Among the New Books of Verse

A Turning Wind by Muriel Rukeyser. The Viking Press. $2.00
First Will and Testament by Kenneth Patchen. New Directions. $2.50
Confusions About X by Julian Symons. The Fortune Press (London). 3s. 6d.
Letter to a Comrade by Joy Davidman. Yale University Press. $2.00
Sequence on Violence by Harry Roskolenko. Signal Publishers. $1.50

In Muriel Rukeyser’s past work as in her present a very real talent has been marred by an eagerness to transform intellectual convictions into an aesthetic unity, and precisely in the proportion that belief falls short of adequate integration her poems are diagrams of desire and rarely realizations of essential poetic vision. The details of the verse have been perceived rather than conceived, and they compose total effects that have the persuasive force of conviction, but infrequently the impactive compulsion of insight. Miss Rukeyser’s social passion is as sincere as her intelligence and sensibility are actual; yet always she seems to be pushing her talents beyond the possibilities of their present scope. The self-conscious strain that underlies her work is betrayed in the introductory note to this book in which she graciously admits a borrowing of ideas from a variety of sources. But patterns taken from studies in symbolism, such as Donald A. Mackenzie’s The Migration of Symbols, and free-handed forays into historiography, such as Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History, cannot, without a powerful creative fusion, lead anyone to “the valid sources of power which have come down to us.” Indeed, one wonders just what Miss Rukeyser means by such a statement. That and her remarks about the contemporary fear of symbols make her out to be a rather inadequate philosopher. However, it is not her sophistry that gives relevancy to dissent. Many poets are indifferent scholars. It is, rather, the haphazard operations of her verse.