I find it difficult to repress the opinion that in Muriel Rukeyser the age is finding one of its major voices….

In a generation of artists all angry rejectors of this murderous world she rejects only arty rejection. In a time which declares … that the flux of experience is hopelessly intractable, and the only discoverable orders those self-contained in art or religion, she discovers an order intrinsic to both life and art. This is a radical integration, and while it appears in the warm and immediate apprehensions of a poet, it is responsible to the evidence of much modern knowledge and substantiated in excellent poetry….

[Of the works "The Life of Poetry," "Elegies," and "Orpheus," one should read] "The Life of Poetry" first. It builds the frame of the theory and illumines the books of poetry…. It maps … the outlines of an esthetic into which are drawn, among...