[Jarrell was an American poet, editor, translator, critic, and educator. Best known as a literary critic but also respected as a poet, he was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. In the following review, he objects to the emotional rhetoric in The Green Wave.]

Muriel Rukeyser is a forcible writer with a considerable talent for emotional rhetoric, but she has a random melodramatic hand and rather unfortunate models and standards for her work—one feels about most of her poems pretty much as one feels about the girl on last year's calendar, and prefers to think of Miss Rukeyser only as the poet who wrote "Ajanta." There is nothing so good as "Ajanta" in her new book, The Green Wave; the best poem in the book, I think, is "Mrs. Walpurga," a sliding, oil-and-honey, sexual fantasy, half-dream, half-nightmare. It is hard not to feel indifferent toward any single poem in the book, since you can see that Miss Rukeyser—and not just Miss Rukeyser—could turn out a thousand more quite like it. The poems are, essentially, improvisations, easy reworkings of the automatic images of a rhetorical-emotional trance-state in which everything slides into everything else, in which everything is no more than the transition to everything else: if my reader will get as woollyheaded and as oracularly emotional as he can—as if, say, he were listening to "Tristan" with complete sympathy and empathy—and then utter, in a slow wavy voice, joined by ands, the most powerful and troubling images he can think of on the spur of the moment, he will get the raw material of one of Miss Rukeyser's elegies, of George Barker's elegies, of many other contemporary poems. But where everything is a dream, dreams are worthless: after a whole book of images changing into images, the reader would trade tons of them for one scruple of common logic, one everyday unchanging fact, one line as blessedly prosaic as

A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman.

After all, Proust's "fork, fork, Francis Jammes" dream has so much effect precisely because Norpois has never uttered one dreaming word. But many poets—I'm not talking about Miss Rukeyser now—write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

Consider this very typical quotation:

Man, an explosion walking through the night in
Rich and intolerable loneliness.
Cathedrals writhing gold against their clouds
And a child asking the fiery pure questions.

Here, just as it usually is, Miss Rukeyser's real concern is to tell the reader, excitingly, how he ought to feel about something. She hardly ever shows him the thing and lets him feel for himself—her rhetoric is a sort of oratorical, oracular testimonial to make him buy it without even looking. Are the questions pure and fiery? Are the things man bears intolerable? Well, in this sort of poetry they always are. The rhythm of every last syllable is crying: "Don't ask questions—lie back, child; don't you want to be moved?" Yes; but more than this—and more specifically than this. You tell us the questions and we'll tell you whether they're pure and fiery. And—and it's all so familiar.

Miss Rukeyser's worst and most familiar lines—there aren't too many—are all rhetorical sublimations of the horrible advertising-agency idealism of Corwin or Wallace or Fast or MacLeish or the Í. Á. Ì., of sermons and radio programs and editorials and speeches: what our ignorant forbears called cant. But Miss Rukeyser is so original—if one leaves comic-strips out of the question—in her use of a Freudian or sexual imagery for this idealism that one feels, with dismay and delight, that one is listening to the Common Siren of our century, a siren photographed in a sequin bathing suit, on rocks like boiled potatoes, for the week-end edition of PM, in order to bring sex to the deserving poor. When you think of yourself as that terrible thing, a public figure—and Miss Rukeyser does, to a considerable extent—it's hard to decide what you do feel, what the real reasons are; and how are the images and emotions of Miss Rukeyser's dream-rhetoric going to decide between do and should, real good? The average poem in The Green Wave is all flesh and feeling and fantasy: as if reality were a pure blooming buzz, with the poet murmuring to the poem, "Flow, flow!" Yet all the time the poem keeps repeating, keeps remembering to repeat, that it is a good girl—that it is, after all, dying for the people; the reader wanders, full of queasy delight, through the labyrinthine corridors of the strange, moral, sexual wish-fantasy for which he is to be awarded, somehow, a gold star by the Perfect State.