Dated February 11th, 1979. Cut-out of Anne Stevenson’s “With Head and Heart,” a New York Times review of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser and May Swenson’s New & Selected Things Taking Place. The article reviews Rukeyser’s poetry in complimentary terms, placing her in “a central tradition in American writing–Melville, Whitman, Crane, Snyder. But, like Melville’s, Miss Rukeyser’s realism is really a bridge to an intensely visionary state of awareness. The line between world and world is indistinct. The threshold of the miraculous and mystical is never far away. It is as if life were always happening to her on two or three levels. Beneath her passion for social justice and her empathy with all sufferers lie deeper apprehensions of what existence and its paradoxes can lead to… ‘No more mask[sic] ! No more mythologies!’ Miss Rukeyser cries in a poem called ‘Orpheus’ (from ‘The Poem as Mask’). But in truth, the coherent body of her poems comprises a mythology that poetry cannot do without. The body of symbol and belief which she has nurtured over the years has worn its masks memorably. All have been worth keeping, as Yeats’s masks were worth keeping….”.
