SOURCE: Gross, Harvey. “On the Poetry of Ruth Stone: Selections and Commentary.” The Iowa Review 3, no. 2 (spring 1972): 94-104.

In the following essay, the author “pleads the case” for Stone's poetry, which does not follow popular trends but exhibits “a concern for craft which flows from intelligent use of traditional techniques and imaginative departures from their restrictions.”

In those remote times called the Fifties (the rhetoric of our on-going Cultural Revolution has speeded up the historical process so that events more than five years in the past seem to have occurred in the Pleistocene Era) literary critics speculated on The Death of the Novel. It now seems the critics went into premature mourning; the genre, while suffering some loss in vigor, is alive and well. Not that genres don't grow senile. Lyric poetry in the eighteenth century, modern tragedy and epic, the piano sonata after Beethoven: all suffered an...