[Carruth is an American poet, educator, and critic. In the following mixed review of Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935–1962, Carruth notes Rukeyser's ineffective use of language but commends her honest treatment of spiritual and moral issues.]

These are the opening stanzas of an early poem by Miss Rukeyser:

The drowning young man lifted his face from the river
to me, exhausted from calling for help and weeping;
"My love!" I said; but he kissed me once for ever
and returned to his privacy and secret keeping.

His close face dripped with the attractive water,
I stared in his eyes and saw there penalty,
for the city moved in its struggle, loud about us,
and the salt air blew down; but he would face the sea.

And one of her recent poems begins:

Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned
By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving
Like a most recognizable most silvery woman;
Tall Alexander to the island came.
The small breeze blew behind his turning head.
He walked the foam of ripples into this scene.

Force, directness, affection for the separate word, tension, knowledge of cadence and syntax as components of meaning rather than vicissitudes of fabrication—there can be no doubt that Miss Rukeyser can write good poetry. But another side of her writing seems to me less effective, a mannerism enlarging as the years have gone by. I mean her way of doing without verbs:

Eyes on the road at night, sides of a road like rhyme;
the floor of the illumined shadow sea
and shallows with their assembling flash and show
of sight, root, holdfast, eyes of the brittle stars.
And your eyes in the shadowy red room,
scent of the forest entering, various time
calling and the light of wood along the ceiling
and over us birds calling and their circuit eyes.
And in our bodies the eyes of the dead and the living
giving us gifts at hand, the glitter of all their eyes.

One can see how this might happen; the search for immediacy, the hunger for experienced language that impelled the Imagists. But Miss Rukeyser's characteristic poem is busy, rather long, full of intellectual machinery, and I miss the motion-making words that would give it quickness. Instead the effect is like that of an impasto, colors heaped upon one another until the surface is thick and lightless.

There you have my like and my dislike; and although I have known Miss Rukeyser's poems for a long time, I shall need to know them much longer still before I can decide whether or not they are, taken as a whole, really good. Possibly I will never decide. Must one stuff every book one reads into a category?

Anyway a reviewer ought not to presume to judge the poetic quality of a lifework in three pages. Something else about Miss Rukeyser is more suitable to my commentary; I mean her vigorous, brave, and I think nearly absolute honesty; this being—honesty—the nearest permissible approximation to an absolute of faith. Let us agree on what seems quite obvious to me: that a large part of lyric poetry is essentially prayer. Where does this leave the poet who cannot acknowledge a supernatural presence? You may go backward and forward in the anthologies of modern poetry and find this problem—a terrible problem—on almost every page. Ninety per cent of the poets are too lazy to deal with it, using such terms as "Lord" and "My God" with the implied reservation that they are fictions. Or they impute a fake divinity to great men, mountains, dead rodents, etc. But suppose you are absolutely honest; suppose, in the straits of your reason and experience, you must deny the existence of the supernatural but assert the existence of the ultranatural, those extreme susceptivities of consciousness which govern our spiritual and moral lives; and suppose you even raise ultranatural experience to a superpersonal level, the racial or the panhutnan; do you then agree to call it by the name of God, do you stand up in church and say the Credo with your fingers crossed (as was lately recommended by a noted British humanist)? Miss Rukeyser does not; this is the quality of her honesty, and she recognizes that there is a point at which symbolism as a poetic technique turns into a substantial instrument of mendacity. I don't say she has solved the problem by any means. Consider it solely as a tactic of vocabulary: what terms shall the poet invent which can assume the richness and versatility of terms refined in centuries of Christian usage? Remember that even the most determined anti-Christians, from de Sade to Sartre, have argued in Christian terms. It would be mere obstinacy to ask Miss Rukeyser, or any single poet, to do a job which requires a sustained community of genius. Yet I know no other body of work in which the problem has been met more squarely; nor, generally speaking, any poetry which has brought more imagination and lyrical firmness to the task. Make no mistake, these poems are deeply felt; prayers, I should say quite desperate prayers, for the things which the poet needs but cannot command—peace and justice. For this reason they are intrinsically, connately a part of our ethical crisis, and as such ought to win the prior respect and endorsement of all of us, whatever esthetic considerations may arise later on.