SOURCE: "Muriel Rukeyser's US 1," in The New Republic, Vol. XCIV, No. 1214, March 9, 1938, pp. 141–42.

Williams was one of America's most renowned poets of the twentieth century. Rejecting, as overly academic, the Modernist poetic style established by T. S. Eliot, he sought a more natural poetic expression, endeavouring to replicate the idiomatic cadences of American speech. In the following review of U.S. 1, he praises Rukeyser's use of documentary evidence in her political poems.

[U.S. 1] is all to the good, three longish, subdivided poems and a group of lyrics relating almost without exception to the social revolution. There are moments in the book that are pretty dull, but that's bound to be the character of all good things if they are serious enough: when a devoted and determined person sets out to do a thing he isn't thinking first of being brilliant, he wants to get there even if...