described playa very small part. It is not really an intellec-
tual novel at all. Although Isaac is a talented and successful
writer, we know almost 'nothing of what he writes, of the
books that influence him. Although he takes an active part
in Zionist and pacifist movements, we remember the conflict
.of personalities, not of ideas. We have no sense of the streets
in wartime, of the war's effects in little things, as we have
in Dos Passos's novels. \Vhat we do have throughout
the
book is a sense of the vigor and charm of Isaac Hyman's
personality. Even the paragraphs of commentary are not
entirely alien to the form of the book, because they also ex-
press that personality in its later development.
But most of
all, Isaac Hyman is memorable because he is such a direct
and sensitive register of class realities. It is not only a ques-
tion of suffering,
·01'
exploitation, or injustice; it is a question
of what these things become in the mind of a sensitive boy,
of the values such an economic system creates, both for those
who, by its standards, fail and those who succeed.
Best of all. are the case studies and character sketches
-thirty or forty of them-that
fill most of the pages of the
book,fully drawn and unforgettable pictures of employers
and workers, intellectuals and aesthetes, women suffering and
women loved, cheats, wastrels and gangsters. As in other
powerful novels of the years of learning, we remember such
characters even more clearly than the hero himself, because
it was through them that he carne to know himself and be-
cause of them that he changed. And we remember them in
From the Kingdom of Necessity
because, through studying
their lives, Isaac Hyman carne to understand the system
which he now wants to destray.
OBED BROOKS
First Books
THEORY OF FLIGHT,
by Muriel Ru.keyser. With a
foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet. Yale University
Press. $2.00.
Muriel Rukeyser's poems are as a collection the most out-
standing to be published within the last decade by a younger
woman poet. And from a critical viewpoint,
Theory of Flight
should be of special significance to anyone interested in the
advancement of modern poetry.
Undoubtedly the most vital (perhaps the only) contribu-
tion being made today to the art of poetry is the shift from
the romantic-personal,
individual consciousness to a collec-
tive, mass-identification with a universal consciousness. The
true "revolutionary" poet is one who has grown beyond self-
love sufficiently to discount the importance of his personal
survival, and who is not only intellectually in sympathy with
Marxian, or socialistic, beliefs, but is also emotionally iden-
tified with the class struggle. Judging from this critique, the
reviewer must state, regretfully,
that Miss Rukeyser is not
as yet a "revolutionary" poet, though she is moving in that
direction. There is real danger, however,
that this poet,
whose intellectual
attainments ?ore above the average, will
encounter difficulty in effecting an essential transition from
the "I" sympathiseI'
type to the "we" collectively working,
emotionally unconfus'ed poet. For among the best and most
sincere, emotionally, of her poems in this collection are those
which draw from the romantic-lyric tradition.
Perhaps an analysis of the Preamble to
Theory of Flight
(the title poem) will help make this clear. This Preamble,
like the main body of the poem, is composed of separate
lyric chunles, or static verse-statements with no stanzaic build-
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
ing-up. It opens with some embracing, cosmic phrases that de-
note at least a mind capable of grasping more than small,
factual happenings:
Earth, bind us close, and time; nor, sky, deride
how violate we experiment again
In many Januaries, many lips
have fastened on us while we deified
the waning flesh.
Here, because the poet is expressing an abstract idea in
physical imagery, the thought is clear, the form good. But as
the poem progresses, her fondness for large words, her abrupt
transitions and lack of ll1tegration in the subject-matter con-
fuse the reader. The second part of this poem is didactic.
Here Miss Rukeyser spoils her material by weighting it
with exaggerated,
sensual imagery. And in the concluding
section she uses an already overworked romantic figure, seed-
flower-fruit, and applies it to aeronautics-the Plane 111turn
symbolizing the flight of the intelligence toward a b~tter life:
This malfusion of romantic-metaphysical-mechanistic
terms
is one that a poet sure of his thought and craft would not
be guilty of.
In the above connection I think it is unjust, if not harmful,
for Stephen Benet to say of Miss Rukeyser in his introduction
that she was apparently born with her craft already in hand.
Miss Rukeyser has a number of poetic gifts, true; but she
has
nat
yet learned how to harness those gifts most effectively.
In time, I think she will. To say also that there is in her
work little of the "direct imitation or admirations which one
unconsciously associates with a first book of verse," is equally
unjust. There arc reflections of certain contemporary contacts.
Mr. Benet has noted that Miss Rukeyser is an "urban"
poet. He seems to find it curious, however, that she writes
of dynamos, gyroscopes, electricity. There is scarcely a young
poet worth naming who hasn't been doing so for a number
of years-although comparatively few women have, as yet.
In 1925, Harriet Monroe toak a pioneer step with a poem
called "The Turbine".
Her ultra-feminine approach, her
"humanization" of the machine in emotional terms, make
a pertinent contrast-study with Miss Rukeyser's objective,
factual statements in "Structure of the Plane":
On the first stroke of the pist(;n, the intake valve opens,
the piston moves slowly from the head of the cylinder
drawing in its mixture of gas and air.
Both Monroe and Rukeyser, however, proceed to philo:;o-
phize about the Machine,
the former saying that Madam
Turbine leads one "far out into the workshop of the world,"
and out from earth to ether; the latter:
We burn space, we sever galaxies,
solar systems about Shelley's head.
N either poet has fully digested her two-fold experiential
contact. In both poems, objective stimulation comes first.
Secondly, the emotional current is turned on. The Monroe
poem is typical of a certain "school" of poetic wn ting ; equally
so is the Rukeyser poem of 1935 vintage. Both are in the
"style" of a moment. Miss Rukeyser reverses gears, and
following the lead of the modern metaphysical poets makes
humanity, individually and as a race, take on the attributes
of a dynamo or a gyroscope. \Ve find the human race, she
says, reflecting "all history in a bifurcated Engine." Also,
we humans
whirl in desire, hurry to ambition, return
maintaining the soul's polarity.
