SOURCE: A review of The Green Waves, in Nation, Vol. 166, No. 19, May 8, 1948, pp. 512–13.

Jarrell was an American poet, editor, translator, critic, and educator. Best known as a literary critic but also respected as a poet, he was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. In the following review, he objects to the emotional rhetoric in The Green Wave.

Muriel Rukeyser is a forcible writer with a considerable talent for emotional rhetoric, but she has a random melodramatic hand and rather unfortunate models and standards for her work—one feels about most of her poems pretty much as one feels about the girl on last year's calendar, and prefers to think of Miss Rukeyser only as the poet who wrote "Ajanta." There is nothing so good as "Ajanta" in her new book, The Green Wave; the best poem in the book, I think, is "Mrs. Walpurga," a sliding...