SOURCE: "Muriel Rukeyser—Before and Beyond Postmodernism," in The Poetic Vision of Muriel Rukeyser, Louisiana State University Press, 1980, pp. 365–89.

Kertesz is an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, she compares Rukeyser's poetry to the work of several postmodern and contemporary poets.

"Postmodernism" was first noted among the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance of the late fifties ([Allen] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso, [Robat] Duncan, [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, and others.) Critics identified postmodern sensibilities as those which departed from the ironic aloofness of the alienated poets of the forties and fifties who followed Eliot. In the San Francisco Renaissance the poet, aware of and often detailing the insanities of a superabundant yet repressive society, became again the person with a special vision into the wholeness, joy, and potential of life. Ginsberg's Howl (1956) became the manifesto of the new poetry now called postmodernist. But as Rukeyser offered in an interview...