value is only in its faded, timeworn message. That
Rukeyser uses such a deceptively simple yet effec-
tive structure to convey her message, however,
points to an altogether different conclusion.
Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘St. Roach,’’ in
Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.
Michele S. Ware
In the following review, Ware critiques the repre-
sentative poems from all periods of the poet’s life
and work.
The resurgence in the last decade of critical
attention to Muriel Rukeyser and her important
place in twentieth-century American poetry
alone warrants the publication of this new anno-
tated scholarly edition ofThe Collected Poems of
Muriel Rukeyser.Yet this impressive collection
makes Rukeyser’s extensive body of work avail-
able and accessible, for the first time in years, to
the general reader as well. Long out of print, the
1978 Collected Poems,published by McGraw-
Hill, suffered from serious omissions and errors,
which Kaufman and Herzog correct in this vol-
ume. The result is a welcome and necessary con-
tribution to contemporary Rukeyser scholarship
that reveals the poet’s persistent, career-long
dedication to the poetry of witness, her wide-
ranging intellectual curiosity, and her powerful,
inclusive, and generous vision.
Of particular interest are Rukeyser’s numer-
ous translations and the full text ofWake Island
(1942), inexplicably omitted from the 1978Col-
lected Poems.By using Rukeyser’s individual
volumes of poetry as their copy texts, the editors
have restored her important translations of
Octavio Paz to the poems inThe Green Wave
(1948) andBody of Waking(1958). Rukeyser’s
affinity with Paz is obvious in these beautiful
lyric poems, and the textual notes and annota-
tions, including Rukeyser’s original notes and
commentary from 1978, offer a glimpse of the
poet’s process. Her passion for translation dem-
onstrates the ‘‘vast reach’’ of her poetic explora-
tions, extending to such disparate sources as
Northern/Eskimo poems andrarilove-chants,
among many others. Kaufman and Herzog spec-
ulate in their ‘‘Editors’ Notes’’ that limited space
may have been the rationale for excluding such
an integral part of Rukeyser’s oeuvre, but the
omission ofWake Island is more suspicious,
especially since its critical reception was so neg-
ative and cruel. This long poem celebrating the
heroism of embattled and doomed Marines in
the Pacific was mistakenly perceived as Rukeys-
er’s naı ̈ve and nationalistic endorsement of
American military will during World War II,
for which she was attacked both personally and
professionally. The poem’s significance, how-
ever, according to James Brock (in ‘‘The Perils
of a ‘Poster Girl’: Muriel Rukeyser,Partisan
Review,andWake Island’’), lies in its function
as an early example of Rukeyser’s global politi-
cal preoccupations. Here again, the editors offer
several plausible explanations for the poem’s
earlier exclusion (Rukeyser’s failing health, self-
censorship) and wisely include it.Wake Islandis
somewhat uneven, but as Kaufman and Herzog
note, ‘‘it is consistent with her lifelong vision that
poetry should respond to questions of social
justice and freedom, as well as to the historical
moment, not only within her own country but
globally.’’
In many ways, the newCollected Poemsis a
sensitive and thoughtful work of restoration, a
concerted effort on the editors’ part to discern
Rukeyser’s artistic sensibilities and intentions
and at the same time do justice to a complex
and massive body of work, a difficult task
when the poet’s intentions are unclear or contra-
dictory. For example, Rukeyser resisted break-
ing upOne Life,her experimental biography of
Wendell Willkie, to excerpt poems for the 1978
Collected Poems.‘‘The arrangement is the life’’
(xxvi), she insisted. Yet the selections she made
fromOne Lifeto include in that volume are
‘‘virtually inscrutable taken out of the context.’’
To correct the problem, the editors have here
reduced the excerpts to eighteen poems later
chosen by Rukeyser for publication inBody of
Waking,thus fulfilling their purpose (to collect
all the poems) while respecting the integrity of
Rukeyser’s art. She was intensely vigilant about
the order, spacing, and punctuation of her
poems in their published forms, and Kaufman
and Herzog have taken care to attend to these
matters. For example, they based their decision
to reorder into a single unit Rukeyser’s elegies, a
series of ten related poems that originally
appeared in three different volumes of poetry,
on her later publication ofElegies(1949) and the
poet’s own reordering of the elegies in subsequent
collections. While they are rather too gentle in
their criticism of the error-ridden 1978Collected
Poems,it is clear why Kaufman and Herzog
returned to the original volumes of poems for
their definitive texts. All corrections, deviations,
and alternate versions are meticulously describedSt. Roach