SOURCE: "Muriel Rukeyser: The Longer Poems," in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, No. 14, 1953, pp. 202–29.

Rosenthal is an American educator, editor, and literary critic. In this excerpt from the first major essay on Rukeyser, he discusses the predominant themes of her early poems "Theory of Flight," "The Book of the Dead," Elegies, and Orpheus.

To readers nourished on Eliot and Yeats and disciplined by analytical criticism, the faults in Muriel Rukeyser's work may seem more obvious than its merits. Though they do not define her work and are very often absent from it, these faults are real: the unearned triumphant conclusion, the occasional muddy emotionalism that can blur the phrasing almost to a blot, the painful view we are sometimes afforded of the poet desperately trying, under our very eyes, to piece a poem together without quite finding the key (usually, a proper middle part).

But if the...