If Muriel Rukeyser is—as I believe she is—the most inventive and challenging poet of the generation which has not yet reached thirty, it is because of her provocative language fully as much as because of her audacious ideas. The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts, but it is the accent which insures poetry's surviving genius….

Muriel Rukeyser, though only a few months more than twenty-six, has already had her disciples and her detractors. Her three volumes have disclosed an accumulating strength of purpose and an increasing originality of idiom. She first challenged attention with "Theory of Flight."… "Theory of Flight" pronounced a new symbolism as well as a new speech. The style was swift, abrupt, syncopated; it matched the speed of the strepitant post-war world, the crazy energy of murderous machines, the "intolerable contradiction" of flight….

For her the images of war and industry are...