[Rosenthal is an American educator, editor, and literary critic. In this excerpt from the first major essay on Rukeyser, he discusses the predominant themes of her early poems "Theory of Flight," "The Book of the Dead," Elegies, and Orpheus.]

To readers nourished on Eliot and Yeats and disciplined by analytical criticism, the faults in Muriel Rukeyser's work may seem more obvious than its merits. Though they do not define her work and are very often absent from it, these faults are real: the unearned triumphant conclusion, the occasional muddy emotionalism that can blur the phrasing almost to a blot, the painful view we are sometimes afforded of the poet desperately trying, under our very eyes, to piece a poem together without quite finding the key (usually, a proper middle part).

But if the faults, which are clearly related to one another, are undoubtedly present, it is also true that they are byproducts—though at times more important than the chief fruit of her labor—of equally real achievements in Miss Rukeyser's writing. And in any case, a sufficient number of her poems do earn what they have to tell us, do have organic structure and precision to match their passion. Still in her thirties, Miss Rukeyser has advanced through several stages and deserves, on the scores of talent and commitment and courage, a sympathetic hearing. Because, by and large, most of her verse exists in a different context from that generally given serious critical attention nowadays, it would seem useful to go into the question of what that context is and how it enters into her effort as a poet. It is not a matter so much of the reservations one must bear in mind (just look, after all, at some of Pound's minor pieces and major aberrations—which do not diminish the stature of his poetry but help us to understand it and therefore bear with some of the lapses at least) as of getting at whatever it is of value that a writer has to offer. The longer poem-sequences provide the best clues to her chief directions, and this essay will concern itself with several of them, as well as with the kind of romanticism they breathe, in order to reach a reasonably objective understanding of those directions.

Now current criticism responds well to the poetry of pure and ironic sensibility; less surely, though constrained to recognize its power, to the poetry of incantation. It does by far the least justice, however, to the rhetoric of romantic expression, in which the speaker dares to give the game away because he counts on a relationship of some personal sympathy with the reader. Witness the cheapening of Shelley's accomplishment in Brooks and Warren's otherwise generally excellent Understanding Poetry. Yet the romantic element—here seen as the exploitation of the speaking personality to will the actualization of a desired ideal [The author adds in a footnote: "Speaking from 'inside' this process, Miss Rukeyser has represented it to me as the use of experience to show the seed, or the arrangement, of this desired ideal."]—is almost omnipresent in the arts.

Not much attention, for example, has been paid the rhetorical audacity of The Waste Land whereby Frazer's brilliant scientific materialism has been appropriated to religious argument so as precisely to reverse the whole direction of The Golden Bough. Nor has much been wasted on the curiously opposite process by which Yeats conveys materialist insights at the pitch of religious, visionary mysticism. Again, the rhetorical impact of Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, in which the speaker places himself in relation both to the real cultural situation and to a projected life of esthetic dedication—and then symbolizes, in "Envoi" and "Medallion," the ideal as the only real—has been similarly neglected, or perhaps thought too obvious.

Nevertheless, these meanings hammer at the doors of our appreciation, as every poet, and every teacher of poetry who takes note of what goes on in his students' minds, must surely realize. The demand for meaning, for the miracle of fulfillment, is after all implicit in the structure of a work of art, its qualities of design and completeness. The closer a poem comes to being thoroughly romantic in this rhetorical sense, the more devoted it will be to its function of magical transformation; indeed, the spell which the romantic poet seeks to cast over the moral present and future is not far removed from that of the primitive magician in either its purposes or its risks. But the more devoted it thus becomes, the more vulnerable, will be its speaking personality. Such vulnerability is readily discovered in Shelley, Whitman, Lawrence, Rukeyser—all, despite differences, exposed spirits, "overstaters" of the case, often denied praise and resisted by those whom they affect most.

Muriel Rukeyser's effort has been to reconcile three sets of assumptions: those of the world-oppressed sensibility which is perhaps our chief modern convention and is by now inseparable from the technique of contemporary poetry, those of the democratic-pragmatic tradition, and those of scientific and revolutionary materialism. The assertion (desire) is that the heart of the poem is the heart of reality, drawing its life from the same sources as a vital culture must: belief in life, an endless reverberation of any heroic act, the dynamic realizations of art and love, strength to absorb the shocks of truth without abandoning its pursuit or denying the joy of thus meeting the meaning of experience:

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The fear of poetry is the
fear: mystery and fury of a midnight street
of windows whose low voluptuous voice
issues, and after that there is no peace.

That round waiting moment in the
theatre: curtain rises, dies into the ceiling
and here is played the scene with the mother
bandaging a revealed son's hand. The bandage is torn off.
Curtain goes down. And here is the moment of proof.

That climax when the brain acknowledges the world,
all values extended into the blood awake.
Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did,
building his bird to extend through soaring air,
as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity
through time extended. And the climax strikes.

Love touches so, that months after the look of
blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart
is translated into the pure cry of birds
following air-cries, or poems, the new scene.
Moment of proof. That strikes long after act.

They fear it. They turn away, hand up palm out
fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem.
The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's shot.
The prolonged love after the look is dead,
the yellow joy after the song of the sun.

…..

The main lines of this effort toward a triple reconciliation are evident in Miss Rukeyser's first book, Theory of Flight (1935). In the Thirties, the nature of this effort did not appear to need explanation; it was in the air, at least until the fall of Spain and the outbreak of the War. Kenneth Burke's Attitudes toward History is derived from similar motivations, and is indeed the best guide to the perspectives of the period. (Burke's review of Theory of Flight, incidentally, was easily the most perceptive one I have seen.) The political hope of the day, that the haphazard, easily corruptible, yet creative and idealistic individualism of Western tradition might find enduring common ground with the consciously organized though rigid social disciplines of Marxism, embodied these motivations and gave impetus to the literary movement in which Muriel Rukeyser was one of the younger participants. Of all the poets of any stature involved with that movement, she has been the most consistent adherent of the anagogic faith in possibility implicit in it. No one who reads her poems, early or late, with any attention can doubt the presence of a romantic personality seeking its own fulfillment through identification with its ideals, suffering recurrently depressive agony because of not being able to realize a "coming-through" yet never on that account sacrificing the goal and vision. For an implacably hostile reader, it may be sufficient compensation for her irrevocable commitment to a secular religiosity that Miss Rukeyser is so thoroughly willing to acknowledge the weaknesses that may underlie the commitment and the terrors which it must conjure up. Thus, she tells us candidly that

The motive of all of it was loneliness,
All the panic encounters and despair
Were bred in fear of the lost night, apart,
Outlined by pain, alone …

And she can speak the language of defeat:

Who in one lifetime sees all causes lost,
Herself dismayed and helpless, cities down,
Love made monotonous fear and the sad-faced

Inexorable armies and the falling plane,
Has sickness, sickness …

These passages are from relatively recent poems, but we can easily find parallel passages in the earlier work, passages betraying fear and guilt over the path which the poet, a true Cordelia of the 1930's, is taking by choice as well as by necessity:

The father and mother sat, and the sister beside her.
I faced the two women across the table's width,
speaking, and all the time he looked at me,
sorrowing, saying nothing, with his hard tired breath.

Their faces said: This is your home; and I:
I never come home, I never go away.
And they all answered: Stay …

As has been observed, the implacably opposed will remain implacable and opposed—rejecting the specific ideas, especially in their threatening psychological associations against the prevailing cultural mode, and regardless of the spirit in which they are held; rejecting too the hysteria at the edge and the open pain at the center of "this sort of thing"; and rejecting finally the autobiographical confession spilling out over the form, not contained and beautifully transformed within it as in Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium." Against all this must be set the fact that there are poems and passages in Rukeyser which either approach transformation of this kind or, failing that, are too rich even in failure to be dismissed casually. The poetic effort to "become whole," when sufficiently spirited and sensitive to counterbalance for the reader his irritation at being forced to watch the trials and errors of a magician from inside the magician's own brain, has gifts for him at last that much outweigh the inconvenience caused him.

In this essay, therefore, we are particularly to consider certain qualities of two of Miss Rukeyser's earlier long sequences, "Theory of Flight" (the title-poem of her first volume) and "The Book of the Dead". Together with these we shall consider her Elegies, a group of poems written over a period of some ten years; and her most recent long poem, Orpheus. Each of these works seeks equilibria among warring factors in the poet's personality and consciousness; and each seeks to render the evil implicit in the fact of conflict nonexistent through its special kind of spell. "Theory of Flight" employs the mechanical and scientific image of an airplane—variously symbolic in its implications, both useful and dangerous in its daily uses, and clearly a token of cultural ideals in its speed, power, and requirement of expert manipulation—to spirit us into the arena of inclusive meaning. "The Book of the Dead", first published as a unit in 1938, in Miss Rukeyser's second volume U. S. 1, has a double system of symbols: the Egyptian salvation-mythology whose sacred writings bear the same name; and the tragic mass-incidence of silicosis in Gauley, West Virginia, subject of national concern and a Congressional investigation in the mid-Thirties. In the first of these two early sequences, the converging of Marxian, personalist, and scientific perspectives is sustained through a combination of prayer similar to that of Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge" with urgent assertions of wish as law, dramatic projections based on fact and fantasy (such as a scene between an aviator and his pregnant wife, a boardmeeting, a strike episode), and precise imagist impressions. In the second, the pacing is more gradual, the symbolism more convincingly grounded in realistic observation and dramatic structure.

In contrast to both these poems, the Elegies are directly "lyric-contemplative." They span the entire range of the poet's interests, beliefs, fears, enthusiasms, and experience from childhood on, recording and making an aesthetic of the major terms in her program of coaching herself into the true prophetic state of the romantic writer acting out his faith. (Similarly, the "Lives", another group of poems which space prevents our discussing in detail here, considers the same range of subjects in the light of the biographies of other Americans, significant experimenters in their several ways with the idea of possibility and the problem of the communication of vital meanings.) Orpheus, in the image of the god made whole again after his dismemberment by the Thracian women, restates without reference to "extraneous" ideas and issues Miss Rukeyser's basic human themes: the indestructability of the creative life, the evil results of inattention to its demands and sources, and the reality of the promise:

Voices and days, the exile of our music
and the dividing airs are gathered home.
The hour of light and birth at last appears
among the alone, in prisons of scattering.

Reviewers of Miss Rukeyser's early work sometimes overemphasized—partly in deference to current literary fashion—the extent to which a Marxian influence had determined her subject matter, outlook, and emotional tone. There can be no questioning the presence of this motive. I believe, however, that we have in her writing an example, curious or paradoxical only in the altered perspective of the present moment, of a writer in the optimistic activist-idealist tradition of meliorism that runs through American philosophical thought who took literally the hope, not yet after all completely dead, that the best aspects of pragmatism and Marxism might be merged through a kind of social religiosity to the great enrichment of the world at large. A romantic writer, furthermore, and the child of an age of "experimentalism" in the arts as in social organization, she apparently found in the Marxian-Hegelian dialectic (thesis-antithesis-synthesis and the belief in qualitative transformation to follow inevitably after adequate quantitative pressure) and in the drama of political struggle forms comparable to those of lyric and sacred literature that could be used for purposes of poetic magic. It is the magic and the underlying mysticism of the dialectic that have characterized most of her poetry since the Thirties, together with a continuing personalism of thought; the rhetorical structure that so often makes her poems acts of faith in the teeth of her knowledge survives, signalizing an unchanged openness to all ideas of possibility now as before.

…..

The first of the longer structures, Theory of Flight, sought like the others to bring together many motifs. Its "Preamble," a secular invocation modeled on that of Crane's The Bridge, carries us at once into the wider implications of the idea of flight:

Earth, bind us close, and time: nor, sky, deride
how violate we experiment again.
In many Januaries, many lips
have fastened on us while we deified
the waning flesh: now, fountain, spout for us,
mother, bear children: lover, yet once more
in final effort toward your mastery.
Many Decembers suffered their eclipse
death, and forgetfulness, and the year bore round;
now years, be summed in one access of power.
Fortresses, strengths, beauties, realities,
gather together, discover to us our wings
new special product of mortality.

The "we" here equals humanity conceived of in the most general sense as the human spirit. This spirit is imaged in active sexual terms, "female" in their connotation of readiness to be moved, taught, transformed. The use of such imagery suggests, perhaps, more than the sexual freedom of modern thought generally, a feeling by the poet that her scientific-revolutionary frame of reference has justified the putting of poetic meanings from this "new" point of view. The reversal of the "usual" notion of the active element in sex as the masculine one almost exclusively can be defended as a rejection of stale conventional attitudes; and more to the point, doubtless, it can be understood as the "natural" expression of a woman. The search for reconciliation of many warring diversities is thus, at the same time, a search for equilibria within herself. The mind of the race, considered "in female," is accustomed to repeated betrayal—that is, to false starts toward a faith that will clarify, strengthen, and liberate all at once. But though "violate," it is always ready to experiment anew, even in the coldest season when traditional attitudes seem reduced to hopeless impotence. Male images are used to focus attention on various aspects of a deeply feminine symbolic structure. In the poem-sequence as a whole, the plane-image brings release to the personality "praying" the poem; the plane's phallic power must bear her away, reveal new vistas, teach her and the reader to "fly" on their own. In the passage just quoted, there is an appeal to the energies of the material universe to provide revelation which will be, as it were, sexually conveyed: by the spouting fountain, by the lover's effort, by the scientific constructions of the will and imagination of men. The revelation, like the child who is the fruit of the act of love, will be a "new special product of mortality."

This theme of the self-realization of the female element in the human spirit is not at all a subordinate one, although its "application" in the poem makes it seem so. It is a theme running through all Miss Rukeyser's writing from the start, in such appealing early poems as "Breathing Landscape" and "Cats and a Cock," in the poems of love and growth and self-knowledge called "Night-Music," and in its fullest and richest expression in the volume The Green Wave. The many poems dealing with difficult childhood and difficult growth bear as much relationship at least to this theme as they do to the other "issues" I have mentioned.

Though some critics expressed surprise that the author of the complex Theory of Flight should be a girl of twenty-one, the emotional atmosphere is actually quite youthfully ardent and anticipatory, as the following passage, which translates the invocation into self-coaching, demonstrates. It demonstrates too, though not as fully as some other passages might, the immaturity of the style—how the poet tries at times to solve technical problems through the simple device of shouting or groaning or ecstacizing:

Look! Be: leap;
paint trees in flame
bushes burning
roar in the broad sky
know your color: be:
produce that the widenesses
be full and burst their wombs …

…
lust in a heat of tropic orange
stamp and writhe; stamp on a wet floor
know earth know water know lovers
know mastery
FLY

The entire book, in fact, is written in a mood that seems typical of the young intellectual radicals of the 1930's. Day-Lewis, Auden, MacNeice, and Spender had published their first volumes in their early twenties also. In these volumes, as in Miss Rukeyser's, the figures recur of the adventurer, the traveler, the explorer, the aviator, each a symbol of the young speaker breaking the ties of home, authority, and convention and each somewhat ambiguous, despite the pervading Marxian assumptions, as to precise destination. (In a Rukeyser poem, however, the speaker is likely to be awakened by a traveler as often as she is likely to be one:

In adolescence I knew travellers
speakers digressing from the ink-pocked rooms,
bearing the unequivocal sunny word.

That is to say, she gives us the feminine version of the voyager-image.) The ambiguities are largely the result of a conflict of motives of acceptance and rejection such as one might logically expect in a rapidly maturing and really sensitive young non-conformist personality. There is a new and oppressive consciousness of sympathy with certain aspects of the old rejected life which interferes with the absoluteness of revolutionary conviction. In Theory of Flight overt expression of this ambivalence is held to a minimum, yet small indications do appear and the over-all symbol of the airplane is not altogether true to its intended function. A letter from Miss Rukeyser dealing in part with this poem and in part with her own experience in flying school gives other associations:

Do you know a plane in a stall? A friend of mine says that it is the most neurotic thing demanded of a plane. You go against the plane, and then you have to go against yourself. You pull the nose of the plane up, so that most of the sky is blocked out by the plane, or so it seems; you feel the power spilling from the wings as it noses further up; then it hesitates a moment and plunges. This is the stall; and if you follow your instincts as a land-animal, you try to pull it out by forcing the nose up again. This you must not do, for you will only go into a worse stall. You must give in and let the plane fall; the fall will give it speed, and the speed will level it out again, it is built that way and that is its nature. As for me, I have never got past the stall; and I know that, in falling, I remembered a great many adolescent and infant prohibitions.

An autobiographical statement can be pushed too far as an aid to critical interpretation. I shall simply note here that the plane—whether seen sociologically and historically; or privately, in relation to a family situation—is a somewhat dubious symbol of positive revolutionary action against the reactionary past. The implication is that the force of gravity, the circumstances of daily material existence, is an evil thing against which the organized imagination must be put on guard; and this imagination will always have to operate "in the air" and against the pull of reality. So there is an unacknowledged suggestion that the real thing is there below, that this flight is a temporary escape, a pipe-dream, after which we must come to terms with everything left behind for the moment. [The author adds in a footnote: "Just such an objection, in fact, was raised by John Brooks Wheelwright in a 1938 review of Miss Rukeyser's verse. Of course, the objection is ideological and not necessarily aesthetic. 'Aesthetically,' in fact—unless the inner contradictions cancel each other out altogether—we should praise the accurate notation of an ambiguous state of mind, and carry on as sympathetically as may be from there.] The same premise is implied in several of the shorter pieces of this first volume, as well as in the work of other leading leftist writers. For instance, Auden's Journal of an Airman contains similar, if more consciously exploited, ambiguities." …

In The Book of the Dead the dramatic, documentary, and rhetorical vocabulary and rhythms are better integrated than they were in Theory of Flight. The earlier poem had employed desperate tactics to achieve progression; the poet had arbitrarily invented characters and interpolated moments of lyrical intensity to buoy up her own spirits against the overwhelming sense of pity and terror. The tactics could not quite succeed because the effort was too strenuous at every point and because the major symbol was too obviously "wishful" and in fact, to a certain extent at least, evoked too clearly the opposite of what it was intended to evoke. There is a fairy-tale element in the whole poem too, despite its serious purpose, just as there is in some of Lawrence's fantasies of womanly liberation. The strength of Theory of Flight lies in individual passages which break through the self-consciousness and the artificial perspectives, and achieve the driving force of a speaker transported by his own oratory. The Book of the Dead is certainly as ambitious a work, with an equally complex symbolic organization, but its structural emphasis remains on the social conditions which it documents.

In this poem, for instance, the traveler-image is more literally "down-to-earth." The poet sets out to "extend the document" by closing in historically and geographically on the scene of action, Gauley Bridge in West Virginia. In her Selected Poems, Miss Rukeyser notes that

The twenty poems of The Book of Dead present a valley in West Virginia—a steep river-gorge where a tunnel and dam had been built. Silica, almost pure, had been encountered in the rock. The men who worked there, under threat of illness and death because of the silica, and unprotected, were dying now; they were being fought over in the courts, by the doctors, and in Congress; the women and children in the valley had come into this primitive state of war, among the fierce colored landscape and the precise buildings of the dam and power plant.

The past of the region includes heroism and triumph—early explorations and economic growth, the story of John Brown, the Civil War; its human heritage seems mirrored in "the power flying deep" of the river and falls. And whatever befalls the people there is a sign of the forces at work throughout America:

Here is your road, tying

you to its meanings: gorge, boulder, precipice.
Telescoped down, the hard and stone-green river
cutting fast and direct into the town.

We are introduced to the inhabitants by means similar to the documentary-film director's. A social worker describes their predicament at a Congressional hearing; the bleak town itself comes into view; there is a closeup of one of the victims of silicosis—and we are all the way into Gauley Bridge with the poet. The Book of the Dead wisely begins at a middle pitch, expository and colloquial in tone, urgent too but not straining beyond what the raw facts will allow. The pace is varied, giving us enough time to grasp the situation but keeping us moving along the clear plotlines. Dramatic monologues give us full-length portraits of real people: a Negro miner, a rich girl who has joined the local committee to fight for proper safeguards and compensation, the local undertaker who has gone Frazer's personae one better by converting cornfields to cemeteries to bury those dead of silicosis at so much per head from the company, the engineer who designed the power plant, and the others. When, after more testimony, characterizations, and other "documentation" (all based on original research), we reach the climactic group of symbolic poems—"Alloy," "Power," and "The Dam"—we find we have been thoroughly prepared for their more concentrated, imagistic statement.

Using methods borrowed from the cinema, from the Living Newspaper of the Federal Theater Projects, from the symbolistic technics of modern verse, Miss Rukeyser invented a new poetic form based on recently developed devices for concrete dramatic presentation. Without abandoning real poetic values as our age understands them, she had met the challenge of centering a poem on a large social problem. We close in on the site of the problem, we meet the people, the action develops, there are moments of intenser realization, and finally we reach both a specific denouement and a projection of widening perspectives. Rereading the whole poem today, we may well ask why so little attention has been paid its methods?

One of the more interesting experiments in this poem is with the rhythms of the document. Miss Rukeyser seems to have been the first poet to block out a long passage from, say, an actual committee hearing, telescoping and altering its language mainly for reasons of poetic economy. Of course, the use of a long passage of prose, or prosy exposition, has ample precedent—in the Cantos, for instance—and has often been successful in providing a contrast and frame for more precise and purer lyric passages. The aim here is a little different, to incorporate a portion of the rhythm of the real situation into the structure of the poem that interprets it. Moreover, the form helps achieve a deliberate emotional restraint in the first half of the poem. It creates interest, has its own inner balance, but does not force unbearable demands for response upon us:

This restraint is supported by the generally expository and antisentimental language of the first part of the sequence. Thus, the camera-eye view gives us detail without comment:

Camera at the crossing sees the city
a street of wooden walls and empty windows,
the doors shut handless in the empty street,
and the deserted Negro standing on the corner.

And in case we are tempted to display a too-easy sympathy, the poet snarls sarcastically—doubtless at herself as much as at the reader—

What do you want—a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

What we have at first, then, is a modified poetic form, just enough heightened in tone to keep us in the realm of incantation rather than of journalism….

The first five poems in the Elegies appeared in the 1939 volume A Turning Wind. In the context of that volume and of U. S. 1 (published the year before), their effect as a unit was considerably more bitter than that of the entire group of ten elegies printed as a separate book a decade later. U. S. 1 and A Turning Wind spoke for the young revolutionary poet struggling to keep an optimistic vision intact despite her own state of deep depression growing in part at least out of her experience in Spain and the tailspinning of the cultural movement with which she has been associated. "We were too earnest. We had to lose," she had written earlier than all this, with a slightly different emphasis from the present one in the poem "Eel," a reconstruction of the process of coming of age in America. She had sent herself a reassuring memorandum concerning the value of her poetry in "Homage to Literature"—with its echoing beginning:

When you imagine trumpet-faced musicians
blowing again inimitable jazz
no art can accuse nor cannonadings hurt …

And she had written, in U. S. 1, a whole series of poems dealing with guilt, fear of self-betrayal, frustrated love. "Night-Music" is full of revealing ambiguities of the sort which show that a writer's most cherished assumptions are still being subjected to a continuous testing against observation and self-analysis. Now, in A Turning Wind, there were poems like "Nuns in the Wind" that smelt out coming disaster:

In this poem and others there are questionings of the worth of her own character as well as of" the ultimate success of her beliefs:

All that year, the classical declaration of war was lacking.
There was a lot of lechery and disorder.
And I am queen on that island.

and:

It was long before the troops entered the city
that I looked up and saw the Floating Man.
Explain yourself I cried at the last. I am
the angel waste, your need which is your guilt,
answered, affliction and a fascist death.

A Turning Wind, in its angry knowledge of world-betrayal and in its ability to maintain a feeling of relationship, both to the causes of defeat and to the projection of possibility, is easily Miss Rukeyser's most moving single volume. The group called Correspondences takes cues from the observations of Kenneth Burke on the effects on a revolutionary philosopher of his own thinking:

Democritus laughed when he
saw his whole universe
combined of atoms, and
the gods destroyed …

The irony of his situation carries over to the poet's own; and further cues are taken from the wryly tough work of Bertolt Brecht in a second poem of the group, and from the passionate simplicities of Yeats's refrains in a third. The world is in an ugly state, it must be confessed, despite the "joys" afforded by knowledge and the Yeatsian "gaiety" of artistic realization; the fall of Bercelona was a key, and in the future, perhaps,

If some long unborn friend
looks at photos in pity,
we say, sure we were happy,
but it was not in the wind.

It is a time when the ritual and politics of war are more powerful than human will, when "humor, saliva of terror, will not save the day," and when

Against this there is only the understanding of the reverse of these tragic ironies of history, the "joke" of the universe, namely the fact that history is without meaning to objective nature and must remain so until men can prevent the perversion of their own humanity.

Violent electric night! and the age spiralling past
and the sky turning over, and the wind turning the stars.

It would have been hard indeed to cast a completely cold eye at the need so acutely and sincerely defined in these poems. A Turning Wind begins with the five Elegies, which set the tone of hope maintained through nerve and faith alone despite many misgivings and moments of hysteria and despair that sink very near to the bottom. This dark element is therefore much more characteristic of these five poems as a group in this volume than of the ten-poem sequence as it now stands.

In their own terms, the Elegies are a long report on the perilous journey of the poet's "unfinished spirit" through loneliness, through the disapproval of her parents and others in authority, and through education in the world's brutality. She learns to distinguish between Magicians and Prophets. The former stand only for "inward pleasure," the "trance of doom" that is the magnetic effect of power on its votaries; the latter, less lurid and forceful in their impact, stand for the "unity of light" but can never win a permanent victory:

The prophet lives by faith and not by sight,
Being a visionary, he is divided …

The allegorical contrast is established in a few violent, concentrated passages which make the second elegy the most successful, perhaps, of the group. The initial personal statement in the first poem, however, might lay some claim to precedence:

Against this ever-present need—so obviously personal or "Freudian" that to note it is to understand and sympathize—for restoring whatever it was that was wrecked in childhood, for mastering the demonic self, and for gaining a life of order and love, the second Elegy sets up a pragmatic puritanism: Reality must be conquered as a means of extending possibility, not merely for self-gratification of any sort. A curious corollary is that immediate experiential meaning must always be subordinated to the "project" for which it is being appropriated. Hence, despite the concern with real experience and with the Magician as symbol of evil, there is too little room for the richest kind of facing up to fact, such as we may find, for instance, in Williams' "The Pure Products of America" or Yeats's "A Dialogue of Self and Soul." Driven by an inescapable rhetorical pressure, the most sympathetic reader will at times find himself, despite everything, driven just a little too fast beyond the point of equilibrium between the fact broken open by a rush of insight and the meaning that might have glowed all around it could the position only have been held a while longer.

However this may be, the poet argues that the Prophet would inevitably triumph over the Magician were it not for the "fear of meaning," presented in the third Elegy as inseparable from "fear of form." (The first poem quoted in this essay deals with the same subject from the same point of view.) One underlying theme is that the vital sources of artistic form are to be found in the oppressed but resilient mind of the people. In the fifth Elegy, "A Turning Wind," hope is expressed for the defeat of evil through a merging of these sources with the strength for good of science. This poem begins with the dryest sort of exposition:

Then, gradually, the exposition is translated into a less positivistic and mechanistic imaginative statement:

And at last the poem moves sharply into the subjective counterparts of this theory of form. Evolution becomes consciousness emerging from centuries of need ("birds trapped in the wall"), only to be cheated of its significant functions by the disavowal of meaning in our day: "A nation of refugees that will not learn its name," we have exiled ourselves from self-knowledge. Nevertheless, all about us, in the recurring motifs of love, of the play and thought of children, of the world's demands for commitment to sympathy and struggle, even of industrial process ("sacred stacks of flame"—how the image recalls the Thirties!), we are challenged to take up our heritage of possibility. And the light of history, rightly understood, can help us pierce the present darkness:

the lights winding themselves into a single beacon,
big whooping riders of night, a wind that whirls
all of our motives into a single stroke …

This was the culmination of the Elegies as they first appeared, and in the context I have described. What their removal from that context, and the addition of five more poems to the group, has done is to shift the whole focus from a struggle for faith to the positive assertion that the faith will become reality. The elegies, now, begin in deep depression and end in triumphant joy, though all are built around similar oppositions and move in the same direction. Or rather, we may say that in outward form the sequence has this pattern, intended to be the earned result of a bitter effort to deal with harsh reality:

Does this life permit its living to wear strength?
Who gives it, protects it. It is food.
Who refuses it, it eats in time as food.
It is the world and it eats the world.

But the tendency of the sixth to tenth elegies is to oppose just a little too glibly—though often most magnetically—the sense of betrayal in these latter years against the certainty of final victory on all emotional fronts. Many poets are under a similar compulsion to force resolution by willful assertion, but the whole problem is to "put a skin" on it. One caveat, at least, the poet working such treacherous ground must absolutely observe is that he must not make his private self the real center of attention, at any rate to the extent of making the validity of his aesthetic achievement depend too much on the reader's faith in the importance of his actual personality, problems, and choices in real life. The hard thing is not to use the poem to explain or justify oneself. To return to an obvious example already mentioned, Yeats's old man in "Sailing to Byzantium" has a sufficient life of his own apart from his creator's. Our attention is riveted, in reading that poem, on the opposition of "countries"—worlds of existence—rather than on the speaker's tragic state, though much of the poem's final poignancy derives from the fact that, no longer of the one world, he is not yet received, if he ever will be, into the other. Miss Rukeyser's greatest need, as a poet, has been to create such a sustained mythopoeic transformation from private reference into self-sufficient aesthetic structure. Inclusiveness alone will not do it, nor will even the most passionate and moving rhetorical assertions. Some irony, and more commitment to the demands of the poem as a poem are needed if one is to stay on the "right side" of the boundary between self-analysis and the spiritual begetting of Byzantium. [The author adds in a footnote: "If, as someone remarked to me recently, one of the chief difficulties of younger poets in America is the absence of any close apprentice-relationship to sympathetic older poets and critics, the isolation of Miss Rukeyser has been even greater than that of most others because of the nature of her talent. On the other hand, it did lead her to seek and receive help from at least one poet of stature, Horace Gregory."]

…..

Miss Rukeyser herself must realize these necessities more than anyone else as she strives to maintain a unity despite a constant scattering of forces in her poems. Not only has she developed a good deal of skill in what might be called the moment-by-moment tactics of rhetorical intensity, but she has also, in her recent work, paid more attention than before to the more purely musical aspects of her writing. Some of the shorter pieces in The Green Wave, like some passages in the later elegies, show the effects of this special attention; and her most recent longer poem, Orpheus, is organized in accordance with this development. More important, she is experimenting in it—as she had not done since "The Book of the Dead," written over a decade ago—with the classical discipline of attempting to rewrite a myth while staying within the limits of association of the original version. Instead of "pieces of animals, pieces of all my friends," we now begin with the most unassuming "objective" imagery, the data of the myth of Orpheus' murder by the Thracian women:

The mountaintop stands in silence a minute after the murder.

The women are furies racing down the slope; far down,
copper and black of hair, the white heel running …

while Orpheus lies

Scattered, there lit, in black and golden blood:
his hand, a foot, a flat breast, phallus, a foot,
shoulder and sloping back and lyre and murdered head.

"I knew," writes Miss Rukeyser of this poem in The Life of Poetry, "what would follow. The pieces of the body would begin to talk, each according to its own nature, but they would be lost, they would be nothing, being no longer together. Like those in love, apart, I thought. No, not like anything. Like pieces of the body, knowing there had been pain, but not able to remember that pain—knowing they had loved, but not remembering whom. They knew there must be some surpassing effort, some risk. The hand moves, finds the lyre, and throws it upward with a fierce gesture … through the black air to become the constellations … the four strings sing Eurydice. And then the pieces begin to remember; they begin to come together; he turns into the god. He is music and poetry; he is Orpheus."

So Orpheus is reborn because without his rebirth there would be no response to the principle of love in man, and because the separated parts of him need to be reunited. The structure, even thus described by the poet herself, bears no inner necessity within it, or conviction of heroic challenge. For here again we have the demand for synthesis existing independently of any real link with the reader except his awareness of the poet's desire for it. In Orpheus as before in Miss Rukeyser's work the greatest impact is made by those portions of the poem which portray calamity and distress. The long opening stanza, associating the landscape, the shock, and the results of the act of primitive murder, focuses with full dramatic effect on the colors and rhythms of the moment of catastrophe—the speaking voice impersonal yet most seriously engaged in understanding the ritual horror of the moment. In a sense this effect contains the most vital elements of the whole poem, and the succeeding lines in the first movement for the most part simply elaborate while blurring a bit the initial impetus. The second movement begins the exploration of the meaning of loss of contact with a wry comment on the "sideshow of parts, the freaks of Orpheus":

Scattered. The fool of things. For here is Orpheus,
without his origin: the body, mother of self,
the earliest self, the mother of permanence …

The poet adverts briefly to her aim of inclusiveness here, for she is still possessed of her old compulsion to explain her motives and to demonstrate the importance of her subject matter. The statement is about as restrained as any she has ever made of it, but the whole "justification" of the poem—rhetorical again, primarily—is implied in it:

All myths are within the body when it is most whole,
all positions being referred to flesh in unity—
slow changes of form, the child and growing man
as friends have seen him, altered by absences and years.
Scatterings cannot discern changes of quality …

Thus an intensive vision has been balanced off by a theoretical statement. Henceforth the poem swings back and forth, finding what balance it can between these reciprocal motivations. There are sentimental passages, melodramatically forced ones, and occasionally, as in the seventh part of the second movement, a moment of passionate identity of the two themes—significantly, in the form of a prayer as we arrive at the sexual wound of Orpheus:

Father of song, in the seed and vaults of the sea,
the wall of light and pillars of desire,
the dark. The dark. But I will know again,
I will know more and again,
woman and man.

At last the effort is made, the resurrection takes place, and the whole poem is resolved into the god's final, brief, lovely song of possibility, of "creation not yet come." The object, as before, remains to make desire become reality in the course of a single poem despite the shadow; and, as before, the demand on the reader is too great for this purpose, although as a statement of need, and in particular passages, there is no question of the poem's power. My own feeling is that this poem, like "Ajanta," is a sign that at thirty-five Miss Rukeyser still felt herself under the obligation to prove the truth of every motif she had ever been inspired by, but that she was growing into a surer sense, finally, of the demands of what has been referred to as lyric-contemplative poetry. The next step—if the suggestion does not seem presumptuous—would be to drop the direct proving-business and the business of self-justification, and to take up almost exclusively the simple matter of honest self-clarification which has produced a number of Miss Rukeyser's most beautifully convincing poems over the years. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Lawrence's "New Heaven and Earth" are of this order of romantic rhetoric—universal, prophetic, organic. Such works are Muriel Rukeyser's best tradition and point to her finest possibility.