SOURCE: "The Letter and the Body: Muriel Rukeyser's 'Letter to the Front'," in A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. 140–70.

In the following excerpt, Schweik contends that "Letter to the Front" "self-conciously confronts and reenvisions conventions of both war poetry and love poetry. "

Muriel Rukeyser's "Letter to the Front" (1944) signals from the first its declared relation to epistolary models then in vogue on the home front. The title of Rukeyser's long poetic series immediately places the text to follow in the tradition of the war poem as soldier's message—but with a crucial difference. Rukeyser does not mimic the voice of the soldier; rather, replacing "from" with "to," she reverses V-letter form.

The woman's letter to an absent soldier—a text Rukeyser rewrites repeatedly from the late thirties on—was not, of course, an unfamiliar document...