[As] the twelve books of verse now gathered in this important edition of Collected Poems suggest, Miss Rukeyser's work has never been easy to place…. Miss Rukeyser has offered an often jarring mix of communicative possibilities: colloquial diction together with formal; the reportorial with the visionary; didactic melodramas with philosophic meditations; extreme privacies and public proclamations: poems whose structures tremble under the weight of rhetorical gesture and poems that are little more than catalogues of names, things, places; lines tense with imagistic spareness and diffuse with shimmering implications. Reading through these nearly six hundred pages is by turns irritating, exhilarating, exasperating and extraordinarily satisfying.

Miss Rukeyser's literary "sins" of discomforting variety and extravagance are, in fact, her saving graces…. Miss Rukeyser's songs of self and society are unprotected, honest, charged with passionate intensity that widens and deepens our knowledge of human pains and pleasures. From beginning to end...