Dated July 22nd, 1979. “Daughter of the 19th Century Poet’s Best Efforts are in Romantic Vein,” a review of Rukeyser’s Collected Poems by B. R. Cohen, published in the Courier Express, Buffalo, New York. Cohen finds it interesting that Rukeyser, despite having been born more than 70 years ago, wrote poetry “almost as rugged, as sexually explicit as that of Anne Sexton.” And yet, he continues, “the end effect is curiously neuter” and her sexually explicit words are, “rather, like words issuing from a poetic eunuch, peculiarly asexual, oddly abstract, diffuse, not felt.” Indeed, as “mother of us all,” Rukeyser, Cohen asserts, “shares with many out mothers the terrible ambivalence that comes from being born and reared so close to the turn of the century. She is split down the middle… by the contradiction between what she has, despite herself, internalized from the teachings and behavior of her parents, her milieu, and what she has labored so staunchly to teach herself about the proper role (and language) of women.” Muriel’s poetry tells us that “Women are meant to be fully fleshed, strong, natural, passionate, sexual, solved–everything, that is, that men are supposed to be,” yet, he goes one: “So the poet tells us, but she doesn't believe it–not really–not so that these sentiments, this rhetoric is transmuted into something genuine enough to become a real poetry.”
