SOURCE: Fiedler, Leslie. “On Ruth Stone.” In The House Is Made of Poetry: The Art of Ruth Stone, edited by Wendy Barker and Sandra M. Gilbert, pp. 3-4. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, the author of the landmark study, Love and Death in the American Novel, celebrates Stone's “wonder of the ordinary.”

I have been reading and passionately responding to Ruth Stone's poetry for more than half a century, ever since I rescued and deciphered a balled-up, scribbled page that she had tossed under the bed in her tiny pre-fab house just off Harvard Yard. Though she occasionally read one aloud to her family and closest friends, she had still—in that irrecoverable time of our shared youth—made no attempt at publishing her poems. It was as if, at that point, it was enough for her simply to have written down the...