Review of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser by Jane Cooper

Dated Sunday, January 21st, 1979. Cut-out of a review of The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser by Jane Cooper, Washington Post. Cooper was poet in residence at Sarah Lawrence College. The review, which is on multiple pages, taped together, asserts: “The best thing the publication of The Collected Poems can do is to right a balance, to set the work of Muriel Rukeyser where it belongs, at the center of the poetry of her generation written in America. Once again now we can read all the poems of that first dazzling decade and understand why they were celebrated. Can we also manage to understand why, in the 15 or so years between the end of World War II and the publication of Waterlily Fire, the work came to be neglected, even disparaged? Our health depends on this understanding, too. My guess is that the New Criticism set up exactly the wrong standards by which to measure a poet of Muriel Rukeyser’s concerns. In the McCarthy era her political material was suspect. Was her very openness to the truths of her inner experience, “as in sex, dreams,” equally suspect? What did people want from a poet in the 1950s, especially from a woman poet?”