Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda.

"[1] One of her most powerful pieces was the long poem titled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.

She wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications, including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she was supposed to cover the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Instead of reporting on the games, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War an experiences that she would describe as a "moment of proof," forming the basis of her rediscovered autobiographical novel, Savage Coast,[4] and the long poem Mediterranean.

During and after World War II she gave a series of lectures, entitled The Usable Truth, about art and politics in times of crisis, eventually published as The Life of Poetry.

[5] From the end of the war through the period of McCarthyism, she was the target of sexist literary and political attacks which affected her career trajectory and publishing opportunities,[6] and the FBI compiled a thick file on her as a suspected Communist.

The title poem of her final book, The Gates, is based on her unsuccessful attempt to visit Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha on death row in South Korea.

The Spanish Civil War broke out and during her five-day stay, she fell in love with Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists, and who was later killed.