there is no bitterness here. "Resurrection of the Right Side" continues:

slowly the left hand extends a hundred feet
and the right hand follows follows
but still the power of sight is very weak
but I go rolling this ball of life, it rolls
and I follow it whole up the slowly-brightening slope.

Rukeyser's intimately personal but objective voice is also evident in her treatment of a major article of faith: her belief in the power of creativity. In her earlier work she often, like Waldo Frank, presented creativity as a mystical, spiritual force. "Art and nature are imitations," she asserts in The Life of Poetry, "not of each other, but of the same third thing—both images of the real, the spectral and vivid reality that employs all means." This reality is the creative force, which pervades human life but does not seem, according to this passage, to originate there. But in her later writing she presents creativity, not as a "spectral" entity but as a normal human capacity. This change entails an altered view of herself; no longer is she the Poet, vehicle and interpreter of this mysterious force, unifier of life through the power of imagination. She ceases to write passages like:

Now we arrive to meet ourselves at last,
we cry beginnings
the criers in the midnight streets call down;
respond respond
you workers poets men of science and love.
("Theory of Flight")

or

In such passages as these Rukeyser, pronouncing on history and society, speaks in the expansive, prophetic voice of the poet-spokesman for humanity. It is a voice that she cannot successfully sustain, as she eventually realized. For although the mystical tone and the public-representative stance die hard in her (they were in evidence as late as 1971 in her biography, The Traces of Thomas Hanoi), her last books of poetry, Breaking Open (1973) and The Gates (1976), are mostly free of them. The poet is the self-critical individual whose main desires are to see her own life whole and to make meaningful connections with others and with society. Creativity is securely rooted in the individual: it is the poet's personal commitment to act, a gesture of acceptance of life. "I have decided," she said in her New York Quarterly interview, "that wherever I protest from now on …, I will make something—I will make poems, plant, feed children, build, but not ever protest without making something. I think the whole thing must be made again" [The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from the New York Quarterly, edited by William Packard, 1974]. This was her final sense of creativity, an effort of the self to connect with others.

Wherever
we walk
we will make

Wherever
we protest
we will go planting

Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing

build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding

Wherever
I walk
I will make

Another writer who combines creativity and social commitment is Kenneth Burke, whose early book Attitudes Toward History refers briefly to Rukeyser's first work, Theory of Flight (1935). Like her, Burke strongly desires to strengthen the forces that unify life and that help us live fully. Like her, he believes that poetry is such a force. "The poetic forms," he writes in Attitudes, "are symbolic structures designed to equip us for confronting given historical or personal situations." Much of Attitudes is devoted to defining these poetic forms and showing how they represent "strategies" for dealing with life. Burke's definitions supply a useful summary of Rukeyser's poetic development.

Theory of Flight, Burke indicates, belongs in a form, or a category, that he calls "grotesque." This is not a pejorative term for Burke, who finds elements of it in Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Pound, and Mann. It is a proper and useful response to a confused age and usually emerges when public values are matters of controversy and confusion (a reasonable description of the American twenties and thirties, Rukeyser's formative years). The Burkean grotesque includes at least four qualities that pertain generally to Rukeyser's early work. The grotesque tends toward mysticism in response to the unsettled quality of the time. It emphasizes incongruity, without humor; to those in sympathy with it, Burke writes, the grotesque "is in deadly earnest." It also involves "the symbolizing of parallels, 'correspondences,' whereby simple notions of identity become confused, as one thing seen in terms of something else; in other words, the poet finds parallels in combinations which the reader may find incongruous or accidental. Finally, the grotesque is an attitude emphasizing protest, rejection, more than acceptance; but since it is a "transitional" mode, one can pass beyond it. All of these qualities can be found in Rukeyser's early work, and all of them diminish or disappear in her later work, as I have undertaken to show. Moreover, her development in the later poetry fits another of Burke's categories; in fact, it fits the form which he considers to be best suited to dealing with modern life.

This form or category (or strategy) Burke calls "comedy," conceding that he might as well have called it "humanism." Unlike the grotesque, the comic encourages objective self-analysis at the same time as action within society. It is a "frame of acceptance" which does not stress (although neither does it entirely omit) protest or rejection. Comedy "should enable people to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness. One would 'transcend' himself by noting his own foibles." Thus Burke describes in 1937 the development that Rukeyser achieves years later. That he takes Theory of Flight as an example in his book, and that Rukeyser uses a quotation and several ideas from Attitudes Toward History in the long poem "Correspondences" (1939), may be only accidental parallels. On the other hand, she read Burke and she may have taken his "comic frame" as an attitude to strive toward. Certainly such an effort to grow was a constant need and condition of her life. The main vehicle of her lifelong quest after herself was poetry. Not only did her developing poetic voice, and the personality it reflects, improve her poems; the poems were the means by which she refined that voice. As Burke says of William James, Rukeyser "wrote what was necessary to sustain" her, and in the process both poet and poetry were strengthened. The Collected Poems is the record of this process.