If you think of poetry as a kind of specialized social work, then you may agree when Adrienne Rich claims in her introduction to Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems that “the range and daring of [Rukeyser’s] work, its generosity of vision, its formal innovations, and its level of energy are unequalled among twentieth-century American poets.” If you have a different perspective on art and life, however, you may find yourself on the side of Weldon Kees, who reviewed Rukeyser’s Wake Island with a single sentence: “There’s one thing you can say about Muriel: she’s not lazy.”   

Rukeyser was born in 1913, which puts her in the generation of Bishop, Berryman, Lowell, and Jarrell. Her poems range from the sprawling to the epigrammatic; they often have a flat, documentary feel (“The tunnel is part of a huge water power project/begun, latter part of 1929”), and they’re formally various (excerpted sections from a single long poem, “Letter to the Front,” contain both a sonnet and a sestina). In her opening remarks, Rich opines that Rukeyser “created a poetics of historical sensibility—not as nostalgia but as resource to express and interpret contemporary experience and imagine a different future.” “Is she,” you might ask, “really that boring?” Fortunately, no; or at least, not always. At its best, Rukeyser’s work can be open, energetic, and well constructed, if a little enamored of its own goody-goodness (“Women and poets believe and resist forever”). Consider the precision of “Salamander”:

Red leaf.       And beside it, a red leaf alive
flickers, the eyes set wide in the leaf-head,
small broad chest, a little taper of flame for tail
moving a little among the leaves like fear.

Flickering red in the wet week of rain
while a bird falls safely through his mile of air.

Often, however, Rukeyser’s poetry is every bit as tedious as Rich makes it sound. At its worst, her work has the campy, creepy tone of someone soliciting for the International Union of Absolutely Good People:

Woman, American, and Jew,
three guardians watch over you,
three lions of heritage
resist the evil of your age:
life, freedom, and memory.

Bubble of Air