The primary virtue of Muriel Rukeyser's poetry has always been a kind of mood, an instinctive organic awareness. Her work has a peasant quality, like the Dorset dialect poetry of William Barnes, the sense of the processes of life all interconnected and spreading illimitably away. Many of her poems have the same sonority as Barnes', a soft rumble and murmur of consonants, "m"'s and "l"'s and "r"'s, with no sharp shifts of tonality in the vowels….

Mood, flavor, they last longer than information. It is hard to realize that it is eight years since Miss Rukeyser's last book. Its impression lingers, definite and so easily recalled. Of all my generation she is the least violent, the most quietly assured. Ever since her long poems, "Ajanta" and "Orpheus," she seems to have been working toward and around a kind of implicitly philosophical poetry, a species of...