Making It New: 1900–1945 393is determinedly modernist, using a free verse line, allusive imagery, disruptive
syntax and grammar, and an associative structure to capture something of the
rapid, disjunctive movements of modern life. Even here, however, the concerns
that were to dominate her poetry are quite clear: power and its betrayal, the
immense possibilities latent in the human being, his “dynamics of desire,” and their
denial by a society that “makes thin the imagination and the bone.” The title poem
from her first volume, for instance, “Theory of Flight” (1935), contrasts Whitman’s
dreams of rapid movements through space now translated into a reality (Rukeyser
was a student pilot at the time) with the world left on the ground: where “our supe-
riors, the voting men” sit “around the committee-table,” voting to disavow “the
eyes, and sex, and brain,” the powers of perception, reproduction, and knowledge- and voting death, too, to all those who would liberate such powers, including
poets and visionaries like Blake and Whitman. “Now, in our time,” wrote Rukeyser,
in the introduction to one of her volumes, Orpheus (1949), “many of the sources of
power are obscured ... or vulgarized ... I have hoped to indicate some of the valid
sources of power.” The piece with which she chose to begin her Selected Poems
(1951), “This Place in the Ways,” makes the point in another way. “I set out once
again,” she says, “From where I began: / Belief in the love of the world, / Woman,
spirit, and man.” “I find love and rage,” she adds. “Rage for the world as it is / But
for what it may be / More love now than last year.” As these lines indicate, Rukeyser
moved toward a greater clarity of diction, a more openly affirmative stance, and an
incantatory (and, on occasion, even declamatory) tone in order to unravel “The
strength of the mystery.” A poem like “Boy with His Hair Cut Short” (1938) reveals
her rage. The subject is simple enough: set in Chicago during the 1930s, it describes
a boy having his hair cut by his sister in the hope that this might help him find a
job. However, Rukeyser’s elliptical style here, harsh diction, and suggestive imagery
turn this into a vision of a shadow world where the machine rules (“The arrow’s
electric red always reaches its mark / successful neon!”) and the human spirit is
cowed. Brutally contemporary though the scene is (“Sunday shuts down on a
twentieth-century evening. / The El passes. Twilight and bulb define / the brown
room”), the ritual of hair-cutting cannot but recall the biblical tale of Samson los-
ing his strength with his hair: this is a society, evidently, that requires impotence as
a sign of obedience. And, elsewhere, Rukeyser uses symbolic and mythic reference
more openly on the grounds that, as she puts it, “The fear of symbol is linked with
the fear of poetry in our culture. It is poetry’s enemy, part of a great emotional
wound.” This is particularly true of those poems more immediately concerned
with “love of the world” and the search for “valid sources of power.” In her long
poem, Orpheus, for instance, she uses the ancient Greek story of the death and
resurrection of the poet-hero (“he has died the birth of the God”) to celebrate the
cycle of life and the creative spirit: “There is only life,” the poem tells us, and “To
live is to create.” In the poem-sequence “Ajanta” (1973), on the other hand, she uses
another, Eastern tradition. The frescoes painted on the walls of the Ajanta caves in
India become the occasion for celebrating “The real world where everything is
complete,” where “There are no shadows ... / ... no source of distortion” – and for
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