Muriel Rukeyser has published a large body of work since her first collection, Theory of Flight, appeared when she was only twenty-one. It immediately marked her as an innovator, thoroughly American, Whitman-like in method and scope. Characteristic of her poetry, of which we now have a survey in Waterlily Fire (Poems 1935–1962), is the big canvas, the broad stroke, love of primary color and primary emotion. Her method is the opposite of the designer's, her vision is never small, seldom introverted. Her consciousness of others around her, of being but one member of a great writhing body of humanity surging out of the past, filling the present, groping passionately toward the future, is a generating force in her work. She celebrates science as much as nature or the restless human heart. Lines from an early poem like "The Gyroscope" … are echoed in Part II "The Island" of her final...