[In The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser] is the great curve, still being completed, of a superb poet's accomplishment and the deep organ music of her experience.

The "Preface to the Reader" speaks of the "film strip of a life in poetry" and the Asian idea of the "long body"—"one's lifetime body" (as she wrote elsewhere) seen as a "ribbon of images, all our changes … in process." "Film," "long body," "ribbon"—these words tell us how the work can be approached. It has been a work difficult to quote in short snatches, therefore always difficult to anthologize fairly. For one thing there is its sheer amplitude. Then, from the very first book, Theory of Flight (1935), long poems and sequences have been central. (Why, oh why do we think of poetry as only the short lyric?) Finally, this is a poetry of faith, and faith convinces us most...