It is very hard to write the way Muriel Rukeyser does, using your life as the direct vehicle of apprehension, the poems the same thing as closest attention to your daily life….

"The fear of poetry is the / fear," she wrote many years ago. In the new book she asks, "Do I move toward form, do I use all my fears?" Clearly the experience of poetry is the cutting edge of the life of someone who speaks like that.

If you are not used to thinking of poetry the way Muriel Rukeyser does, her work can be hard to read. The reader must acquiesce, perhaps more openly than with more conventional poems. Many people seem to have trouble with this beautifully voiced verse….

When the Academy of American Posts recently gave her the Copernicus Award …, the citation started: "From her first book, 'Theory of Flight,' published when...