SOURCE: Wehler, Mary Ann. “Ruth Stone: Voice from Society's Margins.” In Modern American Poetry, an Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson. http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stone/wehler.htm. Urbana-Champaign, Ill.: Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000.

In the following essay, published online, Wehler emphasizes the feminism of Stone's poetry but misses the humor and nuance.

Ruth Stone was forty-four when she published her first book, In an Iridescent Time, in 1959. In fact, Norman Friedman states in his essay, “The Poetry of Ruth Stone” (46) that Stone had mastered the elegant formal conventions of that era. Soon after, Harvey Gross deems in his article, “On the Poetry of Ruth Stone,” that Stone was versed in “balanced pentameters, ballad stanzas, sonnets” and other forms. He recognized that her prosodies in Topography (1970) were more flexible; and...