[Lechlitner is an American poet and critic. In the following review, she provides a mixed assessment of Theory of Flight.]

Muriel Rukeyser's poems are as a collection the most outstanding to be published within the last decade by a younger woman poet. And from a critical viewpoint, Theory of Flight should be of special significance to anyone interested in the advancement of modern poetry.

Undoubtedly the most vital (perhaps the only) contribution being made today to the art of poetry is the shift from the romantic-personal, individual consciousness to a collective, mass-identification with a universal consciousness. The true "revolutionary" poet is one who has grown beyond self-love sufficiently to discount the importance of his personal survival, and who is not only intellectually in sympathy with Marxian, or socialistic, beliefs, but is also emotionally identified with the class struggle. Judging from this critique, the reviewer must state, regretfully, that Miss Rukeyser is not as yet a "revolutionary" poet, though she is moving in that direction. There is real danger, however, that this poet, whose intellectual attainments are above the average, will encounter difficulty in effecting an essential transition from the "I" sympathiser type to the "we" collectively working, emotionally unconfused poet. For among the best and most sincere, emotionally, of her poems in this collection are those which draw from the romantic-lyric tradition.

Perhaps an analysis of the Preamble to Theory of Flight (the title poem) will help make this clear. This Preamble, like the main body of the poem, is composed of separate lyric chunks, or static verse-statements with no stanzaic building-up. It opens with some embracing, cosmic phrases that denote at least a mind capable of grasping more than small, factual happenings:

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.

Here, because the poet is expressing an abstract idea in physical imagery, the thought is clear, the form good. But as the poem progresses, her fondness for large words, her abrupt transitions and lack of integration in the subjectmatter confuse the reader. The second part of this poem is didactic. Here Miss Rukeyser spoils her material by weighting it with exaggerated, sensual imagery. And in the concluding section she uses an already overworked romantic figure, seed-flower-fruit, and applies it to aeronautics—the Plane, in turn, symbolizing the flight of the intelligence toward a better life. This malfusion of romanticmetaphysical-mechanistic terms is one that a poet sure of his thought and craft would not be guilty of.

In the above connection I think it is unjust, if not harmful, for Stephen Benet to say of Miss Rukeyser in his introduction [to Theory of Flight] that she was apparently born with her craft already in hand. Miss Rukeyser has a number of poetic gifts, true; but she has not yet learned how to harness those gifts most effectively. In time, I think she will. To say also that there is in her work little of the "direct imitation or admirations which one unconsciously associates with a first book of verse," is equally unjust. There are reflections of certain contemporary contacts.

Mr. Benet has noted that Miss Rukeyser is an "urban" poet. He seems to find it curious, however, that she writes of dynamos, gyroscopes, electricity. There is scarcely a young poet worth naming who hasn't been doing so for a number of years—although comparatively few women have, as yet. In 1925, Harriet Monroe took a pioneer step with a poem called "The Turbine". Her ultra-feminine approach, her "humanization" of the machine in emotional terms, make a pertinent contrast-study with Miss Rukeyser's objective, factual statements in "Structure of the Plane":

On the first stroke of the piston, the intake valve opens,
the piston moves slowly from the head of the cylinder
drawing in its mixture of gas and air.

Both Monroe and Rukeyser, however, proceed to philosophize about the Machine, the former saying that Madam Turbine leads one "far out into the workshop of the world," and out from earth to ether; the latter:

We burn space, we sever galaxies,
solar systems about Shelley's head.

Neither poet has fully digested her two-fold experiential contact. In both poems, objective stimulation comes first. Secondly, the emotional current is turned on. The Monroe poem is typical of a certain "school" of poetic writing; equally so is the Rukeyser poem of 1935 vintage. Both are in the "style" of a moment. Miss Rukeyser reverses gears, and following the lead of the modern metaphysical poets makes humanity, individually and as a race, take on the attributes of a dynamo or a gyroscope. We find the human race, she says, reflecting "all history in a bifurcated Engine." Also, we humans

whirl in desire, hurry to ambition, return maintaining the soul's polarity.

This is imitative, scientific thinking, and as such already "dates".

Miss Rukeyser, in common with other left-wing poets, condemns parents and that generation which gave us the heritage of a capitalist-directed war and other social crimes. No one has expressed this attitude more bitterly than Auden, who says of the "perfect Pater and marvelous Mater"—

When we asked the way to Heaven, these directed us ahead
to the padded room, the clinic, and the hangman's little shed.

Miss Rukeyser tends to soften her indictment:

We focus on our times, destroying you, fathers
in the long ground: you have given strange birth
to us who turn against you in our blood
needing to move in our integrity, accomplices
of life in revolution, though the past
be sweet with your tall shadows

This repudiation of romantic blood-ties, and the setting up instead as parents (ancestors) the poets, statesmen and scientists who throughout history have been rebels against the status quo, envisionaries of a brotherhood of man, may be ruthless. But it is courageous and necessary in view of the social ideal yet to be attained. On this step which our younger poets have taken, if on none other, can be founded a hope for the future of poetry.