Her muse is a mighty river in her torrential verse, half prose, half poetry, she sweeps before her the possessed and the dispossessed, the victim and the victimizer, like so many chicken coops before a flood Muriel Rukeyser, poet, earth-mother, prophet. "She is," said Erica Jong in a characteristic hyperbole, "the mother of us all."

Surely, not all of us all, but perhaps of the confessional poets, and the poets of social protest….

The poems of Rukeyser are hard to quote with justice. They must be taken in their great, long-breathing lines, like music wafted from a distance. They must be felt as they go down, like gulps of ocean air….

Rukeyser's "Collected Poems" is a strong, vibrant uneven but compelling book. Her manner dwarfs her matter. She towers overpowers, whatever she touches. Hers is the personality that projects across the page. None of John Keats's "chameleon poet...