Muriel Rukeyser's "Letter to the Front" (1944) signals from the first its declared relation to epistolary models then in vogue on the home front. The title of Rukeyser's long poetic series immediately places the text to follow in the tradition of the war poem as soldier's message—but with a crucial difference. Rukeyser does not mimic the voice of the soldier; rather, replacing "from" with "to," she reverses V-letter form.

The woman's letter to an absent soldier—a text Rukeyser rewrites repeatedly from the late thirties on—was not, of course, an unfamiliar document in American Second War culture. Insipid collections of women's letters overseas flooded the home-front literary market; Margaret Buell Wilder's bestseller Since You Went Away … Letters to a Soldier from His Wife is a typical example. The forties poem-as-letter-from-home has, too, more venerable predecessors. From Ovid's Heroides to the present, a genre Linda Kauffman defines [in Discourse of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions, 1986] as "amorous epistolary literature" has represented the writing of the woman left behind, enacting a script which calls, as Kauffman puts it, for "men going to war and women warring with their passions."

The volume of which "Letter to the Front" was a part, Beast in View, is largely given over to love poems which dwell on an ancient and familiar theme of erotic abandonment: the abandonment of women by soldiers, the abandonment of women, in the absence of soldiers, to grief and desire. Many of these poems develop open epistolary fictions. Like the heroines across centuries whom Linda Kauffman analyzes, the "I" of Beast in View transforms herself, poem by poem, "from the archetypal Woman Who Waits into the Woman Who Writes." This metamorphosis, far from being inherently revolutionary or subversive, seems, within the large and long tradition of amatory epistles, almost formulaic.

Waiting and writing, warring and passion. There is a personal story behind Beast in View; Rukeyser's lover, the German athlete Otto Boch, was killed fighting with the Loyalists in Spain, a fact which Rukeyser learned in the year before the book's publication. But we need no specific biographical information to gather the details of Beast in View's underlying plot. "One Soldier," "Gift Poem," and "Sixth Elegy" address themselves directly to the lover who is somewhere else, gone to war; "Mortal Girl" evokes Ovidian narrative, speaking for Leda after the swan has departed ("I wait in all my hopes, / Poet beast and woman"); "The Meeting," Penelope-like, takes up the question of the costs of feminine dedication to absence:

One o'clock in the letter-box
Very black and I will go home early.
Now I have put off my dancing-dress
And over a sheet of distance write my love.
…..

Each absence brings me nearer to that night
When I stone-still in desire standing
Shall see the masked body of love enter the garden
To reach the night-burning, the perpetual fountain.

The epigraph of the volume, from a poem by Dryden which supplies the book's title, links love and war as common pursuits with the same "beast in view," "all, all of a piece throughout." Both quests—military and erotic, public and private—end, in Dryden's lines, with failure and treason: "Thy wars brought nothing about; thy lovers were all untrue." The only hope for completion, for gratified "nightburning," is change: '"Tis well an old age is out, / And time to begin a new." Beast in View offers multiple variations on this theme, strongly eroticizing the speaker's response to the soldier's distance, hinting repeatedly that his absence signals amorous betrayal, crying for a new satiation of female desire.

But this is, after all, Muriel Rukeyser writing—Rukeyser, whose first poem in her first published book had rejected the story of Sappho bereft and pleading to Phaon, turning instead to a different model. "Poem out of Childhood," Rukeyser's early portrait of the artist as a young woman, evokes the major figure of the woman writer in Ovid's Heroides—"Sappho, with her drowned hair trailing along Greek waters, / weed binding it, a fillet of kelp enclosing / the temples' ardent fruit"—only to cut it off sharply: "Not Sappho, Sacco." Her poems in the thirties included long sequences based on investigations of the silica poisoning of miners and on the Scottsboro trial, and in the decades following the forties her books were filled with poems on the Civil Rights movement, on the Vietnam War, and on political prisoners around the world. In Beast in View, left-wing politics, the revolutionary material of Sacco, matters as much as Sappho's lyric erotics. What's more, the two entirely conjoin. Rukeyser's war poems, like her earlier and later work, are unusually open and ardent in two ways; their candid intensities of sexual desire link with their overt political stakes.

Thus Beast in View, at least as often as it appeals to mythic narratives of abandonment, insistently historicizes and politicizes those plots. The title "Long Past Moncada," for instance, dates and places the war letter it represents with careful particularity. In that poem, the lovers' longing exactly coincides with the wish for a Republican victory in Spain and with the hope for a fervent and successful antifascist struggle worldwide:

That this war/love letter, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, is branded with the guilt of a survivor as well as burning with the expectant desire of a patient tender of home fires is made clear by its next stark self-accusation: "If I indeed killed you, my darling, if my cable killed / Arriving the afternoon the city fell …." In the world of Beast in View, one immersed in war, the most loving letter is capable of literal killing. "When," as "Sixth Elegy. River Elegy" puts it, "the cemeteries are military objectives / and love's a downward drawing at the heart / … every letter bears the stamp of death." But such letters are always accompanied in Beast in View by some reference to a spirit which gives life—a spirit strongly antifascist and specifically connected to a tradition of left-wing activism represented by the missing soldier: "Other loves, other children, other gifts, as you said, / Of the revolution,' arrive—but, darling, where / You entered, life / Entered my hours …" ("Long Past Moncada").

"Letter to the Front," the long poetic series at the center of Beast in View, seems to offer in its generic title the paradigmatic version of all the amorous political epistles in that volume; fifty pages into the book, if we recognize any poetic plot, it should be this one. The title is, however, easily misread. Two of the editors of an anthology of lesbian feminist essays on sexuality, for example, quote from the poem on their dedication page, citing it as "Letter From the Front" [Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis]. The slip reflects, of course, a common desire, the need for our authors to be perfect veterans for us; but it misses Rukeyser's redefinition of the dynamics of power in the reading and writing of war poetry. The letter from the front is still, as it was in the forties, a privileged form, thought to be ideally suited for first-hand reports of historical crisis. The letter to the front seems doomed, in contrast, to be merely minor, its only subject the cravings of one abandoned woman. But Rukeyser's "Letter To" not only transgresses the bounds of the feminine epistle, pushing it beyond the billet-doux to assert its status as serious war correspondence; it also constitutes an ironic commentary on and a subtle challenge to the primacy of the eyewitness soldier as subject and speaker of the modern war poem.

"Letter to the Front" self-consciously confronts and reenvisions conventions of both war poetry and love poetry. It does so by exploiting the conventions of a traditional "women's form," the amorous epistle, for a traditionally masculine end, the making of a theory of war. Since "Letter" adapts women's discourse for its own subversive purposes, we might say, following [the poetry of Luce Irigaray] that the poem mimics a feminine voice…. But that point should be followed with an immediate qualification, for in addition to the mocking, nuanced textual strategies Irigaray envisions as the play of mimesis, "Letter to the Front" offers open debate and militant contestation. Taking up the great subject of feminine epistolary fictions—writing's reenactment of or substitution for bodily experience—it extends those fictions to comprehend in the broadest possible terms the subject of the Second World War, exploring suffering's relation to political desire and war literature's relation to both belief and the body….

["Letter to the Front"] consistently substitutes spiritual and mental contest for physical engagement. It insists, repeatedly, on a conceptual fight which precedes, and takes precedence over, armed struggle: "Women and poets see the truth arrive. / Then it is acted out"; "After the change of heart there comes / The savage waste of battlefield"; "Not alone the still / Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh. / That may come also. But the accepting wish…." Again and again, the poem places literal combat, physical action, and physical suffering in the position of that which may come also. When its tenth section argues that women may be "lost surely as soldiers … gone down under centuries / of the starved spirit," it equates categorically physical and spiritual death. In the fourth section, "Sestina," the lines "The fighting / Was clear to us all at last" are followed by "The belted soldiers / Vanished into white hills that dark was changing." Here, characteristically, the clarity of the fight is asserted precisely at the moment when soldiers' bodies blur and disappear.

In its relative indifference to the literal body, "Letter to the Front" works within a long tradition of epistolary fictions. "Nothing of body," as Clarissa puts it, "when friend writes to friend." Rather, the letter, Richardson's Lovelace argues, is "writing from the heart…. Not the heart only; the soul was in it." The letter is the medium of disembodied desire. Forties soldier poets drew on exactly this aspect of epistolary form in their V-letters, lyrics at once intimate and dreamily abstract, war poems as heartfelt records of the soul. In this one sense, Rukeyser's revision of the V-letter may be said to retain as many of the conventions of that form as it revises.

In the soldier's V-letter poem, however, the reader is left to infer, behind the letter writer's protective manly or wistful boyish stance, the unspoken literal danger which threatens at any point to end his soulful correspondence for good: the event to which [Karl] Shapiro's hero in his "V-Letter" refers, with studied nonchalance, as "my matter-of-fact and simple death." This implicit pathos was available to Second War soldier writers in large part because of what had not gone unspoken in the literature of World War I, a body of war poetry not, incidentally, actively hostile to the sentimental possibilities of epistolary form; in Wilfred Owen's war poems which use the figure of the letter, for instance, at the moment when men are wounded letter writing stops explicitly, theatrically dead. Owen's poems … set up the confidences of friend writing to friend as euphemisms only. And then they disrupt them, break them off violently, as if insisting: "In war, everything, always everything, of body."

"Letter to the Front," which argues throughout for the primacy of what its third section calls "wars of the spirit in the world," works arduously against this tradition. For Rukeyser, the most egregious errors and failures in war and in war poetry stem not from the lack of concrete personal experience but from the refusal to think impersonally, theoretically—the failure to recognize the war as part of an ideological struggle. The worst villain in "Letter to the Front" is a "man in the clothes of a commander," who refuses to

In part, this critique of the jingoism of commanders falls neatly in line with the foot soldier's perspective which dominates the modern ironic war poetry tradition; but in larger part it also criticizes and counters that tradition's fundamental suspicion of abstraction.

Eric Leed provides a cogent summary of the powerful model of the individual's relation to war which "Letter" attempts to defy. Experience of modern war, he argues in [No Man's Land,] his analysis of the attitudes of Great War soldiers, tends to be comprehended as distinctively concrete and bodily:

The knowledge gained in war was rarely regarded as something alienable, something that could be taught, a tool or method. Rather, it was most often described as something that was part of the combatant's body, like a chemical substance in the veins, a mark, a scar, a set of reflexes, a part of the individual's very potency.

Strongly resisting this conception of knowledge, "Letter" argues that knowing war, and knowing how to prevent war, are alienable skills. Wisdom, in "Letter," can be taught; insight can be recognized and transmitted—as in a letter; the tools and methods necessary for the struggle can be grasped from anywhere at any time.

In this upholding of the primacy of negotiable belief over the felt experience of the body, the poem opposes not only the dominant strain of modern war poetry and war narrative but also a further reaching and compelling practice and tenet of modernism. Mimesis, in Auerbach's great Second World War study [titled Mimesis], begins with a mark on a returned combatant's body, Odysseus's scar. Its exemplar in modernity is the random, common, personal moment in which Woolf's Mrs. Ramsey measures and knits a stocking, "comparatively independent of the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair; it passes unaffected by them, as daily life." The particular scar on the body of a man, the particular world of women who, like Penelope, tend, weave, mend, maintain the quotidian: neither of these moving specificities much concerns Rukeyser's "Letter."

Unapologetically rhetorical and resolutely antimimetic … "Letter to the Front" exploits with no holds barred the "epistolarity" of letter form—a form which, as Linda Kauffman points out in her study of the literary love letter, "lies at the extremes of telling, so far removed from mere mimesis that the diegetic and performative aspects of narrative dominate the discourse." It courts and welcomes "the controversial and unstable orders over which men"—and women—fight, and it refuses to define that fight in terms only of despair. "One of the worst things that could happen to our poetry at this time," Rukeyser wrote in The Life of Poetry in an explicit argument against the poetry of wounding,

would be for it to become an occasional poetry of war. A good deal of repugnance to the social poetry of the 1930's was caused by reactionary beliefs; but as much was caused, I think, because there were so many degrees of blood-savagery in it, ranging all the way from selfpity—naked or identified with one victim after another—to actual bloodlust and display of wounds, a rotten sort of begging for attention and sympathy in the name of an art that was supposed to produce action.

"Letter"'s purpose, at once a tribute to and a strong revision of the traditional projects of the heroines in amorous epistolary fiction, is to inscribe and to encourage political comprehension and political desire. It attempts, like Rukeyser's work as a whole, to convert one gendered script—"Call the male puppet, Croak, / Call the female puppet, Shriek" ("Correspondences")—into a more hope ful and reciprocal plot:

The woman to the man:
What is that on your hands?
It is also on my hands.

What is that in your eyes?
You see it in my eyes, do you?

Is your sex intact? Is mine?
Can it be about life now?

Where letters in Owen's poems end with the brutal interruption of the letter writer, "Letter to the Front" ends with a graceful invitation to the reader: "signs of belief, offered in time of war, / As I now send you, for a beginning, praise." "A letter," writes Janet Gurkin Altman [in Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form], "is … an attempt to draw [a particular] you into becoming the I of a new statement…. Within the epistolary framework … even closural gestures have inaugural implications." Embracing the inaugural implications of epistolary form, "Letter to the Front" defines itself as prospective. It is a letter to, not from, like the tentative signals sent by men and women across "vast distances" in Rukeyser's later Vietnam-era "Poem."

…..

"Letter to the Front" affirms in the strongest possible terms the need for and the power of abstract belief in wartime and in peacetime; but we would be mistaken to conclude that it calls simply for "nothing of body." In fact, as I have shown, "Letter" returns repeatedly to a problem it cannot and would not wholly evade: the problem of embodiment. Instead of describing the wounded on battlefields, it represents at one point, for instance, forms of injury less usual in the war poem, which are literal as well as metaphorical, concrete as well as abstract: "I hold their dead skulls in my hand; this death / Worked against labor, women, Jews, / Reds, Negroes." Compared to its closest analogue in the literature I have discussed—Moore's promise not to hate "black, white, red, yellow, Jew, / Gentile, Untouchable"—this list is not only more politicized; it also, with its gesture toward the graphic ("dead skulls"), seeks to be and purports to be relatively particular.

The most famous poem in the series, the sonnet "To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century," enacts most powerfully the struggle of the body with and for belief:

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life. Full agonies:
Your evening deep in labyrinthine blood
Of those who resist, fail, and resist: and God
Reduced to a hostage among hostages.

The gift is torment. Not alone the still
Torture, isolation; or torture of the flesh.
That may come also. But the accepting wish,
The whole and fertile spirit as guarantee
For every human freedom, suffering to be free,
Daring to live for the impossible.

The significance of this poem's representation of Jewish experience at a time when the great majority of American volumes of war poems ignored the Holocaust cannot, I think, be overemphasized. "To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" offers a profound extension and reformulation of the terms of the other poems in the "Letter" sequence and of the terms of Western war poetry and dominant American home-front culture. Stressing the active work of Judaism, it reworks a traditional rhetoric of election: Jews are people who must choose to be the chosen people. Giving new substance to the word "belief which has cropped up so frequently in "Letter," it represents that belief as rooted and exemplified in Jewish cultural and spiritual tradition. Its figure of the gift which is also torment refigures conventional imagery of war's exchanges; external battles and written, distant correspondences are replaced by an inward, invisible offering, an internal struggle to acknowledge and live by one's identity and one's principles. Finally, not least, "To Be a Jew" adds another dimension to the front which this "Letter to the Front" redefines, reminding us that in 1944 not only soldiers bore marks, scars, and wounds or capacities of vision and resistance.

There is a body at the center of "Letter to the Front." It is a Jew's body. And, in this war poem, as the female saint who buries her face in mud, the fertile mother, and the old biddy make clear, it is a woman's body. "Letter to the Front"'s strongest revision of the tradition of war poetry and war letters lies here: the great questions of that tradition—if, why, how the body should be or will be put to use, put in danger, for the sake of belief—are claimed as questions, necessary and inevitable, for supposed "noncombatants."

In a tribute to Rukeyser published in 1980 [The Poetic Vision of Mariel Rukeyser, by Louise Kertesz], Kenneth Rexroth wrote, "She does not have an ideology grafted into her head." Instead, "she has a philosophy of life which comes out of her own flesh and bones. It is not a foreign body." In "Letter," both philosophy and flesh, both body and belief, or, to use Irigaray's terms, both ideas and matter are represented as available tools, available terms for women as well as men. The poetic series, resolutely ideological, strives through its figures at once both to free the politics of war from and to ground them in flesh and bone, to prove that finally, in the struggle of ideas it represents and advocates, no body is foreign.