Although poet Muriel Rukeyser often provoked a varying critical response to her work, there was never any doubt during her five-decade literary career that a resounding passion was on display. Of her first book, the award-winning collection Theory of Flight, W. R. Benet remarked in the Saturday Review of Literature She is a radical politically, but she writes as a poet not a propagandist. When you hold this book in your hand you hold a living thing." Some forty-five years later, Gramercy Review contributor Jascha Kessler labeled Rukeyser "the heroic, the bardic, the romantic. Poets who are bardicm take on mankind and the whole cosmos as the field of their utterance,try to carry whole nations forward through the urgency of their message. Wherever