Volume 10 23
“Ballad of Orange and Grape” reflects her intimacy
with the city’s geography and social history.
East Harlem is adjacent to but distinct from the
better known neighborhood of Harlem. In the 1880s
cheap apartments sprang up in the formerly rural
area to house an influx of immigrants. It has re-
mained a poor immigrant neighborhood, though its
ethnic makeup has changed. In the first decades of
the twentieth century East Harlem was known as a
Jewish ghetto. Along with the neighboring Harlem,
it formed the second-largest Jewish community in
the United States. Puerto Ricans began to move into
East Harlem over the next few decades, and white
immigrants slowly moved out. Because of its
Latino population, it is now sometimes known as
“El Barrio.” However, reflecting the racial diver-
sity of the United States, East Harlem has been
home to many blacks and Italians as well as Lati-
nos in recent decades. As a poor immigrant neigh-
borhood, East Harlem has borne more than its share
of social ills. Poor housing, unemployment, and
poverty have long been associated with this strug-
gling, but vital neighborhood.
Critical Overview.
Rukeyser earned early praise as a poet, winning a
Yale Younger Poet’s Prize for her first volume,
Theory of Flight,published when she was only
twenty-two, followed by a series of other awards
and honors in the 1940s. Known as an outspoken
activist in the words of Poetrymagazine’s Linda
Gregerson, led a “lifelong campaign against the
conventional partitioning of thought and action,”
her poetry is often evaluated through the lens of
politics, and her critical reputation has risen and
fallen accordingly. While her career flourished in
the 1940s, it faded during the conservative 1950s,
rose in the radical 1960s, and fell again after her
1980 death. Some signs of a critical reevaluation
of Rukeyser’s place in American letters are taking
place, as evidenced in new collections of her po-
etry published in the 1990s as well as a laudatory
collection of essays on her work, How Shall We
Tell Each Other of the Poet?published in 1999.
Breaking Open,the 1973 volume in which
“Ballad of Orange and Grape” first appeared, re-
ceived generally positive reviews, though some
critics had reservations. Peter Meinka of the New
Republicinterprets the collection’s title: “What
Rukeyser is breaking open are the living moments
of her life, our lives, a conscious affirmation of the
meaning and energy that our best poetry has always
given us.” He goes on to call the volume “a testa-
ment to human toughness and compassion, even
against overwhelming odds.” J. J. McGann of Po-
etrylikes the collection but is less effusive, writ-
ing that “Breaking Openshows no diminishment
of her early [technical] mastery.... Yet the book is
decidedly uneven.” Though Breaking Openis not
one of Rukeyser’s most frequently discussed col-
lections, “Ballad of Orange and Grape” has ap-
peared in all of the major anthologies reviewing her
career, identifying it as one of the volume’s
strongest poems. It has also been included in a num-
ber of poetry anthologies and other collections.
Some critics find Rukeyser’s political mes-
sages too heavy-handed or not sufficiently timeless
to be the substance of great poetry. Some of her
lines “appear politically naive at this distance from
the turbulent times in which they were written,”
stated a Publisher’s Weeklycritic in a 1992 review
of her Collected Poems.She has been embraced by
feminist critics, who sometimes claim that she has
been under-credited for her talent because she ex-
ceeded certain boundaries set for the female poet.
“Rukeyser’s desire to transform herself from a si-
lenced member of an oppressed group into a pow-
erful spokesperson for herself and other women led
her to break many of the barriers and taboos that
impeded the development of women’s writing ear-
lier in the century,” writes editor Kate Daniels in
her introduction to the Rukeyser collection Out of
Silence.
Many scholars and critics have connected
Rukeyser’s poetic vision with that of Walt Whit-
man. In a 1974 retrospective article on her career
in American Poetry Review Virginia R. Terris
placed Rukeyser in the tradition of nineteenth-cen-
tury American Transcendentalism, a literary move-
ment of which Whitman was part. “Her reliance on
primary rather than on literary experience as the
source of truth,” according to Terris, ties Rukeyser
“to her forebears in the nineteenth century.” Terris
added: “At the same time, through her highly per-
sonal contemporary voice, they project her into our
era” and secure her a place as “one of its most im-
portant figures.” Terris explored the connections
between Whitman and Rukeyser in what was then
her most recent collection, Breaking Open,arguing
that “both poets recognize the variety within unity.
For each, the self is the One but also the Many, all
mankind is joined mystically and is thus one, and
each human being partakes of the life of every other
human being, living and dead and yet unborn, in
all cultures and in all lands.” In another compari-Ballad of Orange and Grape