Muriel Rukeyser’s “Campaign” and the Spectacular Documentary Poetics of the Whistle Stop Tour
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Please consider attached file for this part.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you. I have added background material and context on both Rukeyser and Willkie, including information on the former’s life, work, and politics and the latter’s candidacy and wartime beliefs. I have also included a more explicit discussion of documentary poetics.
Reviewer 2 Report
1.Please check if (Nowak) do not need year of publication in the brackets too.
2. It could be useful to introduce near the "cut" and "traveling view" also the category and the name of collage. It is applicable - and historically rooted in in visual and poetical readings.
Author Response
Thank you. I found the Nowak source, and I noticed that I neglected to include it in the list of References the first time around. This has been fixed, with the proper source now cited in “References.”
Reviewer 3 Report
I would rethink the first sentence. It's fine to signal the model for your methodology, but surely that is not the point of the essay: the introductory sentence should introduce your own contribution rather than signal indebtedness. Throughout, the reader struggles to find the author's independent ideas and discovery of new evidence; the sense of derivative work, also of repetitious prose, is strong. The footnotes are more interesting reading (and easier reading) than the text. I recommend introducing the concept of "railspace." Since this Whistle Stop Tour ended in defeat, one might explain with brevity and clarity the history of the Whistle Stop Tour before and after Willkie. Was FDR's use of the train not much like the montage and other effects ascribed here to Willkie's campaign?
Author Response
Thank you. I have re-ordered and re-worked the opening to foreground my own contribution to the field. I have bumped-up my expanded explanation of railspace from the footnotes into the body of the article. I would argue that my discussion on the origins and history of the Whistle Stop Tour is already accomplished on pages two and three, and that the differences between Willkie's tour and others (e.g., Roosevelt) are made clear by the extended discussion of his tour through Rukeyser's docupoetic biography.
