Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication

Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication Author(s): John Malcolm Brinnin Source: Poetry, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Jan., 1943), pp. 554-575 Published by: Poetry Foundation Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20583291 Accessed: 12-09-2016 00:22 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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P O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse MURIEL RUKEYSER: THE SOCIAL POET AND THE PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION

IN THE poetry of Muriel Rukeyser, as represented in three volumes published between 1930 and 1939, it is possible to trace the history of a movement in American letters that was at the same time literary and political. Since her range is wide, and her methods pliable, she has expressed in these volumes the sentiments of many in her generation, and has suggested certain influences that reshaped and ultimately transformed them.

The swift turns of political events in these ten years have evoked parallel movements in the matter and methods of poets, particularly those who draw their material and inspiration from

the immediate issues of their time. Emphasis upon the social and political phases of experience is the hallmark of those years

just as, say, the concern for a revision of ethical, particularly sexual, values of bourgeois convention marked the preceding generation. In the work of certain poets, political stress and disillusion has resulted in a retreat toward obscurantism, the withdrawal from the objective arena into a subjective room. This

change has been accompanied by confusions both of vision and method or, often, a slackening of emotional power toward in difference which, in turn, has led to a concentration upon the minima of experience and dependence upon the bare resources of language. It is a divorcement that has served to drive many poets into the contemporary equivalent of the ivory tower, re furbished, perhaps, with surrealist and Freudian furniture, but

a familiar landmark in its isolation, its detachment from the political flow of masses and men.

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Muriel Rukeyser On the other hand, however, and somewhat overlooked at the

present time, are found a number of poets whose social convic tions, though transformed and challenged in the strain of con tinued partisanship in a difficult world, have remained essene tially as firm and simplified as in their first conscious statemen-ts. Some, to be sure, have remained so close to the partisanship of.

radical journalism that their verse is merely a kind of poetic commentary upon the movements of the Party Line. Others,; however, and Muriel Rukeyser is the most distinguished among these, have undergone the disappointments and tortured doubts

of the last decade and yet succeeded in enlarging both their strength of purpose and the scope of their poetry.

One of the most interesting phases of the transformation of the social poet in years of stress is the change in his use of lan

guage. In the case of Muriel Rukeyser, it moves from that of simple dedarative exhortation, in the common phrases of the city man, to that of a gnarled, intellectual, almost private observa

tion. In her earlier usage, images are apt to be simple and few; the whole approach is apt to be through the medium of urban. speech. In the latter work, images become those of the psychol ogist, or of the surrealist, charged with meaning and prevalent

everywhere. Parallel with this change is the increasing com plication of symbols; the first are public, the last, even though

they may represent universal issues, are privately conceived and privately endowed. In these changes may be found the central problem of the modern social poet. That is, how may he

develop his talent in the full resources of the language and ac cumulated techniques, and yet speak clearly and persuasively to men about him. I shall attempt here to trace the development of- the mover

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P O E T R Y: A Ala gazine of Verse ment that crossed, roughly, the period between the stock market crash of 1929 and the signing of the Russo-German Non-Aggres sion Pact of 1939. Upon both of these events turned the destinies

of millions of men. It is only natural that poetry should have experienced a dislocation as deep-rooted and as broad. However, the principle emphasis will be upon the problem of language as communication. Since the social poet is one to whom com munication is the first and necessary virtue, his attempts to be strong and clear without seeming banal, and his attempts to use

the complex resources of the English language in an original way, are twin problems that are as yet unresolved. Since the work of Muriel Rukeyser demonstrates both of these extremes, a careful examination of the shifts and expansions of her method

and thought may lead to a meaningful resolution. With the publication of her first volume, Theory of Flight, prize winner of the annual contest sponsored by the Yale Uni versity Press, American poetry found its first full-blown expres sion of the rebellious temper that prevailed on American cam

puses and among the younger intellectuals. Its success was immediate, and it took its place as the American equivalent of such work as that published by the new revolutioniary group of

English poets exemplified by Auden, Spender, and Lewis. The volume went into several printings and Miss Rukeyser was praised

for the ruggedness of her technique, her experimentalism, and for the powerful utterance which, from a woman, seemed unique.

Critics found in her work a relief from the popular "female" sentiments that had marked such poets as Millay, Teasdale, and Wylie. Though it appeared for a time that she was a writer around whom a host of radical poets might group themselves, no association comparable to that of the English group came

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Muriel Rukeyser about. The reasons for this failure are complex, but for the purpose of this discussion it is enough to state the fact, since it

is one of the reasons why Miss Rukeyser's work is so easily separable from the great body of social poetry written in those

years.

THEORY OF FLIGHT An attitude of defiance on the part of youth toward the older

generation is, of course, the first expected reaction of a revo lutionary adolescent. In that conflict, rebellion is brought to its

simplest terms. Miss Rukeyser uses the word "father" both as an atavic reference and, at times, dearly with her own parent in mind. Though the defiant attitude is always clear-cut, with uncompromising demands for a break with paternal tradition, there is often a note of tenderness in her work which tends to

qualify the starker sentiments. This quality shows clearly in an early poem, in which she speaks of herself walking with her

father in a suburban countryside which he has chosen as suit able for investment. He wants to become wealthy in order to insure her happiness. She understands this as a gesture of kind

ness, but is helpless to show her revulsion from the whole enterprise: We'll own the countryside, you'll see how soon I will, you'll have acres to play in: I saw the written name painted on stone in the face of the steep hill: "That's your name, Father!" "And yours," he shouted, laughing. "No, Father, no!" He caught my hand as I cried, and smiling, entered the pit, ran laughing down its side.

The central interest here is a dramatic one; the language is simplified to the rhythm of actual speech, unadorned. Conse quently, the virtue of the passage lies in the expert handling of the half-articulated conflict of generations as represented in this father and his daughter.

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P O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse Another attitude attached to the father symbol is the Vic torian concept of "the sins of the fathers." They who manipulated and misused our youth, smearing the centuries upon our hands, trapping us in a welter of dead names, snuffing and shaking heads at patent truth.

Unlike the Victorian code, this admits of no philosophical acceptance; rather, the sins of the fathers provide the sources of rebellion. Since the child has moved from filial devotion toward a social consciousness, the vision of good that the latter engenders is strong enough to erase the earlier loyalty from her

mind. She acts, not as an individual in familial convention, but as a social being whose only morality is that of the collective: Understand my treason, See I betray you kissing, I overthrow your milestones weeping among your tombs.

Speaking allegiances, I turn,

steadfastly to destroy your hope. Your cargo in me swings to ports hostile to your old intent.

In us recurrences: My generation feeds the wise assault on your anticipation, repeating historic sunderings, betraying our fathers,

all parricidal in our destinies.

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 tall shadows, and although we turn from treasons, we shall accomplish these.

This language is rich, simple, passionate; the rhythms are abrupt, shifting as speech. The unity of emotion in the tragic solemnity of address holds together an uneven technique. This is the voice

of a person who is certain that she is speaking for many, who maintains, nevertheless, a strong sense of personal identity. Nor

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Muriel Rukeysef is there any hesitation; the path of action is difficult but the speaker is fully resolved. Thus, she may speak in easy command

of images that are uncomplicated and familiar. Once the separation from the father has been completely real ized, there is a recurrent celebration of the joys of comradeship in radical enterprise. This strain is made authentic by the fact

that the poet immediately identifies her poetic ideas with her day to day activities in the radical movement. In this way, the simplest, most pedestrian chore, involving pamphlets or reports,

may undergo poetic elevation until it stands forth as an act of heroism. Life has assumed a new meaning in the company of Travellers

speakers disgressing from the ink-pocked rooms,

bearing the unequivocal sunny word.

However, though she is resolved in action, she is continually conscious of her separation from the conventional background of family; yet the backward look is still sharp with defiance: I have left forever house and maternal river given up sitting in that private tomb quitted that land that house that velvet room Frontiers admitted me to a growing country

I carry the proofs of my birth and my mind's reasons but reckon with their struggles and their seasons.

In such passages there is a straightforward statement of an emo

tional and highly personal reaction. There is no attempt to justify or to explain; there is a new allegiance to which the poet has become dedicated with her whole being. It darifies her past and gives hope to her future.

The first indication of a concern that becomes major in her succeeding work occurs in the poem, Effort at Speech Be

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P O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse tween Two People. Here, with overtones of Eliot and the per sonal frustrations of the twenties, is a suggestion that communi cation is ultimately impossible. : I am not happy. I will be open.

I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems. There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate On what a tragedy his life was, really.

: Take my hand. First my mind in your hand. What are you now? When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide, and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty, if light had not transformed the day, I would have leapt.

I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

This poem, in its isolation from the political temper of the rest of the book, seems unrepresentative. Its attitudes are ado lescent, its sense of tragedy superficial and commonplace. How ever, in the light of Miss Rukeyser's later development, it assumes

importance. It is the individualistic anchor in the first book which holds the author to her own emotions. When those emo tions are forced to play upon the hazards of political action, a new conflict becomes manifest.

Soon after the personal acceptance of a place in the revolu tionary movement, the author puts by the sheer expression of exhilaration in an attempt to realize an intellectual objectification of her position. One of the choices for this is the concept of flight in modern mechanical terms. sky, indude earth now. Flying, a long vole of descent renders us land again. Flight is intolerable contradiction. We bear the bursting seeds of our return we will not retreat; never be moved. Stretch us onward include us in the past.

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Muriel Rukeyser In this instance, all of history is seen as an attempt at human expansion in the terms of flight. And though the author knows that this attempt has produced no release from the human con

dition, she rejoices in the fact that it has produced an increas ingly complex, and increasingly able, human community: Now we can look at our subtle jointures, study our hands, the tools are assembled, the maps unrolled, propellors spun.

In another instance, not entirely successful, the poet attempts to identiXfy mankind with the structure of the plane. The result

is a fresh juxtaposition of imagery, but the parallelism of forms

is hazy. the final exhaust stroke serves to release the gases,

allowing the piston to scavenge the cylinder.

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

we give ourselves ease, gentlemen, art and these explosions and Peter Ronsard finger-deep in roses

The pilot of this plane is the political hero, who is ready to guide human ambition into flight. Though the poet, in her own voice, has remained outside through all of this poem, at the very end she

makes a familiar intrusion, exhorting the multitude to give its allegiance to the man at the controls: do we say all is in readiness: the times approach, here is the signal shock: ?

Master in the plane shouts "Contact" master on the ground : "Contact!" he looks up: "Now?" whispering : "Now."

"Yes," she says. "Do."

Say yes, people. Say yes.

Yes.

Here the poet achieves the ultimate simplification of the horta tory method, Say yes, people. Say yes.

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POETRY: A Magazine of Verse Though the words are naive almost to the point of being absurd, they form a dimax of such power and sincerity that they become

acceptable. Though most of the poems in this first volume repeat the same attitudes, in the same stress of oversimplification and fervor,

Miss Rukeyser manages, in a few passages, to incorporate into respectable poetry some of the more profound tenets of dialec tical materialism. In this attempt, she succeeds in retaining a durable and clear language and, though her images are neither new nor particularly arresting, the quiet yet passionate expres sion of faith holds them together. They are, consequently, not significant in themselves, but in unfamiliar juxtapositions. Believe that we bloom upon this stalk of time; and in this expansion, time too grows for us richer and richer toward infinity.

They promised us the gold and harps and seraphs.

Our rising and going to sleep is better than future pinions.

We surrender that hope, drawing our own days in, covering space and time draped in tornadoes, lightning invention, speed crushing the stars upon us,

-stretching the accordion of our lives, sounding the same chord longer and savoring it until the echo fails. Believe that your presences are strong,

O be convinced without formula or rhyme

or any dogma: use yourselves: be: fly.

Believe that we bloom upon this stalk of time.

Here, the philosophical long-view is united with exhortation. The result is beneficial to both attitudes. Exhortation becomes less banal, less strident than many other calls to action or faith; the long-view takes on certain of the excitements of immediacy. In this passage, direct address seems to grow properly out of the ahalysis that precedes it. There is no suggestion that the author has left the established frame of reference.

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Muriel Rukeyser In The Lynchings of Jesus, Muriel Rukeyser makes use, in poetic terms, of a tendency that was evident in the politics of the Popular Front movement of the early and middle years of the

decade, i.e. the trick of rediscovering popular heroes as partisans of modern issues. The Marxist aspects of Lincoln's thought, for

instance, or at least those aspects which could be shown as par allel to modern Marxist sentiments, were re-examined and pub

licized. Thus, in Passage to Godhead, Miss Rukeyser reinvokes the Christian legend: Passage to godhead, fitfully glared upon by blooding shinings over Calvary this latest effort to revolution stabbed against a bitter sacrificial tree.

The effect, though attained through methods that must remain

suspect, is often rich both as drama and as poetry. Since any new interpretation of old mythology will have a local interest, that is part of the success here: Bruno, Copernicus, Shelley, Karl Marx : you makers of victory for us : how long? We love our lives, and the crucifixions come, benevolent bugles smother rebellion's song blowing protection for the acquiescent, and we need many strengths to continue strong.

Whatever its consequences for the political expediency of the moment, this is a healthy expansion of interest for the poet. The strength of her partisanship assures a passionate viewpoint, while the new symbols, and the necessity for new imagery, test her poetic ingenuity.

Another strain in this book that, beginning unobtrusively, leads toward later complexity, is that suggested in the poem Eccentric Motion. This poem is similar to many of Auden's

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PO ET R Y: A Magazine of Verse and of the English group of Oxford radicals who came to prom inence in the early thirties. The language of the popular ballad, of the music-hall song, is used to make serious observation. There is a foreign ring here, quite alien to the body of Miss Rukeyser's work, yet one which persists through all of her books. Coated in learning, do we cause its crown to fall? The plane, the bath, the car extend our protection: (But have we seen it all? Shall we continue In this direction?

This is not the way

To save the day.

Perhaps more important than the suggestion of foreign influ ences, this poem shows that Miss Rukeyser retains, even in the days of her most outspoken commitment to a social program, a

detached viewpoint: she is able to speak of herself and the society she abhors as "we." Thus, a completely minor poem suggests the whole turn of her latter work.

Theory of Flight makes a single impression: emotional, un hesitant affirmation. Though there are marginal suggestions of many new influences, none is realized in any distinctive poem. The poet's emphasis is clearly upon the thing said, and not the manner of expression. The volume is plethoric and sprawling, full of extravagances, yet rich and evocative. It would be only natural for the author of such a work to seek development in control. U. S. 1 In 1938, Muriel Rukeyser published her second book of poems,

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Muriel Rukeyser deriving its title from the federal highway that runs from Maine

to Florida. This collection showed a stage in her development that was notable for tendencies toward objectification of those feelings that, in the earlier book, were expressed with emotional extravagance. This process was furthered by her use of a new form that had come into prominence in those years, a form that was neither straight fiction nor straight exposition but a dramatic

presentation of facts that combined elements of both. This form

went generally under the name of "reportage," and those who used it were concerned with aligning social data in the dramatic design of fiction. It was not, primarily, literature since its pur

pose was to call the reader to action. Translated into cinematic terms, the form resulted in a vogue of "documentary" films.

Interested in the new reportage, both through her reading and through her work with documentary films, Muriel Rukeyser set about to write a poetic account of the tragedy that was exposed in the deaths of thousands of miners in the state of West Virginia. This holocaust was the result of silicosis infection, a preventable industrial disease, that had spread among great numbers of miners through the negligence or wilful indifference of employers. It

was a matter much publicized, especially in the radical press, and eventually was brought to Congressional investigation. Miss

Rukeyser went to West Virginia and used the methods of a re porter in speaking with many of the persons involved, learning at first hand the pitiful conditions in which they lived, examin ing company reports and stock quotations, speaking with owners and. investigators alike.

The long title poem, U. S. 1, was the result. Though she man aged to present in orderly fashion the findings of a good reporter, it is surprising to find, under the name of poetry, language as

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P O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse barren as statistics. Many of the poems in the sequence are barely distinguishable from routine newspaper commentary. Since there is no success anywhere in her attempt to crowd the facts of a committee report into the beat of poetry, the poem as

a whole is a failure. It is too long, the language routine and unevocative, the arrangement of data completely lacking in dra

matic contrasts. Unlike earlier instances where her dramatic sense brought life to an otherwise undistinguished poem, this work remains flat and prosaic. U. S. 1 represents the most extreme limit of Miss Rukeyser's attempt to objectify and it is so successful, in the narrow sense,

that all suggestions of the elevation of poetry have been objec tified out of existence. In one or two passages, when the poet intrudes with extraneous commentary, there is a heightening of

effect that only serves to point the weakness of a method so extreme. It is also significant in this regard to notice that, when the poet leaves the statistical approach to speak for herself, ele ments of poetry return momentarily, suggesting that, with bal ance, the method might not always end in failure: Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force.

It will rise. These are the phases of its face.

It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden.

It changes. It does not die.

The familiar immediacy of partisanship does not show here; it ,is evident that a sense of withdrawal has been achieved, begin nings of separation of the individual from the unhesitant life of

action. There is partisanship, to be sure, but it is no longer of the kind that attaches itself to a specific group or program.

The poet has begun to watch things happen, to comment more and judge less.

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Muriel Rukeyser Words on a monument. Capitoline thunder. It cannot be enough.

The origin of storms is not in the clouds, our lightning strikes when the earth rises, spillways free authentic power: dead John Brown's body walking from a tunnel to break the armored and concluded mind.

In the middle section of this book, between the long reportage poem and the allegorical Voyage, occur a number of lyrics that rank with the finest examples of Miss Rukeyser's work. These have been achieved through a balance of subjective emotion and

objective record. In A Flashing Cliff, for instance, Love, in its most abstract sense, becomes the source of human power, the revolutionary agent in all existence. The image to hold this concept is that of a frozen waterfall: Will you fight winter to break in immense speed resisting and sensitive, a waterfall-flash

sparkling full across the vicious plain?

This passage is representative of the poem as a whole and shows

the beginnings of a great concentration of language and ideas. Such fusion was not possible while the poet spoke in the single mindedness of a political program. Opposites are not enjoined in slogans, since the words on a banner must be outspoken and immediately understandable. Yet, though the poet has come far from sloganizing, the new verse is built upon a use of lan guage so complex, and a compression of ideas so intense, that it is unquestionably removed from the grasp of the lay reader, not even to mention the proletarian. Here Miss Rukeyser comes to the crux of the problem of the social poet: whether to insist upon first premises, even though that means a static repetition of familiar ideology, or to exercise full imagination and the resources of language in an endeavor

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P O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse to contribute a new dimension to poetry, though that attempt, in its inevitable intellectual concentration, must deny the social

audience. In this middle stage, she makes no definite choice. There are poems compact and difficult to penetrate, but they are, nonethe less, exhilarating exercises in modern rhythms and textures. No matter how far afield she may go in the errors of obscurity her

technique is never dull, most often brilliant. In a sense, the poet has fallen in love with language; a romance that was delayed by the demands of political conviction.

Among these complex poems are those wherein language is reduced to utter simplicity, wherein poetic excitement comes from the dramatic presentation of the idea, as in the tender Boy With His Hair Cut Short: He sees his decent suit laid out, new pressed, his carfare on the shelf. He lets his head fall, meeting her earnest hopeless look seeing the sharp blades splitting, the darkened room, the impersonal sign, her motion, the blue vein, bright on her temple, pitifully beating.

To continue a thin strain from the earlier book, there is the touch of Auden: Give my regards to the well-protected woman, I knew the ice-cream girl, we went to school together; There's something to bury, people, when you begin to bury. When your women are ready and rich in their wish for the world, destroy the leaden heart,

we've a new race to start.

There are personal poems that are completely individual in expression, unique among her work in that they are removed, in almost every influence, from social relationships. These show a new symbolism that is almost always tenuous and psychological.

Yet the power of her language, its oblique, beaten intensity, never fails to excite wonder:

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Muriel Rukeyser See the entire scene bright as you fly round lots pauper all year, shacks lame with weather, this sour fertile time teeming and ramshackle

before you, loving 'clean sight in spyglass air.

And around town again. River, River. Why do people live on islands?

Though a new direction has been firmly established, there re main instances of hearkening back to the earlier role of prophet

ess. Though direct exhortation is almost gone, the convictions of the poet have remained strong. When she speaks out now, it is in her own voice as a sophisticated poet and not as a coiner

of slogans. At the same time, speech that has a public signifi cance is held in restriction by her use of special, intangible, almost private symbols. In a sequence of poems called Night Music, there is a psychological analysis of the individual response

to chaotic society. In the tangled welter of symbols and mean ings, an inherent revolutionary ardor does not come clearly through until the last line: Make music out of night will change the night.

But this resolution is dependent upon antecedent knowledge; it is not immediately available, even in context, to every reader.

This second book, then, accomplishes the separation of the poet from her comrades and from the radical vernacular, in the sense that only a part of her interest is centered upon the imme

diate conflict. The tragedy for the artist as a social conscious ness lies in the fact that, as her powers as a poet expand in the terms of craft, she is isolated as an articulate leader among those

who daim her allegiance. The partisan feels that it is much too early to examine the bases of modern consciousness, since the manifest battle is not won, and any deviation that means a slack ening or diversion of effort from the immediate goal becomnes

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PO ET R Y: A Magazine of Verse inconsequential, if not reactionary. Thus, the poet is driven into

a sense of loneliness out of all proportion. Her heart is in the same place, but the demands of her immense talent have not allowed her to remain static. A diversion of her art from her beliefs has taken place that is parallel to the diversion of art from life in America today. A TURNING WIND Because of the progressive development of early themes and devices of craft, it is possible to say that the books of Muriel Rukeyser are different not in kind, but in degree. A Turning Wind, the latest of her published works in poetry, reinforces that conviction, and it would be but repetitious to point out and analyze all those strains that have akready been shown in trans formation from the first to the second book. However, changes have been rung upon certain of the earlier motifs that are arrest ing enough to warrant at least a cursory examination. Instead of the barren objectification of social data that caused the failure of the poem U. S. 1, Miss Rukeyser has developed a strong and evocative set of symbols. The problems of a gen eration, for instance, are no longer centered exdusively in the terms of the striker or the organizer, but in the larger concept

of Death, who appears in many disguises. This is a concept that is fashionable in current poetry. A baroque night advances in its clouds,

maps strain loose and are lost, the flash-flood breaks, the lifting moonflare lights this field a moment,

while death as a skier curves along the snows, death as an acrobat swings year to year, turns down to us the big face of a nurse.

In the same manner the fascist becomes, not the enemy at the door, but the magician, the symbol of all darkness and chicanery.

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Muriel Rukeyser The poet has shuffled off an obvious truth to darify a deeper one. Magnetic ecstasy, a trance of doom mean the magician, worshipping of darkness

with gongs and lurid guns, the colors of force. He is against the unity of light.

Such symbolization gives the poet a new freedom; the effect is toward elevating her themes into universal significance. The hesitant, truncated passages of direct address tha-t occurred

here and there throughout the second book give way to more forceful utterance. However it is obvious that the poet is no longer speaking to her first audience. Now she speaks almost exdusively to fellow artists, to those who, intellectual and sensi tive, are in retreat. The poet, as one who has survived a general disillusion and bewilderment, is happy to reaffirm. New combinations; set out materials now, Combine them again! the existence is the test. What do you want? Lincoln blacking his lessons in charcoal on an Indiana shovel? or the dilettante, the impresario's beautiful skull choosing the tulip crimson satin, the yellow satin as the ballet dances its tenth time to the mirror? Will you have capitals with their tarnished countesses their varnished cemetery life

vanished Picassos or clean acceptable Copenhagen or by God a pure high monument white yellow and red up against Minnesota?

The choices that are offered in these passages have little cognitive meaning for the ordinary reader; they are significant only for those

who have understood the attraction of a dying, over-sophisticated culture as opposed to the blunt naive health of a rising one. Yet

never has Muriel Rukeyser spoken with more conviction, more truly caught the crux of an issue in wild beautiful language. An earlier preoccupation with heroic character comes into evi

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P O E TR Y: A Magazine of Verse dence in the long last section of the book entitled Lives. In this

sequence of biographical appreciations the poet celebrates indi viduals, only one of whom has been conspicuous for her devo tion to the social good in explicit political terms. All of the others, in one degree or another, have been unsung heroes, quietly

working in the arts and sciences with integrity and singularity of purpose. Appreciations of this sort would have been impos sible had the tone of the first volume prevailed, for there all in dividualism is suspect, all heroics the will of the collective cen tered in one person. This latter attitude must be considered an advance, a healthy widening of sympathies since, even in social terms, the dedication of these individuals to a central idea radi ates, ultimately, for the collective good. Though in U. S. 1 there is a manifest separation of the artist from her whole function as a member of the human community, a reader feels that she is not completely conscious of this, that she is still somewhat bewildered at the change that has taken place. Dislocation of poetic sensitivity has, in these times, often led to semi-hysterical privacy, to the abortive use of imagery and symbolism from sources that are but half understood. Muriel Rukeyser barely misses this pitfall in parts of the second book, but if there has remained any doubt as to her powers of reinte gration, they are dispelled upon reading the first poem in her most recent volume, the elegy, Rotten Lake. This poem estab lished the poet anew; though she has given up public speech as a major premise, she is resolved within herself as never before. This resolution brings together not only craft and direction, but the inevitable disillusion of one who has seen the revolutionary temper of her contemporaries become dissipated and insignifi cant and who, herself, has been forced to reconcile grave doubts

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Muriel Rukeyser concerning the efficacy of certain policies. It has become evident,

in the late thirties, that the "revolution" was, for a very long time to come, a lost cause. Events abroad had split the partisans

of the left into many contentious camps of opinion, resulting in a general impotence that was a sorry thing to face when one remembered the buoyancy of earlier years. While the movement slackened, while its influence diminished, its partisans were thrown into even greater despair by the spectacle of an appeasement pol icy upon the part of great nations that violated every tenet of p?rogress. At this point, unsure of his immediate political group, and filled with hopelessness at the progressive darkening of the world scene, the radical partisan reached his lowest ebb.

In the face of this Muriel Rukeyser achieved her finest se quence of poems-the five elegies that begin the volume. These poems show an integration of method, a fibre of belief, a philo

sophical authority superior to all that has gone before. Their range includes all the strains that the poet has touched upon in

earlier experimentation, so that, in the greatest expansion of her powers, she has achieved the dosest fusion of them as well. Though she seems, at times, to have been caught like an innocent with visions and beliefs in a world of abject denial, almost always she is consciously reconstructing a faith that will match that of

her adolescence. The poet is returning, sadder but wiser. Denying much of experience, she finds strength in the simple faith of particular

friends. Beyond that, she would attain the discipline of an un sentimental insight into the failing world in order to survive its terrors with dignity. She has come to terms with tragedy. Rejecting the subtle and contemplative minds as being too thin in the bone; and the gross thighs

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P-O E T R Y: A Magazine of Verse and unevocative hands fail also. But the poet and his wife, those who say Survive, remain; and those two who were with me on the ship leading me to the sum of the years, in Spain. When you have left the river you will hear the war.

In the mountains, with tourists, in the insanest groves the sound of kill, the precious face of peace. And the sad frightened child, continual minor, returns, nearer whole circle, 0 and nearer all that was loved, the lake, the naked river, what must be crossed and cut out of your heart

what must be stood beside and straightly seen.

A new dimension has been added to her poetry, and that has come through the act of tragic affirmation. When this has been

accomplished the poet is released again. It is a phoenix birth. I look in Rotten Lake

wait for the flame reflection, seeing only'

the free beast flickering black along my side animal of my 'need,

and cry I want! I want! rising among the world to gain my converted wish, the amazing desire

that keeps me alive, though the face be still, be still, the slow dilated heart know nothing but lack,

now I begin again the private rising, the ride to survival of that consuming bird beating, up from dead lakes, ascents of fire.

This is a resolution that seems likely to endure for Miss Rukeyser, since it contains both the core of her dedication and her escape. For others, it is one impossible to attain. Not only personal lack of creative stamina, but the disapproval of the politically-minded critic will tend to curb their digressions. In the face of such continued divergence, it seems unlikely that a general reintegration upon the part of social poets can take place for many years. Since the public symbols of these times are thin and unevocative, they must be replaced by personal ones, or those

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Theoretical Criticism with special and literary interest. For the ultimate solution, we must look to the social scene. Since great poetry is that which is drawn from the depths of common myth, its rebirth will depend largely upon the success of men in joining together in a society that is homogeneous, whose fundamentals of belief are available to everyone, and whose aims are the conscious enterprise of every

one. Until that state is approached, countless poets will, like Muriel Rukeyser, be driven to heroic, but unwilling, resolution.

John Malcolm Brinnin

REVIEWS THEORETCAL CRITICISM The New Criticism, by John Crowe Ransom. New Directions. IN THE four essays comprising this book Mr. Ransom examines carefully the critical methods of I. A. Richards, William Emp

son, T. S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters, and ends with a plea for an ontological critic. Mr. Ransom is devoid of pettiness and petu lance, but not of pedantry and pretentiousness. He tries not to denigrate his subject but to find what is valid in it. He is con cerned primarily with formulating a firm theoretical background for the criticism of poetry.

The book proceeds consecutively to develop an elaborate appa ramtus that is extremely obscure. His theory, briefly, has to do

with structure, which is the logical thought in a poem, and texture, which is the free detail.

Mr. Ransom, while he appreciates the distinction between science and poetry, does not appreciate it wholly. If poetry is concerned with the concrete and general, and science with the

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