Miss Rukeyser's first book [Theory of Flight] is remarkable for its self-confidence and lack of hesitation. At twenty-one, she has already covered much of the technical ground of modern American verse, and has learned how to pick up everything she feels capable of consolidating into a poem. The result is a big book, in the quantitative sense; a book on an exceptionally even level of accomplishment; and her dexterity and energy in finding an approach to a great variety of contemporary material deserves respect. (pp. 107-08)

In her seventy-five close-packed pages appears a succession of city and country landscapes, narratives of a sentimental order, sensations, social sermons, self-revelations; conceived, most of them, from the vantage-point of American Marxist writing. In the main, her images are urban and her tonalities firm and impersonal, with occasional efforts towards the pure flash of modern surfaces.

Miss Rukeyser's verse, however, unlike that...