Muriel Rukeyser's latest book [Beast in View] is also her best, if for no other reason than that it contains her finest poem, "Ajanta." Here she has really achieved the height of a permanent poem, complete in its own logic and unity. Otherwise her book is a collection of forms which she has essayed to use in her assiduous search for techniques: lyric, sonnet, elegy, etc. These rhythmic shapes she uses much like planks being tested by the foot of an elephant about to cross a chasm. Miss Rukeyser's acumen over matters of choosing the right folklore, her fireworks of imagery, strain these forms without allowing them properly to shape a complete poem. Her general fault is an overabundance of material. In the midst of one poem she habitually begins another, and though practising a perpetual literary sleight-of-hand, sometimes manages to cover a hatrack of form with a...