54
PARTISAN REVIEW
u.
S. I
U.S. 1.
By Muriel Rukeyser. Covici-Friede. $2.00.
Among the poets born under the World War, Rukeyser, able and
ambitious, has assimilated the prosodic taste and social philosophy
which were worked out then. They are being worn out now and, for
all her straightforward perception, they disable her when she is most
ambitious. Her full ability appears in lesser pieces, not in the title poems
of
Theory and Flight
and
U.S.
1, which fall below the high standards
they raise up against themselves. The shorter pieces show that in longer
poems she may yet do what she wants and, apprehending contemporary
fact through immediate documentation, compel instant sense of moral
history. The mere attempt is generous to our poetic growth.
Poetry develops intuitive reason not by logical contrivances so much
as by immediate sensual association. This is so delightful a process to
follow' that a poet easily wins readers over to his teaching, if only he be
clear about what he has to say and whom he has to address. Given
proper audiences, poets are the best agitators; but no one ever has an
audience given to him; we must win our own by what we sound and
show and teach. All poetry's sound and show is subservient to its teaching
even if what it teaches is just what it sounds and shows (i.e. "Pure"
Poetry). Where poems are stuttered and blurred, it is because their
authors do not know what they are about.
Rukeyscr refers to social revolution but tells little of its purpose or
its method; yet this is just what people want to learn. Though she says,
"Say 'Yes,' people, say 'Yes Ves'," one can hear "the" people answering
"Oh yeah?"
Her socialism belongs to the inexperienced school-pre-war.
Philo-
sophic experience, necessary to any agitation except that which Debs called
"agitation of the atmosphere," is necessary above all to a choice of
super-image. For
Theory of Flight
she chose the flying machine because
it consummates historic effort and, extending the body through space-time
opens up a vaster spread for reason and imagination; and freed men will
do all this for a world society; yet the super-image is intractable. Process
of flight is not an accurate equivalent to process of emancipation. The
overtones of flight imply escapism (Get out from under home and father).
The sensations of flight dreamily translate into fornicating. "Ves," she
says, "Ves," she says, "Do." Now, rebellious individuals who made the
revolution sexy, long have freed capitalist culture from bourgeois de-
corum. Edna Millay is a sexual saint of the Women's Clubs. All of this
may well be good. But it is not the revolved love we expect to enjoy
after the abolition of property, and, at its best, is only tangent to prole-
tarian concern. Free sexes will be by-products of a more impersonal
