Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date April-September 1930)

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SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Review of New Found Land, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 36 (April-September 1930): 270-75.

[In the following review of New Found Land, Zabel concentrates on MacLeish's poetic style—which he finds to be strongly influenced by other poets, especially T. S. Eliot—and foresees the possible “dissolution of a fine poetic talent.”]

Mr. MacLeish's new book [New Found Land] is made up of fourteen poems, beginning with the familiar “You, Andrew Marvell” of five or six years ago, and ending with several poems in a somewhat later manner which have appeared in periodicals during the last year. The collection is distinguished, however, by a style which, for all its slack and discursive rhetoric, carries a definitive accent, unmistakably Mr. MacLeish's own. Even where certain external effects carry one back from these lines to the Swinburnian distension in the meters of The Happy Marriage or The Pot of Earth, there is no confusing the early uncertainty with the later stylistic sobriety and deliberation. MacLeish still handles his line with a kind of amateurish laxity from which the experimental note is not likely to disappear. More than any other poet of his standing, he has retained his affection for Eliot's early idiom. But this leaning, as it now reasserts itself after the discipline of The Hamlet, is less a matter of expression than of temperament; less, that is, to be seen in his phrases than in his themes. Apparently MacLeish intends to remain an elegiast, commemorating in his sombre and muffled oratory the historical melancholy of mankind, deliberating on the flight of illusion and the death of heroes.

If any doubt remains that Eliot's influence is still an open secret in the poems of New Found Land, one may pass from their colloquial-heroic intonation to an inspection of their anthropology. Here Frazer and his colleagues still furnish the properties and symbols. Here, as in The Hamlet, the sun supplants the water allegory of The Waste Land, and the cosmography is expanded to include a wide scattering of terrestrial and stellar geography, the historical background meanwhile becoming a sort of panorama of man's physical progress on earth. MacLeish has inherited Eliot's predicament without approaching Eliot's conformity to a newly discovered doctrine of being and destiny. He stops short at a compromise which may be considerably more rational and persuasive than Eliot's latterday submissions, but which, fundamentally, involves no greater assurance of esthetic and spiritual integrity. He stands on a star revolving among planets, still cloaked in the polite bewilderment of Senlin facing the dawn or Prufrock walking by the sea. In the present volume he offers, from the midst of his perplexity, no solution beyond embracing the sun-warmed earth, cleaving to his faith in the common heroism of men, and waiting passively for such gleams of higher intelligence as may be communicated to him through the ministries of friendship, art, and love.

In his last two books MacLeish has shown, in a score of poems openly and in most of the others implicitly, his desire to lose personal identity in the common body of humanity. Apparently he reached a climax, emotionally and conceptually, in his poem called “L'An Trentiesme de Mon Eage” where his earlier irony began to soften into a querulous and wandering nostalgia, expressed with remarkable beauty:

 And I have come upon this place By lost ways, by a nod, by words, By faces, by an old man's face At Morlaix lifted to the birds. .....By words, by voices, a lost way— And here above the chimney stack The unknown constellations sway....

(This entire section contains 1393 words.)

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 And by what way shall I go back?

This poem remains the pivot of his subsequent thought. It has been his patient attempt to answer its last question. The Hamlet has been the most ambitious part of the program—a minor epic-allegory wherein men, devising their common destiny under the sun, find ultimately their only brotherhood and heroism in sorrow, and their hope in the creative fruition of natural processes. The serio-fantastic analysis of the Einstein (elsewhere carried to the point of travesty in the humorous pieces, or again expressed with sharp refinement in “Ars Poetica”) has yielded to a style expressive of this theme of mute inglorious heroism. It is this style whose character is fully developed in New Found Land. The tone is persistently autumnal, the cry nostalgic, the content excessively miscellaneous. Unquestionably the lines have a flowing searching order—the curious and unflagging impulse which means style. It is, on the whole, the most successful attempt thus far to convert Eliot's nervous lucidity, Aiken's tinkling languor, and Robinson's clipped aphorisms into an amalgam which will constitute a genuine rhetoric of elegy.

The fact remains, however, that one of the first sources of stylistic durability in a poet is the “rebellious labor” which is motivated by some unequivocal form of private moral resolution. If MacLeish's style never gains the firm edge of individuality, and if his slow sentences with their too casual and unpunctuated phrases are unquickened by decisive impulse, it is because he has been too willing to lose himself in the crowd of men whose greatness lies only in unconscious union, or to surrender to the vast historical memory, inchoate and unanalyzed, which he has made his principal theme. Streets of the Moon is likely to remain his best volume (barring the unpredictable), because in its finest poems he exhibited a sensitive formal mastery, and a genius in understatement which the present “American Letter” and “Cinema of a Man” have probably disabled permanently. Today only the fragments of this unusual style remain; its beauties have been lost in catalogues and inventories.

The temptation to sound a warning against the complete dissolution of a fine poetic talent into verbosity and tedious repetition is irresistible, even when Mr. MacLeish's errors exasperate rather than dismay. His creative processes are synthetic, and his poems are mostly documentary in substance. Like Hemingway in prose, he urges the immediacy of his sensations by presenting them on a level of detached observation, connected by coordinating conjunctions and the simplest prepositions, but no longer by conventional periods and commas. If this method involves grave doubts in a novel, there can be no question of its dangers in a poem. The flat monotony of this style is capable of the finer moments in “Return,” “Memory Green,” and “Immortal Autumn”:

I praise the fall it is the human season now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough

But too often it achieves only the open banality of “You, Andrew Marvell” (where the mechanism and the moral alike revolve with the naïve inconsequence of Mr. Wilder's recent fable); or the limp humility of “American Letter” whose theme, tiresomely reiterated, is “It is a strange thing to be an American”; or the sheer parody of “Men”:

We believed in the feel of the earth under us
We planted corn grapes apple-trees rhubarb
Nevertheless we knew others had died
Everything we have done has been faithful and dangerous

Few sensibilities can survive such monotony. This fluid ambiguity is charming only until it obliterates the design of a thought. That design, often brilliantly achieved in Streets of the Moon, reappears in “& Forty second Street” and in the “Poem Dedicatory,” the latter a kind of ejaculatory apostrophe which threatens to break heartlessly and insignificantly at the end of every exclamation, but which achieves succinctness. There remain “Reproach to Dead Poets,” some lines in Part I of “Land's End,” the grave beauty of “Immortal Autumn,” and six fine line-couples in “Anonymous Signature” to assure us that Mr. MacLeish is not closing his accounts in this book. He has a serious task ahead if his future work is to rise above the threat of anonymity and indecision which at present overshadows it. From the first there has appeared in his work a strain of genuine nobility; to lose that quality, particularly in that full stature which Mr. MacLeish once promised to give us, would be to lose one of the finest personalities in recent American verse. Not with complete confidence yet with a considerable reliance on his creative responsibility, we await the larger projects upon which Mr. MacLeish has been engaged for some months past.

Introduction

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Archibald MacLeish 1892-1982

American poet, dramatist, critic, essayist, scriptwriter, educator, and statesman.

The following entry presents criticism of MacLeish's poetry through 1993.

Among the most distinguished American poets of the twentieth century, MacLeish examined the central philosophical and political concerns of his era in poetry and drama, seeking to reconcile individual experience and responsibility with an ideological age. In his writing, MacLeish employed a variety of poetic forms, including blank verse, the sonnet, and epic, while experimenting with varied line lengths and speech rhythms in an attempt to create a distinctly American voice. His mastery of lyric verse is evident in such pieces as “Ars Poetica” and “You, Andrew Marvel,” which first appeared in his noted collections Streets in the Moon (1926) and New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (1930), respectively. MacLeish's outstanding contribution to the epic form is Conquistador (1932), inspired by Spanish explorer Hernan Cortez's sixteenth-century encounter with the Aztec Empire in Mexico. He also composed a series of verse plays for the stage and radio, many of them based upon social themes, including the award-winning drama J. B. (1958), an imaginative reworking of the biblical story of Job in MacLeish's modern, liberal-humanist idiom. In addition to his considerable literary efforts, MacLeish was one of the most politically active poets of his generation. He served as Assistant U.S. Secretary of State from 1944 to 1945 and occupied several other government positions under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the war years 1939 to 1945, including Librarian of Congress.

Biographical Information

MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago. Educated in Glencoe and at the Hotchkiss preparatory school in Lakeville, Connecticut, he later attended Yale University, where he was a successful football player, swimmer, and scholar. One of MacLeish's earliest poems was published in the Yale Literary Review during his freshman year, and a small collection of verse entitled Songs for a Summer's Day (A Sonnet Cycle) won the Yale University Prize for Poetry in 1915. After graduation that year, MacLeish entered Harvard Law School but temporarily suspended his studies to serve as an ambulance driver in France during World War I. He transferred to active duty shortly thereafter and rose to the rank of field artillery captain. Another of his early volumes of verse, The Tower of Ivory, was published in 1917 by a friend while MacLeish served in France. Following the war, MacLeish returned to complete his law degree as class valedictorian. After teaching constitutional and international law at Harvard for a year, MacLeish worked for a New England law firm until 1923, when he decided to pursue a full-time career as a poet. Moving to Paris with his wife and sons, he associated with many of the writers who were to revolutionize twentieth-century literature, including Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. In the ensuing years, MacLeish published several volumes that distinguished him as one of his generation's most promising poets. After he and his family returned to the United States in 1928, they settled on a turkey farm in Conway, Massachusetts; however, MacLeish accepted an editorial position with Henry R. Luce's Fortune magazine shortly thereafter. During the 1930s, MacLeish expanded his public presence with the publication of further volumes of poetry, including Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933) and Public Speech (1936), and wrote the first of his verse plays for radio broadcast. During this time, he also chaired the League of American Writers, an antifascist organization that counted Hemingway and John Dos Passos among its members. In 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed MacLeish Librarian of Congress. In the early 1940s, MacLeish also served as director of the U.S. Office of Facts and Figures and later as Assistant Secretary of State. Following the war, MacLeish became a member of the committee that drafted the constitution for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). With his wartime public career concluded, MacLeish issued a new collection of verse, Actfive and Other Poems, in 1948, his first in nearly a decade. While resuming his literary activities, MacLeish also began to teach literature and creative writing at Harvard in 1949. The publication of his Collected Poems, 1917-1952 earned him a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1952. The verse play J. B. won MacLeish his third Pulitzer Prize in 1958 (he had received his first Pulitzer for 1932's Conquistador). After retiring from teaching in 1962, MacLeish returned to his farm in Conway, where for the remainder of his career he concentrated primarily on the composition of verse dramas and essays and produced one final collection of original poetry, The Wild Old Wicked Man and Other Poems (1968), before his death in 1982.

Major Works

While MacLeish's initial volumes of poetry including Tower of Ivory and The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (1924) largely contain conventional, generally minor verse, several of his first mature works, composed while he was living in France, are thought to chart early and innovative developments in his style and selection of subject matter. The Pot of Earth (1925) bears certain similarities to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, most notably in its inclusion of death and resurrection symbolism from James Frazer's anthropological study of myth, The Golden Bough. Also in part demonstrating the early influence of Eliot and Ezra Pound on his poetry, MacLeish's Streets in the Moon features in such pieces as “The Silent Slain” and “Memorial Rain”—the latter an embittered elegy to MacLeish's brother killed in World War I—themes of alienation, despair, and war's destruction of cultural traditions. The volume additionally contains the much-anthologized piece “Ars Poetica,” an enigmatic and self-reflexive statement of MacLeish's early poetic theory that contains the line “a poem should not mean but be,” and the long blank-verse poem Einstein, a meditation on the triumph of human rationality in its apprehension of space-time. The verse drama Nobodaddy (1926) takes its title from one of William Blake's contemptible terms for God, and reveals MacLeish's developing interest in the potential of biblical themes as sources of modern, poetic insight. A tragic and gloomy mood informs The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), which focuses on the internal torments of a sensitive man spiritually akin to Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark. New Found Land: Fourteen Poems, MacLeish's first collection of verse published after his return to the United States, documents the poet's efforts to depict the temporal nature of life through sensual imagery, allusions to the rise and fall of civilizations, and lyric evocations of landscape. It contains the piece “You, Andrew Marvell,” which expands upon the lines from the seventeenth-century English poet Marvell, “But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near.” In his epic Conquistador, MacLeish updated the Tuscan form of terza rima, used by Dante in his Divine Comedy, to recount Cortez's expeditions in Mexico. Related from the point of view of Bernál Diaz del Castillo, a foot soldier in Cortez's army and author of The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, MacLeish's poem chronicles the destruction of native Mexican cultures by Spanish explorers.

In his subsequent work of the 1930s and 1940s, MacLeish increasingly invoked a tone of social engagement, often producing collections that are primarily didactic or exhortative in nature. Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City castigates both Marxists and capitalists for manipulating culture to their own ends. Its title was inspired by an incident at New York City's Radio City Music Hall involving left-wing artist Diego Rivera and billionaire J. D. Rockefeller, Sr., in which Rockefeller ordered Rivera's commissioned fresco destroyed when he discovered that the artist had included a portrait of communist hero Vladimir Lenin. In the six irony-laden poems comprising Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, MacLeish positioned himself as a champion of democracy and opponent to both capitalist empire builders and their Marxist critics. MacLeish's burgeoning social voice is further evident in the poetic collection Public Speech, his verse plays Panic (1935), The Fall of the City (1937), and Air Raid (1938), and in his essays of the period, including The Irresponsibles (1940). A central thematic element in all of these works is a call for individual responsibility in an age marked by its unquestioning certainty in the dictates of historical determinism. Strongly polemical pieces also appear in the later collections America Was Promises (1939) and Actfive and Other Poems. The ironic title poem of the latter work, “Actfive,” offers a codification of many of MacLeish's principal themes from The Pot of Earth to his Hamlet, forming a dynamic synthesis of his thoughts on the human experience of an unjust world. Songs for Eve (1954) features twenty-eight lyrics drawn upon the Old Testament Book of Genesis, combining scriptural subjects with MacLeish's enduring interest in the poetics of space-time. The verse play J. B. is a modern refashioning of the biblical Book of Job and concludes with a strongly optimistic and humanist theme. Among the principal components of MacLeish's late volume The Wild Wicked Old Man and Other Poems is a sensitive and moving treatment of an elderly couple's love that recalls the poet's early volume The Happy Marriage.

Critical Reception

In one of his personal statements on poetic composition, MacLeish acknowledged that his early verse “took off from Swinburne” and developed from there. Indeed, during the poet's lifetime, scholarly comment regarding the influence of other writers on MacLeish's work was plentiful. His poetry of the 1920s—a period marked by his expatriation to Paris with other lost generation writers, including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. E. Cummings—has been noted for its similarities to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's early Cantos and Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. Like the works of Eliot and Pound, MacLeish's poetry of this era has been viewed as an attempt to revive broken cultural traditions through the use of literary and mythic allusions. His later thematic explorations of the process of aging and the spiritual exile of modern humanity have drawn critical comparisons to the work of Irish poet William Butler Yeats and French poet St. John Perse. Early designations of MacLeish's poetry as in part derivative have generally been put aside by contemporary commentators, however, some of whom have urged a formal and comprehensive re-examination of the writer's work. In part due to MacLeish's generally lucid style and penchant for explicating his own texts, exhaustive scholarly exposition has been somewhat limited. Among those works that have elicited a great deal of commentary are MacLeish's Pulitzer Prize-winning Conquistador and J. B. A lengthy historical poem, Conquistador has variously been praised as the closest thing to a great American verse epic of the twentieth century or denigrated, as in Randall Jarrell's assessment of the work as an internally inconsistent “melodramatic oversimplification” of historical events. The verse play J. B. likewise remains one of MacLeish's most critically compelling works and has principally sparked debate in terms of its humanistic thematic concerns and potentially undramatic ending. Among his verse plays for radio, Air Raid has been described as MacLeish's contribution to a social critique originating from Picasso's painting Guernica—both works acknowledging the threat to those who ignore the destructive potential of modern, total war. Complementary socio-political themes are likewise seen as central to most of MacLeish's works of the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast to his politically charged writings of the later Depression era and war years, MacLeish's earlier, lyric works have often been designated as his most enduring. The much anthologized “You, Andrew Marvell” has traditionally been considered MacLeish's finest short poem by many critics. The epigrammatic “Ars Poetica” remains another of his favored works, while Einstein is among those individual pieces of an extensive opus that has been singled out in the preliminary stages of a re-evaluation of MacLeish's poetry since his death.

Harriet Monroe (essay date April-September 1931)

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SOURCE: Monroe, Harriet. “Archibald MacLeish.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 38 (April-September 1931): 150-55.

[In the following essay, Monroe evaluates MacLeish as a poet of the age with a sensitivity to human suffering, but wonders whether he has the necessary forcefulness to interpret the modern world.]

One morning in late April a modest, melancholy, implacably sincere young man faced an audience of two or three hundred persons in the Arts Club of his native city of Chicago. The modernistic setting of the room—suave, never violent, a faultlessly tempered simplicity—was in harmony with the poet's mood; against it the beauty of his cadences was like the sound of a fountain in a garden, and through the windows the incessant motors slipping along Michigan Avenue struck the bass notes of a perfect chord.

It was manifest that a thinker confronted us, and that he was using his slow quantitative elegiac rhythms to express the break-up and remolding of the world. It was as if he saw some mighty hand crumbling the dried clay of worn-out systems to moisten and reshape it into a form unforeseen and strange. He stood beside the adventurous molder sensitively aware of risk, trembling lest the huge and massive figure of human society, still in the rough, should prove less symmetrical than the one now dissolved to powder, should prove indeed incapable of symmetry, casting upon the new age a gigantic shadow of ugliness.

As the poet read the prologue of his epic-in-the-making, Conquistador, one felt that he was using the fury and splendor, the clash of ideals and civilizations in that old sixteenth-century war, as a symbol of the modern worldwide clash of systems and ideas; that Cortez and Montezuma seemed to him not more different, not more violently opposed in every thought and custom, than the separatist feudal world from which we are emerging and the steel-linked radio-bound international world which already holds us in its enormous grip. One felt that this poet realized the threat of tragedy in the situation of the human atom caught in immensities, and the grotesque heroism of the atom's conquest of gigantic tools, of his puny leap into infinities of knowledge. His imagination seemed to be aware of the modern clash of forces, and one queried his future, wondering how profoundly and prophetically he would be able to symbolize this conflict in Conquistador and later poems.

My mind wandered back over this fellow-citizen's history. Born in a Chicago suburb to a typical well-to-do family childhood and school life; Yale, graduating in 1915; the Harvard law school for two years; marriage; the War, and as he volunteered and left his wife and infant son for service in France, his first book of creditable youthful poems was edited and brought out by a young Yale professor, his friend; service at the Front in the Field Artillery; after a year of it ordered home in August, 1918, to train soldiers to handle big guns; the Armistice, just as he and his troops were about to embark for France; demobilization, followed by three years' practice of law with a firm of repute in Boston; all very like other American boys from well regulated suburban homes; typical, except for the soldiering, of the youth of our fathers and brothers, perhaps of our sons and grandsons. And then a breaking away from tradition at the thrill of a new discovery, a new purpose—that not law but literature was his vocation, not legal oratory but poetry. Then came a burning of bridges, and flight across the sea with his family, this time to a France at peace. And after a few years' sojourn back again to his own country, and the purchase of an old farm in Massachusetts.

Perhaps it was necessary and inevitable that the embryo poet should go abroad to enforce the change—his only way of making a complete break with his conventional and professional past, of escaping the doubts and queries of puzzled and well-meaning friends. Also he needed Paris esthetically at that time more, probably, than he realized; he needed the ferment, the intellectual hostilities and loyalties, the provocative rages against everything conventional or old-fashioned. He needed a thorough stirring-up that his art might be enriched beyond the mild flavor of his first book; and if his enthusiasm for the new contacts carried him too far, tempted him toward derivation and imitation, that was a phase to be easily outgrown, in all probability, as his work developed.

The Happy Marriage (1924) and The Pot of Earth (1925) were the first fruits of the new passion. In reviewing them in Poetry I said in part:

These two books are “tone-poems” played with muted strings; played in the half-light or the half-dark when rapture and anguish, however real, become suspect of dreams. What we all fear, the poet sees come to pass—life blurs and dissolves before his eyes; lovely concords are hushed; beauty that is too beautiful perishes of its own fragility, like a soap-bubble vanishing with its flicker of iridescence.

All this is not expressly said, any more than in music. In the earlier book we have indeed the delicate raptures of a happy marriage—love as fleet as a fawn to tempt and elude, as warm as a bird in the nest to cherish and guard; but the poet, singing the changes of joy, feels always how perishable is joy in this vibrating, swinging, dissolving world. And he knows that the soul can not be bound, but must beat away from the closest contacts. …

In The Pot of Earth we find the poet's instinct for rhythms and tone-values developed almost to virtuosity. A certain relation to The Waste Land is obvious. Mr. MacLeish, either consciously or unconsciously, has set himself to study Mr. Eliot's wavering variable rhythms, his way of neither beginning nor ending, of leaping backward and forward, and somehow reaching his goal by wayward paths no other poet could travel. But if the younger poet has taken a few hints from the elder one, he has shown extraordinary intelligence in recognizing their adaptability to his theme, and in heeding them just so far as they suited his purpose. In other words, The Pot of Earth is beautifully done.

From this book to Streets in the Moon was a long leap. In a year the poet had gained firmer ground to stand on, and though we still hear echoes of Eliot, and both hear and see reminders of the transition experimenters with rhythm and typography, the poet is developing his own style and using it to express his own personality. The book contains such modernistic meditations as Einstein such self-questionings as “L'an trentiesme de mon aege” and the beautiful “Signature for Tempo,” such grotesques as “March” and “Man!”; and everywhere the expert touch, the delicate manipulation of rhythms, the fine, sometimes almost-too-studied phrasing. In the latest book, New Found Land, we find a further development of these qualities: poems of rare and usually melancholy beauty, like “Immortal Autumn” and “Epistle to be Left in the Earth”—a beauty marred only by eccentric typography and troublesome lack of punctuation.

Through all these books the poet's philosophy of life—or perhaps one should say the instinctive feeling about life which becomes the underlying motive of his art—is less hard in texture and brazen in tone than most of the Parisian-American group could sympathize with; there is room for human pity in it, and even for human love—that love of the race which, implying the merging of the individual in the mass, may be the democratic, or at least the communistic, ideal—an ideal difficult, perhaps inaccessible to the poet, who is always by instinct an individualist.

We find this instinct of human pity underlying the self-analysis presented as the artistic motive of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. Here the Elizabethan doubter shrinks into the modern agonist, and “the King his father's ghost,” revisiting the glimpses of the moon, becomes the symbol of the world's irrevocable past, of dead generations and their dreams:

Where is thy tongue, great spectre? Hast thou not
Answered to others that with hearts like ours
Followed thee, poets, speakers in the earth?
Didst thou not show them? For they were as sure,
Returning, as those men whom the great sea
Chooses for danger. …

The poet is oppressed by human suffering, and exalted by the evidences of human camaraderie, human friendliness and love. Apparently Conquistador is to embody his effort to merge the individual in the mass, and show him moving on with the race to whatever goal of harmony or discord, of freedom or slavery, of beauty or chaos, may lie ahead of us.

I have much faith in the ability of this poet to interpret his age: he has the thinking mind, the creative imagination, the artistic equipment of beautiful words and rhythms. There is perhaps only one fundamental doubt—it would take gusto to express this age, a shout of driving rage and laughter, a rush of god-like or demoniac power. The men of science have it, the engineers, builders, inventors, discoverers; the big men of finance, the bankers and brokers; even, I am told, the bootleggers and bandits. Can Mr. MacLeish, shy, sheltered, melancholy by temperament, compass all this—not of course in experience, but in imagination, in his art? Can he give us the superb power and splendor of this most creative age of the world's history? Or must we wait for some poet of grit and brawn, some prophet of grandeur and laughter, some cross between John Milton and Ogden Nash, to tell us the whole truth and save the world?

Principal Works

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Songs for a Summer's Day (A Sonnet Cycle) 1915

Tower of Ivory 1917

The Happy Marriage and Other Poems 1924

The Pot of Earth 1925

Nobodaddy (verse play) 1926

Streets in the Moon 1926

The Hamlet of A. MacLeish 1928

*Einstein 1929

New Found Land: Fourteen Poems 1930

Conquistador 1932

Elpenor 1933

Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City 1933

Poems, 1924-1933 1933

Panic (verse play) 1935

Public Speech: Poems 1936

The Fall of the City (verse radio play) 1937

Air Raid (verse radio play) 1938

Land of the Free—U.S.A. 1938

America Was Promises 1939

Actfive and Other Poems 1948

Collected Poems, 1917-1952 1952

The Trojan Horse (verse radio play) 1952

This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters (verse radio play) 1953

Songs for Eve 1954

J. B. (verse play) 1958

The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish 1963

The Wild Wicked Old Man and Other Poems 1968

The Human Season: Selected Poems, 1926-1972 1972

New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976 1976

Six Plays (verse plays) 1980

The Irresponsibles: A Declaration (essay) 1940

The American Cause (essays) 1941

A Time to Act: Selected Addresses (speeches) 1943

Poetry and Experience (criticism) 1961

The Eleanor Roosevelt Story (screenplay) 1965

Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections (essays) 1978

*This long poem was originally published as part of the 1926 collection Streets in the Moon.

Morton Dauwen Zabel (review date June 1934)

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SOURCE: Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Review of Poems, 1924-1933, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 44, no. 3 (June 1934): 150-59.

[In the following review, Zabel traces MacLeish's development as a poet through the early 1930s and the publication of Poems, 1924-1933.]

“My development as a poet is of no interest to me,” says Archibald MacLeish in the preface to his Poems: 1924-1933, “and of even less interest, I should suppose, to anyone else.” What his statement lacks in candor it makes up in optimism. For this collection of his best work in ten years shows that like any serious and respectable poet, he has been interested to the point of painful obsession in his “development.” Self-knowledge (if not self-reverence and self-control) has been his involuntary goad in all the work he can now “read without embarrassment,” whether disguised by literary anthropology in The Hamlet, by American nostalgia in New Found Land, by romantic heroism in Conquistador, or, in “Cinema of a Man,” by post-War miasmas of exile and bewilderment, the poet plodding through simple sentences and assorted geography with “Ernest” (“they are drunk their mouths are hard they say qué cosa They say the cruel words they hurt each other”) toward the oblivion of racial orphanage and the Nirvana of dead time.

To such an exhibition the public can hardly be expected to remain indifferent, particularly when Mr. MacLeish's plea for indifference is offset by his recent labors as scourge and fury among literary critics and Marxists. Adding to this the fact that he has written a portion of fine verse, and given himself more systematically than most of his contemporaries to the ordeal of his craft and personal predicament, one is obliged to consider the present Foreword as another installment of his rather evasive prose work, of his Challenge to the Age whose energies might better go into his poetry, since both History and Controversy, outside his verse, have left him somewhat the worse for his struggles with them.

Those struggles, however, underlie both his poetic “embarrassment” and his claim to dignity. They are a clue to his value as a contemporary. They are the result of several typical experiences: his obligation to forge a spiritual doctrine in the absence of both inherited belief and social necessity, his acceptance of an esthetic method before he had either moral or doctrinal matter to justify it, and notably his enlistment (widely advertised in this book) as a Paris exile some ten years ago and the consequent pathos of distance and sentiment that has troubled his ultimate conflict with America.

One of the oddest aberrations in our cultural history was the great exodus to France of 1918-1929, when literature, to be written, had to be written in Paris. Those were the days when American art moved from the Middle West to the Left Bank; when farm-hands hurried from Ohio and Wisconsin to get in on the Dada movement; when Gertrude Stein brandished the torch that lately sputtered in the grasp of Amy Lowell; when Kiki was the toast of Rotonde and Coupole; when “Ernest” proudly wheeled his well-filled go-cart among the occult biologic growths of the Dôme of an evening to partake of a whiskey and parental pride; when transition was young, nothing was sacred, and money was cheap; when whole generations got lost and Jimmie the Barman was accumulating his heady memoirs. These are just now being published, it happens, with an introduction by Mr. Hemingway, valedictorian of the period—“This Must Be the Place”: Memoirs of Montparnasse, by Jimmie the Barman. One fruitful passage suggests admirably the spirit of that heroic decade:

Walking ahead of me was Flossie, both of us on our way to The Dingo. As she came abreast of the bar entrance, a handsome Rolls-Royce drove up to the curb and from it stepped two lavishly dressed ladies. They looked at The Dingo questioningly. They peered into the windows. Flossie, seeing them, looked her contempt. As she passed into the bar she tossed a single phrase over her shoulder: “You bitch!” Whereupon the lady so addressed nudged her companion anxiously. “Come on, Helen,” she said, “this must be the place!”

Under much the same inspiration our writers decided that Paris must be the place to produce novels and poetry. This was the setting which Mr. MacLeish, after academic beginnings, war-service, and law-work, chose for his poetic discipline, and its spell upon him, to boast or exorcise, has been his chief spiritual problem ever since.

In those days his idea of poetry was almost purely esthetic. He argued for “mere poetry, poetry made out of poetry, poetry without sex, smirks, or graces, poetry without the sentimentality which passes among us for ironic, poetry without tags of wit.” In view of the twin threats of propaganda and vulgarization which, then as now, aim to dispossess poetry of its essential purposes, his stand was a worthy one. Its weakness lay merely in what it denied in his own character, and what serious decisions, of inheritance and moral responsibility, it left him unprepared for. For these decisions the writers of the desultory Twenties substituted two literary methods: the elegiac and the hard-boiled. They were combined in The Sun Also Rises, Trinc, and The Hamlet. “Make us tough and mystical,” said Phelps Putnam, and MacLeish:

O play the strong boy with the rest of them!
Be hard-boiled! Be bitter; Face the brassy
Broad indecent fact and with ironical
Contemptuous understanding take the world's
Scut in your hands and name it! Name its name!

This was the pis aller of Montparnasse and Minetta Lane, a new version of the fustian desperations of Montmartre and Shropshire. Beyond those despairs lay the dignity of the stoic tradition, and since hard-boiledness is a strenuous way to keep up one's belief in the deflation of all values but the physical and the esthetic, heroic pathos was substituted in the form of bull-fighters, drunkards, Spanish imperialists, or mere silent men lying flat on the ground, listening to the pulse of centuries, or marking the universal sunlight in its blind measurement of man's insignificant hours. From such impersonal fortitude MacLeish shaped his first serious conceptions of art and human idealism.

From the start his technical labor had been sensitive and passionately sincere; but both sensibility and sincerity come to their supreme test in the solution of an inner, specifically personal problem. To externalize them in the interests of a general depersonalization of the human consciousness is to strike at their very life. This may be done by social propagandists in the cause of public reform or revolution. Or it may be done, as he has done it, in the interests of a more abstract sense of universals, the poet sinking his moral personality in the total consciousness of humanity, and in what is conceived to lie behind it—the unconscious life of nature and the universe. It is notable that after 1923 MacLeish's poetic masters were men who aided him toward this gradual surrender of private intelligence: poets who, like Fraser's anthropology (which he followed Eliot in using for the symbolism of The Pot of Earth), relieved his private agony by opening up prospects of great involuntary human struggles, prospects of man in his most impersonal condition of consciousness against a background of racial transitions and wide-flung geographic movements. Here he could escape the threat of futility by submitting himself and mankind to an unfathomable universal will.

It is no longer A Man against the stars. It is Mankind: that which has happened always to all men, not the particular incidents of particular lives. The common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon, of time, of disappearance-and-their-place-knowing-them-no-more. The salt-sweating, robust, passionate, and at the last death-devoured lives of all men always. Man in the invisible sea of time that drowns him. …

The poets who helped him to this submission were the Cendrars of Transsibérien and Kodak documentaire, Apollinaire in Alcools and Calligrammes, and Perse with Anabase. To these Eliot, with Gerontion, added the appropriate tone of ironic elegy, and Pound, with the earlier Cantos, the proper method of historical imagination. The result was the work of MacLeish's early maturity, the lyrics in which he caught pathos before it suffered distension and critical inversion, poems that celebrate with great verbal beauty a surrender to the mystery of existence and the processes of physical anonymity. This was “Le Secret Humain,” and it was the consolation of his Hamlet:

We know what our fathers were but not who we are
For the names change and the thorns grow over the houses.
We recognize ourselves by a wrong laugh;
By a trick we have of resembling something. Otherwise
There are strange words and a face in a mirror.
                                                                                                                                                      We know
Something we have forgotten too that comforts us.

It found its finest form in “You Andrew Marvell,” its humorous expression in “Mother Goose's Garland,” “Immortal Helix,” and “The End of the World,” its tragic scale in “Land's End” and “Tourist Death,” and in Einstein, an attempt to harmonize with the abstract ultimates of science:

                                                                                                    He can count
Ocean in atoms and weigh out the air
In multiples of one and subdivide
Light to its numbers.
                                                                                If they will not speak
Let them be silent in their particles.
Let them be dead and he will lie among
Their dust and cipher them—undo the signs
Of their unreal identities and free
The pure and single factor of all sums—
Solve them to unity.

Unfortunately MacLeish soon permitted his compliance in this “pure and single factor of all sums” to undermine the personal resistance upon which such surrender, stoic or otherwise, counts for salvation. “Men” brought the idea to the brink of parody, and Conquistador allowed the lavish beauty of its materials to become vitiated by the huge extension and dilution of an epic scale unsupported by adequate epic motivation. Moreover, the surrender of real certitude and “intellectualism” communicates itself to style. MacLeish's earlier style grew into an astonishing beauty that contradicted the prejudice of anyone who knew the contemporary sources from which it derived. His real task was to preserve its integrity. But his progress in anti-intellectual humility meant also a progress in stylistic self-effacement. This is apparent not only in the disorganization, the overplayed repetitions, and the symbolic vagueness of Conquistador, but in the progressive tyranny of his models. Worthy models are the right of every worthy poet; but in Conquistador the exhausted echo of the “old man” theme of Gerontion, and the overplayed effect of historic rumination borrowed from the Cantos, showed clearly that the models had deadened an ambitious creative purpose. And when, in the Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, we find a device of the Cantos baldly reproduced:

To Thos. Jefferson Esq. his obd't serv't
M. Lewis: captain: detached:
                                                                                                              Sir. …

we are led to wonder why Mr. MacLeish, who likes “that clean sharp stroke which is heard when the axe goes into living wood” should be so indifferent when he hears the axe sink into Ezra Pound's neck. “Critics moved by a love of poetry,” he says, should

point out the excellence of the work, the way in which, with honesty and self-respect, the man handles a long and eloquent line, a firm and vivid phrase and a vocabulary not filched from the thesaurus—

or, presumably, from his fellow-poets. Implicitly he demands that the absence of these poetic virtues be similarly pointed out. A poet who aims at them resolutely need waste no petulance on critics who are trying to rescue poetry from the vulgarity of “Couturier criticism” or “The Literature Business” which he himself has deplored.

MacLeish's irresolution has been emphasized by the serious direction which his work of the past five years has taken. Physical stoicism and obsession by time had come to him too easily; they began to stir uneasy scruples in his thought. To feel, “face downward in the sun … how swift how secretly The shadow of the night comes on” was a beatitude disturbed by a sensation that is likely to disrupt the stoic peace of soul:

These alternate nights and days, these seasons
Somehow fail to convince me. It seems
I have the sense of infinity!

Infinity, paradoxically, is likely to drive a man back to the local and specific accidents of his own life and self. MacLeish, in European expatriation, was troubled by his duty and birth-right: “It is a strange thing to be an American.” Returning to America, he was plunged into the crisis of the past five years. To him this crisis could not be relieved by the technical or forcible reforms of economic socialism. It is a crisis between the fundamental pioneer idealism of “The Farm” or the selfless heroism of Conquistador, and the industrial greed he denounces in “1933” or the revolutionary violence satirized in the Frescoes. But between these antitheses his judgment is too satisfied with abstract canons of honor—canons which risk committal neither to a positive moral dogmatism nor to a practical social risk. He invokes “Time which survives the generations” when he argues on economics, and “disinterestedness” when he defines the poet:

It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers:
Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas—
Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers.
.....There is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style:
.....Neither his class nor his kind nor his trade may come near him. …

Or, more explicitly:

The intuitions of the poet are valid and may be accepted only because his loyalty is to his art, because his sole test of the acceptability of a word or a phrase or a poem is the test of his art and not the test of his politics or his social indignation. This is not to say that the true poet is without prejudice. He has of course the prejudices of his blood, his countryside, his education, if you will, his “class.” But … there remain certain individuals who believe that the first and inescapable obligation of the poet is his obligation to his art; who believe that the fact that the practice of his art is difficult in no way releases him from that obligation; who believe that the desertion of his art for any reason, even the noblest, even the most humane, is nevertheless desertion.

This is nobly expressed and it involves an inevitable esthetic loyalty, but MacLeish's practice shows too clearly how for him art, like human stoicism, becomes an evasion of the specific responsibility to which a poet, no less than the humble honest man, is committed. Poetry, like moral and social life, is an art of concrete conditions, whose style and function are achieved when conceptual and ethical abstraction is tested by vital and practical experience. It is as easy to fail in that test through an exclusive esthetic idealism as through propaganda. Like Jeffers and Lawrence in their different ways, MacLeish has brought a keen sense of experience to an abstract vagueness of use. This sense need not be degraded to uses he cannot admit or acknowledge, but “self-respect,” “firmness,” and “vividness” stem from positive determination, from the isolation and not the loss of self. Such identity is expressed and realized in art, but it is not initially determined there, and this determination produces the real Hamlet, not the cinema of Hamlet. It starts in the personal, intellectual, and social circumstances of which MacLeish has tried hard to dispossess himself. Where he has succeeded, his verse dwindles toward apathy and diffusion. Where he fails, his work finds the sincerity and beauty upon whose final triumph will depend the poetry his admirers, and the defenders of American poetry, must hope he will write.

Llewellyn Jones (review date June 1935)

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SOURCE: Jones, Llewellyn. “Archibald MacLeish: A Modern Metaphysical.” English Journal 24, no. 6 (June 1935): 441-51.

[In the following review of Poems, 1924-1933, Jones comments on the symbolic poem The Pot of Earth and MacLeish's more social works, such as Conquistador, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, and the verse play Panic.]

It would perhaps be unfair to label Archibald MacLeish with even so inclusive a tag as metaphysical, were it not that the best metaphysical poets have also been poets of sense, and their work often simple as well as sensuous and passionate. Certainly the term is not meant to indicate any bounds limiting Mr. MacLeish's work but to suggest that pervading quality which, together with another, an Americanism that is the very antithesis of the popular one-hundred-per-cent variety, gives character to a body of work that is extraordinarily diversified.

Of Mr. MacLeish's peers in American poetry—and there are only two—Mr. Frost cultivates a fairly wide but a compact domain: his poetic realm does not include colonies; and the late Edwin Arlington Robinson, though he wandered farther in time and space than Mr. Frost does, and colonized in so far a region as that of King Arthur, yet disciplined his colonies strictly in terms of his own code. Both have been more or less men of one voice.

Mr. MacLeish on the other hand has been a poet of many voices, and in his Poems, 1924-1933, a gathering of all the poetry by which he wishes to stand, remains so in spite of the deletion of those voices which he learned from others in his salad days. I do not notice in the collection anything from The Happy Marriage, published in 1924. Everything in that early book is on a high technical level and many of the poems might easily prove irresistible to some industrious anthologist, the opening lines for instance of “The Tomb of the Abbess of Tours”:

Over the hills and very far away,
Far, far away and centuries ago,
She was so young, so swift to love—so slow. …

or the lyrical:

Here, O wanderer, here is the hill and the harbor,
Farer and follower, here the Hesperides.
Here wings the Halcyon down through the glamorous arbor,
                    Here is the end of the seas.

But were those verses included in an anthology, they would almost rank as anonymous: theirs is a voice common to many years of English poetry.

It was not long, however, before the man who had written them was finding his way into the present. Mr. MacLeish was born in 1892 near Chicago, the son of a Chicago business family. He went to Yale, studied law in Harvard, lost a brother in the war, went into it himself, after first doing some work in a French hospital unit, and, on his own testimony, wanted to write verse but did not at first write the kind of verse that he himself liked. After some practice of law he returned to France with his wife and two children, traveled, and came back to America in 1928. By that time he had sloughed off his early influences, and had done so without falling into a too exclusive idiom of his own. Archibald MacLeish is now the master of an exceptionally wide range of poetic vocabularies, both verbal and rhythmic. He is modern, almost journalistically contemporary in his interests, yet he has never cut the cord binding his vocabularies to the traditional past. There is in his work none of the Spencer-Auden-Lewis type of obscurity.

The first poem by Mr. MacLeish that I read came out in a very small volume published less than a year after The Happy Marriage (which itself had been preceded by a very small Yale University Press collection which I have never seen). This poem, The Pot of Earth, reads as compellingly today as when it was first published, and is rightly included in the one volume collection.

A superficial, and, I am sure, an accidental, resemblance to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land caused some critics at the time of publication to say that the one poem was inspired by the other, but this judgment could, I am convinced, only be made by one who had not read both poems through. Beyond the fact that both use the symbolisms of ancient religion as recorded by Frazer, the resemblance ends. While Eliot's poem is a critique of our own day, with the symbolism rather arbitrarily used, Mr. MacLeish finds one major symbol, of the tragic predicament of all mortals, who must breed and pass, and tells the tragic tale in terms of the life of a modern girl, whose own fate is pictured before her in almost the self-same terms that once adumbrated the fate of all who live, namely, the dumb and eloquent language of the garden of Adonis. That toy garden, as one might call it, is described by Frazer in a few words which Mr. MacLeish places before his poem:

These were baskets or pots filled with earth in which wheat, barley, lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of flowers were sown and tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively by women. Fostered by the sun's heat, the plants shot up rapidly, but having no root they withered as rapidly away, and at the end of eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis and flung with them into the sea or into springs.

The poem begins with the symbol and then abruptly swings us into the contemporary exhibition of its reality:

Silently on the sliding Nile
The rudderless, the unoared barge
Diminishing and for a while
Followed, a fleck upon the large
Silver, then faint, then vanished, passed
Adonis who had lately died
Down a slow water with the last
Withdrawing of a fallen tide.

That year they went to the shore early—
They went in March and at the full moon
The tide came over the dunes, the tide came
To the wall of the garden. She remembered standing,
A little girl in the cleft of the white oak tree,—
The waves came in a slow curve, crumpling
Lengthwise, kindling against the mole and smouldering
Foot by foot across the beach until
The whole arc guttered and burned out. Her father
Rested his spade against the tree. He said,
The spring comes with the tide, the flood water.
Are you waiting for spring? Are you watching for the spring?
He threw the dead stalks of the last year's corn
Over the wall into the sea. He said,
Look, we will sow the spring now. She could feel
Water along dry leaves and the stems fill.
Hurry, she said, oh, hurry. She was afraid.
The surf was so slow, it dragged, it came stumbling
Slower and slower. She tried to breathe as slowly
As the waves broke. She kept calling, Hurry! Hurry!
Her breath came so much faster than the sea.

Not only in natural accident, however, is the old fertility symbolism still to be seen. The rites of Adonis have, as rites, never ceased. And one day as this girl walks home from school, a Syrian immigrant woman gives her a bloodroot flower:

With white petals and the scarlet ooze
Where the stem was broken. She said: In my country
The feet of spring are stained with the red blood,
The women go into the hills with flowers
Dark like blood, they have a song of one
Dead and the spring blossoming from his blood—
And he comes again, they say, when the spring comes. …

And the girl, troubled by this so obviously natural and true symbolism, bringing as it were to a focal point of consciousness the forces beginning to awaken in her, for she is at the age of puberty, feels herself drawn into a sinister and fatal rhythm. And having consciously identified this rhythm and its symbolism, the girl is able to express her own tragic predicament—her sense of the antithesis between escape from the life cycle through sterility and a participation in it which would in turn lead to participation in death and corruption also. She is able to express it, but not to escape it, or even to choose which horn of the universal human dilemma she shall be impaled on.

In one passage where the girl directly addresses the power she feels compelling her, the author has made a very effective use of the device of consonance, hitherto used in contemporary poetry, as far as I can remember, only by the late Wilfred Owen, a British war poet. This device consists in the substitution for rhyme of end words whose consonant sounds repeat but whose vowel sounds differ, the result being something more veiled and dubious than rhyme and yet just as compelling:

“… Oh, wait, I will gather
Grains of wheat and corn together,
Ears of corn and dry barley.
But wait, only wait. I am barely
Seventeen: must I make haste?
Tomorrow there will be a host
Of crocuses and small hairy
Snowdrops. And why, then, must I hurry?
There are things I have to do
More than just to live and die,
More than just to die of living.
I have seen the moonlight leaving
Twig by twig the elms and wondered
Where I go, where I have wandered.
I have watched myself alone
Coming homeward in the lane
When I seemed to see a meaning
In my going or remaining
Not the meaning of the grass,
Not the dreaming mortal grace
Of the green leaves on the year—

And why, then, should I hear
A sound as of the sowers going down
Through blossoming young hedges in the dawn—
Winter is not done.

Consonance is not the only device which makes these lines musical; they are tied and cross-tied throughout by alliterations, especially of w and wh sounds.

Then the winter symbolism of a purely individual life is sharpened. The girl is walking on the seashore:

Certainly the salt stone that the sea divulges
At the first quarter does not fructify
In pod or tuber nor will the fruiterer cull
Delicate plums from its no-branches—Oh,
Listen to me for the word of the matter is in me—
And if it heats to the sun it heats to itself
Alone and to none that come after it and the rain
Impregnates it not to the slightest—Oh, listen,
You who lie on your backs in the sun, you roots
You roses among others who take the rain
Into you, vegetables, listen—the salt stone
That the sea divulges does not fructify.
It sits by itself. It is sufficient. But you—
Who was your great-grandfather or your mother's mother?

It is noteworthy that this poem, written from the point of view of the woman victim of nature, should show us the other side of a shield which the majority of poets have industriously polished on one side but never turned around. Once indeed, Mr. MacLeish uses the same figure for his obverse that a contemporary poet, Lascelles Abercrombie, uses for the bright side. The girl speaks of the generations of men as a “ripple of thin fire burning Over a meadow, breeding out of itself,” while the individual is not the fire itself but momentary and unreal, merely, changing the figure,

… the shape of a word in the air
Uttered from silence behind us into silence
Far, far beyond. …

While in the “Hymn to Love” Abercrombie writes, perhaps unconsciously from the man's point of view instead of from the woman's:

We are thine, O Love, being in thee and made of thee
As thou, Love, were the deep thought
And we the speech of the thought; yea spoken are we,
Thy fires of love outspoken.

That the poem ends with the girl a physical victim to nature's rhythm of living, begetting, and dying, does not of course, make it any the less universal in its treatment of the human dilemma.

Mr. MacLeish's succeeding volumes of shorter poems were followed in 1932 by Conquistador, a long poem for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Here he again breaks fresh ground technically, forging an instrument by means of which, an old soldier who had followed Cortes into Mexico may give expression to his own participation in the conquest. Bernal Diaz del Castillo writes in old age under the spur of the indignation aroused when he reads the official history of the conquest, which like all official histories has been written in political terms. But Bernal had fought with weapons in hand, bled real blood, been assaulted in all of his five senses by the horrors, the beauties, the shocks of wonder, belonging to the strange land through which so painfully he fought his way. And he will tell us of “That which I have myself seen and the fighting. …”

A doctrinaire critic complained when the poem was first published that the author had written not a major but a sentimental poem: that he had envisaged only the surface aspects and not the significance of the conquest. The point is hardly well taken, for the theme of the poem is confessedly the actual sensuous experience of a participant:

These things were real: these suns had heat in them:
There was brine in the mouth: bitterest foam:
Earth: water to drink: bread to be eaten.

The poem is written in a terza rima with assonance instead of rhyme, and although there is no schematized alliteration, there is enough use of it to give the feeling of Anglo-Saxon verse, as we may see in this statement of Cortes' justification for massacring the Cholulans:

For indeed he had read in their hearts as a split cod
And he knew their souls by their slime as a snail his journey—
How they had salt for our flesh and a boiling pot: …

When Conquistador was published, we were already launched upon the depression, and a seeming majority of the younger critics had already been swept into the Marxian camp, whence they were proceeding to judge contemporary literature from the point of view of the class struggle. These critics classified Mr. MacLeish as belonging to the ivory-tower school of poetry. His reply was a witty poem, “The Social Muse,” in which he compared the poets to the licensed ladies who follow armies—but who are not given combatant status:

It is also strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers:
Those that infringe are inflated with praise on the plazas—
Their bones are resultantly afterwards found under newspapers: …

Furthermore:

He that goes naked goes farther at last than another:
Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they'll jimmy his
Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month:

(Who recalls now the address of the Imagists?)
But the naked man has always his own nakedness:
People remember forever his live limbs.

The Marxians, however, do not admit that a poet can be neutral. Apparent neutrality in the social struggle is disguised hostility. And so, one day, a Marxist who had read a little Freud announced the horrible truth about Mr. MacLeish. It was after the first publication of a short series of poems, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City—occasional in a sense but included in the collected edition. Mr. MacLeish contrasted in these poems the real America, the great sprawling roof of half the world, with the feverish and sectarian activities shown in the famous frescoes and adumbrated in the discussions surrounding Riviera's fight with the Rockefellers. Unfortunately he satirized the foreign-born revolutionaries in the language of those among them who lived on the East Side in New York:

Aindt you read in d' books you are all brudders?
D'glassic historic objective broves you are brudders!
You and d'Wops and d'Chinks you are all brudders!
Havend't you got it d'same ideology? Havend't you? …
For Marx has said to us Workers what do you need?
And Stalin has said to us Starvers what do you need?
You need the Dialectical Materialism.

To the Marxian mind there was only one explanation of this. Anyone who in the same verse poked fun at dialectical materialism and at the accent of the East Side Jew had a “fascist unconscious”

Mr. MacLeish did not think it necessary to deny the charge—but some of his friends not only denied it for him, but asked all the Jews they knew, who had read the poem, whether they felt outraged by it. I do not remember that any of them did.

That the tempest was artificially stirred up—even if in a fairly large teapot—is perhaps obvious. If it does not seem so, let the doubter prove it by a glance at the dedication of Mr. MacLeish's latest work, Panic, a poetic play which has actually been a success in New York. This play is a study in realistic yet symbolic terms, of the clash between the haves and the have-nots brought forth by the collapse of the banking system—which Mr. MacLeish does not have to exaggerate so very much to make it serve his symbolic purpose. It is dedicated to John and Katy Dos Passos—which if Mr. MacLeish really were a semi-Fascist would be crossing the no-man's land with a vengeance—and its words are such as should forever wipe out any idea that Mr. MacLeish is, as a man or a poet either, on the aristocratic side of the battle line:

Why should I explain to you that Those who are not known have returned to us again? You also have seen them from no chair in no window but suddenly as men learn everything—as though the mind were, as it well may be, I do not know, a swarm of invisible apprehensions which like insects devour in silence and secrecy the whole house: for it falls in an instant's illumination and a collapse of darkness.

The characters in the play see these unknown from the chairs in their directors' room, and then the unknown invade it, tell them their order is over; and one of them, a blind man, feeling the face of McGafferty, the chief banker, tells him that he speaks truth when he says that the proletariat—his followers in that room—are weak and helpless. Nor can these men say when history will strike for them—as Marx has said it must. But the real point is not their helplessness, or history's ambiguity. The real point is present and immediate:

                                                            The prophecies come true
Not of themselves but of the ears that hear them.
The violence works in the blood. The living inherit the
Hard speech of the dead like the seed of a pestilence.
They carry it close in their mouths and their breath feeds it
You yourselves will feed it and will die.

And later he says:

You yourself—desiring your own death—
Neither wealth nor richness of earth nor turning of
Wheels perfectly under the acre roofs nor the
Proud piling of ingots prevails over the
Mute will your mind to suffer destruction.
No power of force or of violence can weaken the
Willingness in your own mind to die.

To generalize the poetry into philosophy, this is simply a translation of Marxian dialectical materialism into psychological dialectic in which Marx is no longer a pointer out of the economic necessity which will bring the masses to power, but a symbol which evokes the under-dog's will to live, while the capitalists, as symbolized by McGafferty, lose their symbols when their structures crash, leaving them helpless before the will to die which is in each one of us, only kept in check by this or that faith: and his faith, McGafferty tries to keep to the last moment but cannot, so kills himself.

In this play, as always, Mr. MacLeish has forged a special instrument for his special task. He tells us in a preface that blank verse as developed in the Elizabethan period did express the rhythmical idiom of the time and place, but does not express American spoken rhythm which is excited and nervous where the Elizabethan was violent but deliberate. American speech falls from a stressed syllable, instead of rising to one. Its characteristic and its beauty is in the sharpness and distinctness of its stress. Mr. MacLeish therefore eschews syllabic regularity and counts only by accents, arranging his lines and his phrasing so that his rhythm is predominantly falling—either trochaic or dactyllic. In the speeches of the bankers emphatic lines may have as few as five syllables, but all of them will be accented.

The result is not only a successful reading play but one which carried its New York audiences.

In a very large sense that play may be called occasional, even as in a fairly large sense, the Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City may be called occasional. Both are sharply focussed on special circumstances but the light turned on those circumstances is that of the poet's “Americanism,” an attitude given a more general expression in a poem, “American Letter,” written during his European sojourn and conceived in terms which give us a strong contrast to the spiritual exile of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, both of whom have cut that umbilical cord of home connection which Mr. MacLeish has never severed. When we read the poem, however, we can see how weaker spirits might well be tempted to cut it:

It is a strange thing to be an American.
Neither an old house it is with the air
Tasting of hung herbs and the sun returning
Year after year to the same door and the churn
Making the same sound in the cool of the kitchen
Mother to son's wife. …

But instead of a country we have a half world to live on, “the open curve of a continent” and we do not live among brothers with a common and inherited speech but among men, uniform in dress but speakers of a learned rather than a native tongue, in a land and a people that is not one land and one race. But all we can do—apart from exile—is to accept it, and in the Frescoes the poet does make his acceptance, seeing at last his country as a unified figure—a great brown nude reclining in the sun, the scent of her hair of dust and of smoke, but seeing too that:

She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.

Dorothy Van Ghent (essay date fall 1938)

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SOURCE: Van Ghent, Dorothy. “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish.” Science & Society: A Marxian Quarterly 2, no. 4 (fall 1938): 500-11.

[In the following essay, Van Ghent presents a thematic overview of MacLeish's writing up to 1938, considering its concentration on metaphysical issues and human fate.]

MacLeish's first tentative poems were published by his university shortly after his entrance into the service during the World War. They were tentative, but they were stalwart in one theoretical position, and that was the poet's conviction that the ivory tower was the right place for him as an artist. The main poem in the book is written on the theme of Helen's apparition to Faustus, the antique symbol which, to the poet of the ivory tower, represents the only reality. MacLeish's latest book, printed in 1938, is a brief text written to accompany photographs taken largely from the collection of the Resettlement Administration, pictures of the ruined lands of the Middle West, of a scrawny child with deeply-ringed eyes packing shrimps in a Texas packing plant, of California migratory workers with spindle legs, swollen bellies, and faces starved and pinched into the least possible resemblance of human beings. The text is a simple statement of a social antinomy. By its clarity of apprehension it is also a call to arms. Reality for MacLeish has, during these twenty years, changed from a gilded Platonic essence to human creatures and contemporary situations.

This change is not an easy or simple one, however easy it may sound by the bare statement. It is as complex and difficult in the development of one poet as it is, on a large scale, for the whole world. Old attitudes are dragged along that subtly affect the purposes of poems, no matter how changed their subject matter may be. Though MacLeish's work falls naturally into periods which mark definite cleavages of belief, as it expanded from the ivory tower through nationalistic sentiments and finally into an objective appreciation of facts, such divisions argue transformations of thought which do not exist in so wholesale a manner. Basic attitudes cannot be left behind so glibly. This is why a survey of his work from its beginning is instructive, both for poets who are interested mainly in their own work, and for people who are interested in MacLeish himself.

Symptomatic of his earliest position, which can be traced also through some of his mature work, is a restless questioning of the place of man in the world. In a universe in which the moon whirls round the earth, the earth round the sun, and the sun possibly round Vega or some other mastodon of space, what, he asks in his early mood, are the laurels of consciousness? At a time when consciousness at its proudest is proved futile by the directionless violence of war, who is the hero? The geographical and social facts, the impassiveness of mechanical nature and the brutal idiocy of human events, combine to make up one large insensitive background for the sensitive individual consciousness, which carries about against this background a “dream of order” acknowledged illusory. Hence derives the picture of the man against the sunset, or against the stars, or against any other back-drop of nature which is conducive to making him look pitifully helpless. Out of his very helplessness he manages to extract heroism, as we see in Bertrand Russell's “A Free Man's Worship,” and as we see in the fascist apologetics of Spengler. It might be well to quote Spengler here, whose very predaciousness makes the sentimentality of the point of view more apparent.

… the genuine human soul now forms—a very solitary soul (even as compared with those of the other beasts of prey) with the proud and pensive look of one knowing his own destiny. … This soul is profounder and more passionate than that of any animal whatsoever. It stands in irreconcilable opposition to the whole world, from which its own creativeness has sundered it. It is the soul of an upstart.

(Men and Technics.)

The attitude is found also in the sentimental mechanism of Henry Adams. When Adams says “thought did not evolve nature, but nature evolved thought,” he seems to be echoing the Anti-Dühring, but, contrary to Engels, nature to him produced a source of nothing but illusion when it evolved thought. To Adams the fact that a dynamo was man-made was insignificant beside the “revelation of mysterious energy” of which the dynamo was instrument. The mind, after serving the trick of dynamo-making for supersensual chaos, returned to its illusion.

Since MacLeish's poem Einstein seems influenced by a reading of Henry Adams, and since it recapitulates most of the crotchets of mechanism, it is convenient to turn to this poem. The poem is a satire and its object is science. This is in accord with MacLeish's strong anti-intellectual bias in his earlier work. Einstein is presented as a man who is not satisfied with his own finiteness but must resolve the universe to finite terms also. He must go through every door and find out once and for all what is behind it. But he is always repulsed, for whenever he seems to have the thing well in hand, “a flare falls from the upper darkness” and he realizes that supersensual chaos is ahead of him after all. For MacLeish, at that time, there can be no knowledge of earth, though it be weighed out in atoms. Nevertheless there was a kind of knowledge. It consisted in revelation. “The Virgin of Chartres … knew a word.” This is supersensual chaos speaking, as it spoke to Adams through the dynamo.

The poem, though one of the poorest that he has written, is important in that it states the epistemological basis of MacLeish's earlier work. Like Adams, he posits a real external existence to nature, and so far is a materialist. But his whole emphasis is on the fact that nature is unknowable save through the lost “word,” that it is discontinuous with man, that it presents a dichotomy with consciousness which makes of them irreconcilable orders. Einstein's truck with atoms is not, to MacLeish, a process of valid reference between mental images and physical realities, he confuses the mental image with the “real thing.” Einstein would have to have the Bernese Oberland inside his head in order to achieve the kind of understanding MacLeish supposes him to want.

The attitude of the mechanical, or metaphysical, materialist is here expressed in its most vulnerable form. Solipsism is implicit in it. For if there is no continuity between nature and consciousness, there can be no knowledge of nature: nature, then, as we know it, does not exist. What remains is consciousness alone, “sensation without substance, thought without brain.”

As the same problem is raised in The Pot of Earth, it is accommodated by the symbolism of Frazer via the phraseology of T. S. Eliot. The conflict in the poem, as it takes place in the mind of the young girl, is between the principle of physical growth and a senseless mechanical principle which circulates in vast proportions around the growing thing like a Primum Mobile. The two symbols that are set in opposition to carry out this conflict are the earth and the “salt stone” of the sea. “The earth is prepared for the seed by the feet of oxen that are shod with brass.” In other words, the labor of the earth is a shabby trick played on it by chaos.

The symbol seems to be double here. The man against the sunset has his type in the girl; the earth seems to reflect the girl's predicament and to share in it. But the earth feeds on the rot of corpses; hence it is in connivance, not with the girl, but with chaos. The girl remains essentially alone, isolated and intact in her consciousness though victimized as an animal. It is not a pleasant position. Hence the constant questioning as to the meaning of consciousness, which must be something different from “the meaning of the grass.” As in so much of MacLeish's work of this period, the poetry consists in the question, which is a rhetorical question, for the problem cannot be resolved so long as it remains on a mechanistic basis.

In The Hamlet of A. MacLeish the conflict is the same. The symbol of the earth as adulterous mother, with her “hypocrite green smile,” is a convenient and proper one. The symbol of the king's ghost as supersensual chaos, saying “Swear!” to a decision which cannot be formulated, is vaguer, but necessarily so, since there is nothing more vague than chaos and a decision which cannot be decided. Like the girl in The Pot of Earth, Hamlet has a formidable sense of conscious existence and, at the same time, of being victimized by the “indecipherable will.” This indecipherable will speaks to him through the ghost, as it spoke to Einstein in the “flare descending from the upper dark,” and as it spoke to Henry Adams in the Virgin and the dynamo. But the words cannot be understood.

Here begins a formulation of the end of the search which is carried down through MacLeish's work of a later period.

We must find a word for it men can say at night,
And a face for the dark brow.
We must find a thing we can know for the world changes.
We must believe, for it is not always sure.

To primitives, the “word” is magic which unleashes power. To mystics it is revelation which unleashes grace, which, as Adams points out, is power. The “word,” the “name,” which the poet seeks here, is a substitute for the cumulative decision which is the necessary process of life.

In this poem, besides the omnipresence of The Waste Land, a very special and typical symbol makes its appearance. It consists in geography, with the migration of a people—in the “dumb-show” scene—giving it movement. Geography, both earthly and interplanetary, is a favorite reference of most writers who retain the mechanistic point of view, for the sunset and its various substitutes contribute points of heroic contrast. MacLeish's influences from the French are responsible for his geographic orientation. Both here, and in passages of later poems, are echoes of the Anabase of St.-Jean Perse. And one remembers, incidentally, that the name of the hero of Larbaud's Barnabooth, who sought truth among the flower-stands of the empires, was Archibaldo.

MacLeish ends the dumb-show passage with the words:

                                                                                          I say there were millions
Died like that and the usual constellations.

The constellations are the necessary operatic drop for Hamlet's lone pageantry.

The short poems of New Found Land, intervening between Hamlet and Conquistador, are not so much a new found land as an already frequented one. It is significant that his best poem, “You, Andrew Marvell,” is a geographical parable. The speaker lies “face down beneath the sun”: Ecbatan and Kermanshah, Baghdad and Palmyra, Sicily and Spain experience their changes in total loneliness, as the speaker experiences his own premonition of evening in total loneliness. Geography pure and simple is here contrapoised against the aloneness of the speaker, and since there is no good reason why a great deal of geography should make one feel more alone than a little geography, especially when one is not even in the scene but beside it and unconnected with it save through the mind's eye, the cause of the feeling is only apparent, the feeling being actually—as given here—causeless. Dante, in various passages of the Divine Comedy, draws similar pictures. In the twenty-second canto of the Paradiso, from the heaven of the fixed stars Dante turns his gaze below him to the path traversed. But his retrospective journey across space is coordinated physiologically. The field of reference has for its poles his own body and the things seen, as well as his own accumulated experience of judgment and the new aspect of value of the things seen. The evocative power of MacLeish's poem depends not on a personally developed, an essentially “human,” history by which Palmyra and Baghdad, Ecbatan and Kermanshah, receive their value through the poet's own experience, not on a physiological link between these and MacLeish, but solely through their literary aura of romance. The experiment of changing the names of the places he mentions is illuminating: Odessa for Baghdad, for instance, shatters the mood of the poem, and the picturesque loneliness of consciousness is not nearly so picturesque. One finds this geographical paraphernalia today in the poetry of Frederic Prokosch, and Mr. Prokosch is so little removed from Swinburne that things don't look so good for geography.

Similarly, in “Cinema of a Man,” the power of the poem lies in the contrast between the passionate traveller and the dead planet on which he whirls. The traveller dies. A wave breaks in the sea beyond the coast of Spain. This symbolic statement of the human impasse is always the final pronunciamento.

III

The real theme of Conquistador is the same as that of Pot of Earth and of Hamlet. But these two tales of the single consciousness lend themselves sympathetically to MacLeish's purpose. The Conquest of Mexico does not, and the theme bogs down in the moral possibilities of the narrative. Unfortunately, the Conquest was a real tragedy, real Aztecs and real Spaniards took part in it, a real culture was lost and another real culture took its place. It is evident that there are things doing here in which Hamlet—who always, by his very nature, attempts to usurp a drama—messes up the show.

But first as to the fact that the dilemma of Hamlet is also the theme of Conquistador. The main symbolic contrast in the poem is that between the sentient experience of the young soldier Diaz—“That which I have myself seen and the fighting”—and the wintry years of his later life. It is impossible not to think of Eliot's Gerontion in this connection, in the first place because MacLeish has taken the simple primary contrast in Gerontion—that between the fighting at the “hot gates” and the “old man in a dry month”—for his main structural bulwark. But the second part of the contrast is weak. Though repeated throughout in such complaints as “And not a word of our deeds or our pains or our battles,” one feels that it is a mere clothes-rack to hang Diaz' sweaty jacket on. On the other hand, with Diaz' old age dispensed with as a dramatic artifice, there remains the physical aspect of Mexico as the most substantial “other character” in the poem: the “vast earth secret with Sun with the green sound with the singing of grasshoppers.” The poem is essentially about one man and the earth. The man is very much alive, his sensations are manifold. And again and again we are reminded of his “living feet” against the secret unknown ground.

Ah but the mark of a man's heel is alone in the
Dust under the whistling of hawks!

But what of the Conquest? After all, it is in the history books. And the historical-minded reader feels piqued when he comes to the final massacre and finds that it was really not Spaniards who did the thing: it was “the shadow of terror” that did it: it was “a cloud out of the north-east”: it was

                                                                                                                                            the water
Treading behind us with its ceaseless waves.

Naturally, in a system so constituted as the one we have been discussing, mysterious pressures are necessary to make things happen.

But it is apparent that no real tragedy is possible in these terms, the terms of incipient solipsism. The man against the stars has no one to engage in action with but the stars. But they refuse to act. Like MacLeish's ideal poem, they do not mean, but be. Hence no action is possible, except the passive action of sensation. And no judgment. Progress in the narrative of Conquistador is an accident irrelevant to and not affecting the undifferentiated emotion of the poem. Emphasis denoting value is placed where it cannot be justified, at the same time that a secondary emphasis—forced by the matter of the narrative—runs counter to the first. In other words, what is supposedly the tragedy within the given complex of existents and events has no relation to the assumption of tragic feeling. To Dr. W. C. Williams, in his “Destruction of Tenochtitlan,” the Conquest was a tragedy. It was so because real things happened in it, and when real things happen certain values are lost and are replaced by other values.

But there is a modern suspicion that real tragedy is not quite in good taste, that “plots,” or a dynamic progression of relationships, are vulgar. This obviates the necessity of making up one's mind about either actual or imaginary situations. Nevertheless these days one cannot go so far as Madrid without precedent tragic awareness and judgment.

MacLeish, in his own way and with his own difficulties which are so apt a resumé of the difficulties of all thinking people, seems to have brought a reply to these assertions, for he has returned from Madrid in more senses than one. In his last two dramas he handles the issues of economic crisis and of fascist oppression.

MacLeish's social consciousness had already beset him in somewhat dim form in Conquistador. The theme of the anonymous men who shed the blood and earth up the cities and for whom no monuments are made—Bernal Diaz, “an old man in a hill town”—is the theme which he was unable to handle there, which remained factitious and unsuccessful. This became the main theme of the Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City. The anonymous men are here those who laid the ties and the steel for the railroads. What is most curious in this new interest of the poet may be expressed best of all in MacLeish's own words:

It is no longer A MAN against the stars. It is MANKIND … The common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon, of time, of disappearance-and-their-place-knowing-them-no-more. … Man in the invisible sea of time that drowns him. Man in the sun, on the earth, under the stars—and as he breathes time sweeping him away. … Not myself, my soul, my glycerine-dropping eyes, but these unknown and nameless men, anonymous under this sky, small in these valleys, and far off and forever there. Poetry, which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt—an image of mankind in which men can again believe.

The attitude of the man against the stars is the attitude of one who would enjoy the nobilities of consciousness without engaging in decision within the moving reality of history. The attitude has been called sentimental, in the sense in which James Joyce uses the word in that telegram to Mulligan which is one of the high spots of Ulysses: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” No doubt, by the evidence of the paragraph quoted above, MacLeish also believes this attitude to be sentimental. Therefore—and it is here one watches with interest the slow and painful progression of the poet's sense of actuality—he has set up all of mankind against the stars. It is not Hamlet or Bernal Diaz who is to be the sentimentalist now. It is all the rest of us, kit and caboodle.

There is one other curiosity in the paragraph quoted. Poetry's debt is “an image of mankind in which men can believe.” We have seen Hamlet searching for the “thing we can know,” a “word for it,” a “face for the dark brow.” Now we must find an “image” for all of mankind. But the function of poetry is not to make images. Poetry is not a substitute for religion. Furthermore, poetry does not give mankind its beliefs, but mankind gives poetry its beliefs.

There can be little wonder that the Frescoes caused a stew of trouble for left wing reviewers. Shortsightedness is manifest in these poems. MacLeish was here impatient with the aims and slogans of the labor movement. In a period when this movement was constituted by the most disparate elements, and when its greatest need was a rich theoretical background, at a time when it was as yet disordered and unorganized, the poet proposed “Americanism.” But until order was achieved by virtue of the growth and application of theory, there was nothing to “Americanize.” Only that which is already something can deliberately “-ize” itself. Again in the Frescoes, as in Conquistador, MacLeish is neglectful of the real character of events. And because he is gradually leaving an old realm of discourse, and because a purely subjective habit of judgment is receding like a landscape, flaws in objective appreciation grow more intense. This is inevitable. As appreciation is more critical, it is more susceptible of criticism.

Public Speech follows. Though its verse is more dignified than that of the Frescoes, the point of view is the same. The “born brothers in truth” are those who experience together, and the kind of collective experience that matters is “danger,” “harm,” “hurt.” This is in keeping with the kind of experience which was a measure of the aliveness of Bernal Diaz, for it was most of all the Bernal Diaz who suffered thirst and scorch of heat and “pure ill Like a crystal of quartz in the heel where the flesh will tread it!” who was sublimely alive, with a bit of fornication in the dunes as an anodyne. What, one wonders, about a poetry concerned with this sort of experience in a “planned society”? Is it harm and hurt that will endure as valid points of poetic contrast?

It is evident that this measure of brotherhood in truth is simply a transposition to flat collectivity of Hamlet's suffering. In any way the criterion is turned, there remains a static hypostasis: men against the stars (instead of man against the stars) versus blind, unreasonable “harm and hurt.” We still do not hear of the function of the collective originative will as it composes the history of the group, because there has been no word of the single originative will. Not a word of the dynamic composition of history, because there never has been, actually, any history.

The play Panic presents the collapse of capitalism. Malcolm Cowley has said of the play that it revolves on the theme of the Artist versus the World, of the completely realized individual versus incoherent mass. True, a contemporary social situation is treated. Here, in Panic, are smokeless smokestacks that do not smoke, for reasons to which everyone is alive. Here are victims of financial crash, and hysterical financiers. But the fact that the whole movement of the drama is concentrated on the note of hysteria, and above all the emphasis on Fate, lead one to see in the play but the old dilemma revived. Revived in somewhat humanized form, and this is the mark of a development. But nevertheless it is the old dilemma, whose one horn is the personal element (and it does not matter whether this element is a single individual or a collection of individuals) and whose other horn is the impersonal and fateful element.

In this case the fateful element consists in the economic cycle; and Fate in the clothes of the economic cycle is, of course, a suspicious portrait of Fate. Mere statement of the theme of the play in such a manner indicates the central weakness which is the important thing about this whole survey. Poetry and drama cannot exist persuasively to the imagination if they are constituted by elements one of which is definitively inhuman. By this I mean an element that is not susceptible of intellectual certainty. Even orthodox religious mystery, as any Catholic with an intellectual approach to his faith will insist, is susceptible in this way. It is doubtful that the Greek dramas, which have been interpreted so long in terms of an inhuman Fate, are actually built of so incognizable an element. But most of all when Fate assumes proportions familiar to mortals—as the proportions of a crash in Wall Street—does the intelligence fail to recognize it as such.

The same criticism applies to the Fall of the City, a poetic drama intended as a warning against Fascism, and in which the oppressor is represented as an empty suit of armor, animated supersensually, arriving like Scyld Sceafing or Merlin in a boat from an unknown and perhaps non-existent shore. It has none of the local and homely roots of the perfectly healthy cancer. It stoops not to derivation. It comes like babies out of the nowhere into the here. Can one decide what to do about such a phenomenon?

It is important to notice, however, in these last poems and plays what amounts to a transposition of emphasis. The fact comes clear when we look at MacLeish's text for The Land of the Free. Here, of course, the photographs are the striking feature of the book, and they are arranged in an order that starts, more or less, with single individuals or small groups and that ends with crowds of people—protest meetings, street demonstrations, strikers at the Ford plant, and so on. The cumulative power of the photographs is tremendous. MacLeish's text accompanying them is shrewd, subdued, and perfectly fitting. The whole book, taken as a comment on MacLeish's development as a poet, reminds one that his work has followed a similar order of emphasis, from the predicament of the lone consciousness in an inhuman universe, gradually expanding to groups of people and specifically to the working class. In other words, his work shows with amazing clarity the growth of the theme of collective experience.

The fact that he has carried along with him old attitudes makes his work a far more interesting study than if he had indulged in glib abandonments. We see the Hamlet dilemma at first in Hamlet himself and in the girl in The Pot of Earth. It is the dilemma of the individual oppressed by his own sentience in a dead world. Mysticism is implicit in it. We then see MacLeish struggling, rather obscurely, with large groups of people. We can see this even in the dark movements of migratory groups in the Hamlet, but more clearly we see it in Conquistador. Here the specifically human theme, concerned with the experience and the fate of the common soldiers, is very strong, and was surely intended as the main theme of the poem; one feels that MacLeish wrote another Hamlet story in Conquistador in spite of his own artistic purpose. The real leap in emphasis occurs with the Frescoes and with Public Speech, where the group theme is now in full and actual light. But even here the old Hamletism casts shadows, and we find the group itself involved in the dilemma which was at first the dilemma of the individual: the important thing about the group experience is suffering, presented in such a manner that the suffering seems fateful and the group passive. Again in Panic and The Fall of the City, where the dramatic form necessitates an even more humanized approach, humanization is incomplete and we find the group again at the mercy of inhuman and fateful elements. Only in the last thing that MacLeish has written—the text for the Resettlement Administration photographs—which is necessarily too slight to give one much opportunity for a final judgment, are Fate and Metaphysics ousted. Their place is taken by people. And when one says this, one means that it is no longer human experience in the sense of passive suffering that dominates the book, but volitional human activity.

Arthur Mizener (essay date October 1938)

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SOURCE: Mizener, Arthur. “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish.” Sewanee Review, no. 46 (October 1938): 501-19.

[In the following essay, Mizener emphasizes the continuity of MacLeish's poetic work over time, despite shifts in the poet's emotional and philosophical responses to experience.]

The career of Archibald MacLeish has the appearance of having been a tortured series of unconnected allegiances. It is, after all, a long way from what Horace Gregory once called “the four-year illusion of supremacy at Yale” to the interest which lies behind “Pole Star for This Year”. It seems even longer when one stops to consider that it leads through the terrible and wonderful days of the exiles when the pages of transition were being filled with manifestoes on “The Revolution of the Word”; when Harry Crosby and Hemingway were drunk in the streets of Sargossa and “their mouths are hard they say que cosa”. MacLeish (“a few years older, but still affiliated with this present generation”) had not left Paris when Cowley, Josephson and the rest began issuing their blasts against the exiles (though still in the pages of transition), impressed by the fact that

'Tis said all poetry must and can
Resolve the ways of God to Man.
And yet when Ford or Morgan raise their face
Poets paddle off to some french watering place.(1)

It seems an even longer way when one remembers that it leads through the period when the exiles all returned, all but a few who died quietly away in the neighborhood of the rue de Fleurus or gradually got more interested in Major Douglas than in poetry. This was the period when the poets briefly discovered the romance of the pioneer Middle West, of “Tenochtitlan”, of the Civil War and the pre-War-between-the-States South. Finally, this long way leads through the battle of the books, that curious scholastic debate about literature and propaganda which is only now dying out. Through that battle MacLeish fought valiantly for the Poet against the Propagandist, only to find in the end, not that the others were right and he wrong, but that these two words did not stand for real people at all; he did not find that “Background with Revolutionaries” was false, but that the poet was responsible for more of the uses of his poetry than he had imagined; and this discovery made it impossible for him not to accept these responsibilities, without running the danger of ceasing to be a poet altogether.

There does not, certainly, seem to be much order in such a career. Yet the order is there, and the appearance of confusion is the result of concentrating on the part of MacLeish's poetry about which he has always been least concerned, sometimes, perhaps, too little concerned for his own peace of mind. That consistency can probably be most simply illustrated from two articles separated by twenty years. The first was an editorial written by MacLeish as Chairman of the Yale Literary Magazine entitled “For Reformers Only.” The argument of this editorial seems a curious one today, concerned as it is with the challenge to Yale and the other “older and poorer” eastern universities of the great western educational “plants” (Nebraska is instanced) which “are solving the problems of practical education”; and some of the battle plans proposed seem a little too heroic, as even their author realized. For having advocated that Yale ignore the “practical” side of education, which was found to include economics, journalism, history and the drama, and become a “classical seminary”, he observed that “certain members of the Corporation would undoubtedly indulge prejudices, however unreasonable, against the destruction of the new laboratories. …” The point of the editorial is, however, not the argument, but MacLeish's insistence that what was of value at Yale was “the life of the College … the source which differentiates Yale from the universities whose first presidents are not as yet grandsires.” Out of the atmosphere of the college, “of ivy and elm, of dreams and aspirations” came the power to create intellectual background and develop imagination. “We can,” he said, warming to his conclusion, “preserve this priceless gift only by accepting the world we see here on the Campus … idealizing it if need be, but never cheapening it, never brightening our old mahogany with new enamel. … The phrase ‘Old Yale’ is more than the minor chord of sentiment. It is the reminder of our past, the explanation of our present and the necessity of our future. In hoc signo vinces.”

If one separate out of this faith the unconscious snobbery which confuses the ability to use a tradition intelligently with having presidents who died in 1707 and make due allowance for the author's age and the 1890s air which he had acquired by living in the very tradition he was defending, there remains the essential MacLeish. There remains, that is, a man passionately devoted to the “creation of background and the development of the imagination”, believing that without the one “a man is a barbarian; without the other he is a machine.” Strip this essay of the means proposed and it comes down to a statement that for the author the education that counts most is the training of the responses to the thing seen or the idea, and these responses are ultimately a matter of what, for want of a more precise term, we call the emotions. In the early and simplified form of this conviction, MacLeish scorns not only “the ‘science’ of business management” which he was to scorn in the Yale he looked at again twenty years later, but also history, economics and drama. We may object—as will he—to the beliefs which seemed to him then the logical intellectual formulation for his sense that the most important aspect of consciousness was the apprehension of the simple, sensuous and passionate qualities of “the flowing away of the world”. The point is not, however, and never has been with MacLeish, the intellectual formulation. The point is that the whole argument of this editorial springs from just that sense of the importance of the simple, sensuous and passionate.

The second article which illustrates this underlying consistency is an essay on “New-Yale” which MacLeish wrote for Fortune in 1934.² It is based on exactly the same feeling. Its author is, however, twenty years older, a far more complex and more sophisticated person. The measure of that difference is the substitution for “The phrase ‘Old Yale’ is more than the minor chord of sentiment” of the simple title: “New-Yale.” But the same fundamental feelings are there, and some of the more superficial; they can be seen curiously mixed when MacLeish writes of “the most moving memories of a Yale graduate before the War”: “he will remember the campus on one of those early spring nights when the raw taste of the harbor hung just under the smell of the new grass in the flukes of air. … He will remember the ironic ceremonies of the fence oration when that piece of much publicized realty was bequeathed by the sophomore class to the freshman class and by the freshman class, with equal irony, received”. MacLeish himself gave the fence oration for the sophomore class in 1913.

But for all the greater complexity and precision of responses, and for all the sophistication of twenty years' intellectual development, the standard by which MacLeish judges the new Yale is the standard by which he judged it in 1915: How much better is Yale equipped, not to train people in “useful knowledge” nor to bring up what he called in 1915 “the decorous candidates for membership in the exclusive clubs of New York and Philadelphia” (the phrase becomes in 1934 “the vulgar manners of Park Avenue”), but to provide people an opportunity to develop attitudes which will make it possible for them to react like adults to what they know and what they will find after college. And his judgment of the physical alteration of the Yale campus is based on the same fundamental attitude which made him find a virtue in the “ivy and elm” of Old Yale, a virtue which no amount of Nebraska money could reproduce:

As of the spring of the year 1934, therefore, the educational contribution of the Harkness Yale may be put down as quite precisely nothing. … Its novelty is the novelty of its buildings and the altered life they impose. And its creators are the creators of its brick and stone and steel … in the end, colleges, library, gymnasium and Gothic all come down to one thing only. And that one thing is the ＄60,000,000 which put them up … its measure is a measure accurately expressed in sums of cash. And sums of cash so allocated as to prefer the physical expansion of the university to its intellectual life.

In the very process of learning what this new Yale was, MacLeish was seeking to understand qualities rather than statistics:

What is relevant is the quality, the feel of the new institution. … The quality of the new Yale, architecturally and physically considered, is the quality of the decade which produced the skyscrapers of New York, erected the great houses of the California litoral and installed the gilded plumbing of the banlieu of Oyster Bay.

He sees a hope for education in his sense of the term in the greater personal contact between scholar and student which should result if the university develops what he thinks is the logical corollary to the college plan: the tutorial system. But even that, he would like to believe, will be more the product of “the educational revolution which dates from 1916” (MacLeish was graduated in 1915) than of the new Yale. For to the MacLeish who found the “ivy and elm” of Old Yale so vital a part of its educational equipment this imposing physical expansion represents just that process of “brightening its old mahogany with new enamel” against which he had protested in 1915.

At either end, then, of this twenty-year period one finds MacLeish with the same purpose, the same fundamental standard and the same means of approaching the external world. This underlying consistency is the result of his having sought always for himself the quality of his experience (“[the poet] can satisfy the needs of his nature only by laboring to fix in some artificial substance of sounds and signs a moment, an aspect, of the flowing away of the world”); of his having judged others by the strength and completeness of the response they made to the ideas they professed to believe in (“unless we can not only perceive, but also feel, the race of men to be more important than one man, we are merely fighting back against the water”); and of his having measured institutions by their ability to provide an opportunity for the cultivation of these responses.

Always the thing MacLeish has clung to as most real, as the thing he could trust, has been his apprehension of the quality of things, of their nature, not as a concept, as a unit in a logical intellectual structure, but as a felt experience. “The condition of any writer's success as an intelligence is the refusal to think as everyone about him thinks and the ceaseless effort to arrive at personal perceptions.” This way sometimes seems, however, extraordinarily difficult in our world:

So then there is no speech that can resolve
Their texture to clear thought and enter them.

The Virgin of Chartres whose bleaching bones still wear
The sapphires of her glory knew a word—…
And there were words in Rome once and one time
Words at Eleusis.
                                                                                                    Now there are no words
Nor names to name them and they will not speak
But grope against his groping touch and throw
The long unmeaning shadow of themselves
Across his shadow and resist his sense.

Nevertheless, using a name as a device for putting things in categories, even at its best, is no alternative; for “poetry, like any other art, can only reach its highest level in a universe of which man is the center. In a human world. And the world centered about man was destroyed by the impulses which produced the world explicable by science”:

                                                                                                    He can count
Oceans in atoms and weigh out the air
In multiples of one and subdivide
Light to its numbers.
                                                            If they will not speak
Let them be silent in their particles.
Let them be dead and he will lie among
Their dust and cipher them. …

And so, since “the poet … must always attack his world factually and physically, not abstractly, not in intellectual concepts”, MacLeish comes back to what seems most real to him and to the only way he knows to communicate even a part of that reality.

Thus a system of beliefs, a dogma, a logical structure of concepts, has never been adopted by him for its own sake; its self-consistency or its consistency with its fellows or its predecessors has always been for him a secondary consideration. He has adopted it or rejected it accordingly as it served or failed to serve the slowly but steadily expanding wisdom of his emotions. For the ideas have been the by-product of a growth in sensibility. That growth has been slow but continuous (at least since 1923), and it has been accompanied by a steady search for the set of ideas which would make sense of, which would focus most sharply, the sensuous and emotional values which he has always felt strongly and which, as he has developed, have become clearer to him.

MacLeish's development as a poet cannot, then, be understood by tracing the sequence of his philosophic allegiances, because such development as he has shown has been a matter of growth in the range, complexity, and precision of his responses and in his awareness of the exact nature of these responses. This development is the only one that matters to him and the only one that ought to matter to his critics. It was because almost everything but that seemed to interest his critics that he wrote, in the Foreword to Poems in 1933: “My development as a poet is of no interest to me and of even less interest, I should suppose, to anyone else.” Taken literally, as Conrad Aiken pointed out in a fine review in the New Republic, that statement simply cannot be accepted. There is, indeed, less possibility of that statement's being true for MacLeish than for most poets, for MacLeish's poetry concerns itself extensively, not merely with the attempt to communicate his responses to things, but with the far more difficult task of tracing the growth of those responses. MacLeish's remark was not, of course, consciously or unconsciously, intended to be taken literally; it was intended to indicate that the significant grouping of his poems was not the chronological one, but the very skillful arrangement according to subject, in the widest sense of the word, used in Poems; this arrangement frequently ignores chronology. For example, the “Land's End” group of poems, all dealing with the same theme, range all the way from 1924 to 1930. The remark thus indicates that what matters to MacLeish in his poetry is not to be learned by taking the poems chronologically, abstracting from their “ideas”, and then trying to “explain” the sequence thus obtained.

The key poem in the growth of MacLeish's sensibility up to the present is The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. There for the first time he managed to state with some exactness the quality of the central response to life itself which is either (both metaphors are inexact) the core or the sum of all his other responses to the details of experience:

Night after night I lie like this listening.
Night after night I cannot sleep. I wake
Knowing something, thinking something has happened.
I have this feeling a great deal. I have
Sadness often. At night I have this feeling.
Waking I feel this pain as though I knew
Something not to be thought of, something unbearable.
I feel this pain at night as though some
Terrible thing had happened. …
Much of the time I do not think anything;
Much of the time I do not even notice.
And then speaking, closing a door, I see
Strangely as though I almost saw now, some
Shape of things I have always seen, the sun
White on a house and the windows open and swallows
In and out of the wallpaper, the moon's face
Faint by day in a mirror; I see some
Changed thing that is telling, something that almost
Tells—and this pain then, then this pain. And no
Words, only these shapes of things that seem
Ways of knowing what it is I am knowing.(3)

This central feeling of pain, this sense of the inadequacy to their professions of human attitudes and of the inexplicable instability of the present, this despair, is the common denominator which runs through all his responses, unifying them. It can unify, in a wonderful poem like “You, Andrew Marvell”, such apparently disparate elements as the personal life, civilization and nature itself:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on.

But it can be seen everywhere also in the less ambitious poems where MacLeish is trying to realize for the reader his responses to the details of his experience. You will find it, for example, in an emotionally characteristic and beautifully precise poem like “The End of the World”:

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidexterian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madam Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb—
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the canceled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.

You will find it also in the fine close of “Yacht for Sale”:

My youth is
Made fast
To the dock
At Marseilles
Rotting away
With a chain to her mast …
It's easy to see
She was frail in the knee
And too sharp in the bow—
You can see now.

And you will find it in any of the group beginning with “Land's End” in Poems. All these poems, then, are peripheral to this central feeling; they are quite inexplicable unless they are seen in the larger context of which this feeling is the core. That is, incidentally, why everyone, with the possible exception of Malcolm Cowley, was talking so irrelevantly in the controversy over Frescoes.

The fact that MacLeish feels this way may be “explained” in the terminology of other modes of apprehension. One may, if it serves his purposes, “explain” that MacLeish was brought up in a dying culture, possessing rich and familiar traditions which were naturally attractive to him, but with a set of fundamental beliefs which are not adequate vehicles, in our time, for any sensitive person's responses. That the fragmentary beginnings of new cultures around us are as crude and unpolished by long usage and constant loving handling as a new haft which has not “fitted the palms of many”. And one may add that T. S. Eliot taught poetry a diction and a way of communicating the frustration of a man born between these two particular worlds,⁴ and thus made possible, or at least much easier, the complete expression of the individual variant on this theme.⁵

Against such an explanation MacLeish has rebelled constantly:

                                                                                                                                  Why must I
Say I suffer? … or write out these words
                                                  … for solemn lettered fools
To judge if I said neatly what I said?—

And he has frequently spoken with considerable feeling against the critiquins, those “sterile little pedants whom contemporary criticism has bred”. It was in this mood that he wrote his fine saying about the defensive position to which poetry has been driven by the doctrinaire Marxists, a “position no less dangerous because it is also ridiculous. The lady treed by a sow is not the less in peril because the sow is an object of derision.”

The intellectual abstraction from life of this critical method has always seemed to him a business of throwing overboard the cargo in order to save the ship. Everything that really matters to MacLeish is left out, for however much this method explains, it explains nothing away: the feeling is still there with its pain, for all that this learned explanation seems to ignore it. The futility of substituting this “explanation” for his statement is vividly present to him; and, since he feels with such passion, the uses of their intellectual aspect are not always apparent to him. When the uses of this aspect of things are not apparent to him, he does not see it as a complement to his way, but as the attempt to substitute for his careful poem an idea stripped of all its emotional connotations. So seen, of course, the intellectual explanation is an incredible piece of stupidity.

And sometimes the expounders of the intellectual aspect of things, blind in their turn, are trying to substitute their explanation. The rather silly New Masses review of Poems is a good example; as one reads its confident flippancies about its own irrelevant paraphrases of the poems, one realizes afresh the solid good sense of MacLeish's remark that, so far as the poetry as such is concerned, “interpretation is almost always vain. We can never, for example, know anything worth knowing about the Chanson de Roland. But we can … endow it with the apparent vivacity of our own recognition. We can save it from becoming an acknowledged historical fact in the haze back of the last horseman. And the same thing is true in a measure of the works of living writers.” The incompleteness of that view depends on the fact that poetry itself has other uses than its purely poetic ones, important as those are. But it is perhaps as well that a poet should not concern himself with these other uses.

There must of course, even in the poet's view, be ideas, beliefs firmly held; but the essence of beliefs is the way they are held. It is the feeling deeply about them that matters; for ideas are not of value in themselves; they are valuable only as the bearers of feeling. Hence a real belief is “not to be had for a word or a week's wishing”; it is impossible for a belief so gained to be made emotionally a part of one.

This clear realization of the necessity for living up to one's ideas emotionally has led MacLeish, in a kind of desperation, to value deeply his own beliefs. This may seem paradoxical, but it is the fact that once an idea has come to life for him because he has oriented it to his feeling, it comes to have a kind of symbolic value for him and the process of shifting his ideas, of establishing a new symbol, produces a struggle which involves his whole personality. The thing which has kept him going has been his humility, his absolute refusal to allow any pride or any opinion to stand between him and the evidence his talent for feeling offers to his observation.

It is for this reason that MacLeish's career, considered in terms of the ideas he has held, has the appearance of being a series of unconnected allegiances. Its consistency depends on the realization that he has sought always for a more complete consciousness of the feeling which he is beginning to define in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish—not some approximation of it—and for the verbal correlative which would communicate that feeling. This search, its motive being what it is, has frequently created myths; made, that is, out of the ideas which for the time being were the intellectual residences of this central feeling, a kind of religious symbol. One can follow this mytho-poetic process from the beginning. In 1915 the old Yale atmosphere of “ivy and elm, of dreams and aspirations” was a part of his myth. Most of the rest of it, as one can see easily by reading his poems and short stories in the Yale Literary Magazine, was not his at all, but was composed of the views and values of Robert Louis Stevenson, seasoned with a touch of Masefield and the pre-Raphaelites. And this myth is just visible in 1934 when he noticed generously “the young professors and instructors [at Yale] who are fired with a vital purpose” and imagined to himself an intellectual renaissance at Yale coming as a revulsion to the “new Yale”. This renaissance may have occurred, for the reasons MacLeish suggests or for other reasons. That is not the point; the point is that for MacLeish the idea of this renaissance became an emotional symbol, a factual home for the positive feeling by which he measured the “new Yale” and found it wanting.

One can see this same process going on in his attitude toward the war. He remembers his own experiences on the Marne and his feelings about his friends; he remembers, above all, Kenneth being shot down over Schoore in 1918

                                                                                I had not slept for knowing
He too, dead, was a stranger in that land
And felt beneath the earth in the wind's flowing
A tightening of roots and would not understand,
Remembering lake winds in Illinois,
That strange wind.

Thus there were feelings for him attached to the idea of the War as an heroic and brave adventure such that he rebelled against the dispassionate historical analysis of it which he dubbed The Second World War. The First World War was the War as those who took part in it had felt it to be as they took part in it. Many of them died feeling that way; and “Is it perhaps conceivable that the measure of vanity in a man's death is to be found not afterwards in a history which to him has no existence, but presently in the circumstances in which his death is met?” Feeling so, he wrote to those who had died in the war about those living today:

As for the gents they have joined the American Legion:

Belts and a brass band and the ladies' auxiliaries:
The Californians march in the OD silk:

We are all acting again like civilized beings:
People mention it at tea …

You can rest now in the rain in the Belgian meadow—
Now that it's all explained away and forgotten:
Now that the earth is hard and the wood rots:

Now that you are dead …

That First World War had a value for him out of all proportion to its historical validity, and no amount of cold reason about economic causes or passionate shouting about the horrors of war, calculated to disgust people with it, could make him want to forget that First World War.⁶

When Malcolm Cowley, writing, at least at first, with sympathy and understanding, suggested that this symbol did not serve for all one felt, since there were the dead of the next war to be thought of, and suggested that we put over the graves of those who died in the last war: they died bravely, they died in vain; when this occurred, one could see MacLeish beginning to move toward another symbol which would make place for both his feeling about the First World War and Cowley's concern for the result of the War, which MacLeish felt too:

Obviously, standing here upon the little heap which time forever pushes up to give a better perspective of the past—obviously you and I, alive in the year 1933 and looking back—obviously we can say in your fine phrase: “they died bravely, they died in vain.” The history of the post-war world proves they died in vain.

But one can also realize, reading his “Lines for an Interment” and his fine letter which I have just quoted, what profound feelings had to be detached from the old symbol before this change was possible. Indeed, it was three years before that new symbol was established and in “Speech to those who say Comrade” the comradeship of the old soldiers remembering “Their twentieth year and the metal odor of danger” became a part of that larger brotherhood which is “the rich and the rarest giving of life and the most valued” and which includes now also

                                                                                                                                                      The puddlers
Scorched by the same flame in the same foundries:
Those who have spit on the same boards with the blood in it;

Ridden the same rivers with green logs:
Fought the police in the parks of the same cities:
Grinned for the same blows: the same flogging: …

Those that have hidden and hunted and all such—
Fought together: labored together: they carry the
Common look like a card and they pass touching.

The bitterest public quarrel of MacLeish's career was the result of his opponent's—and indeed his own—failure to realize the function in his poetry of these mytho-poetic symbols. The symbol in that case was America, and one must go back a little to see how it caused misunderstanding. MacLeish had never lost the memory of the America he had known as a child and as a young man, the America which is so remembered in “The Farm”, and “Eleven”. That other America which bulked so large in the eyes of the exiles, an America debauched by industrialism, with no roots down in the soil, with no traditions, appears in his poetry around 1928 with such poems as “& Forty-Second Street”, “Critical Observations” and “Aeterna Poetae Memoria”. It was this feeling and feelings like it which drove so many American poets abroad in these years. They were trying to go some place where industrialism had not completely destroyed civilization, where there were still traditions and “peoples”. This feeling was never dominant in MacLeish's poetry, but its presence is plain. Soon, however, he turned once more to the America which had seemed valuable to him, and finally in “American Letter”, the merging of this feeling for America with the feeling for a land far off begins. On the one hand

America is West and the wind blowing.
America is a great word and the snow,
A way, a white bird, the rain falling,
A shining thing in the mind and the gull's call;

on the other,

A land far off, alien, smelling of palm-trees
And the yellow gorse at noon in the long calms.

The merging, however, has just begun, the emotional problem only just been faced:

This is our land, this is our ancient ground—
The raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers,
The different eyes, the wind, and the heart's change.
These we will not leave though the old call us.
This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.
Here we will live our years till the earth blind us—

The wind blows from the east. The leaves fall.
Far off in the pines a jay rises.
The wind smells of haze and the wild ripe apples.

I think of the masts at Cette and the sweet rain.

Around this kernel of remembered feelings and new apprehensions there began gradually to accrete other feelings; gradually the feelings of the exile began to blend with the new feelings. Prominent among these new feelings was a sense of the greater importance of the common man, of the simple folk who actually do the work and have the experience at first hand:

                                                                                                                                  but I
Fought in those battles! These were my own deeds!
These names he writes of mouthing them out as a man would
Names in Herodotus—dead and their wars to read—

These were my friends: these dead my companions: …

I: poor: blind in the sun: I have seen
With these eyes those battles: I saw Montezuma:
I saw the armies of Mexico marching. …

This same feeling is strong in the “Wildwest” and “Burying ground by the ties” sections of Frescoes. For it is in Frescoes that the new symbol first achieves complete expression; and it is Frescoes which produced the quarrel.

The first fresco is of the figure of America:

She lies on her left side her flank golden:
Her hair is burned black with the strong sun:
The scent of her hair is of rain in the dust on her shoulders:
She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.

Then come “Wildwest”, “Burying ground by the ties”, and an attack on the artist who prefers the “land far off, alien”, which had meant so much to MacLeish when he wrote “American Letter”:

He prefers a tidier stream with a terrace for trippers and
Cypresses mentioned in Horace or Henry James:
He prefers a country where everything carries the name of a
Countess or real king or an actual palace or
Something in Prose and the stock prices all in Italian.

This fresco is followed by the counterpart of the praise of the little folk, an ironic eulogy of the “Empire Builders”:

This is Mister Harriman making America:
Mister-Harriman-is-buying-the-Union-Pacific-at-Seventy:
The Santa Fe is shining in his hair.

Then finally comes the satire on those others who do not share with the little folk their feeling for the reality of America, the dogmatic revolutionaries. Before considering this passage, it would be well to glance back over the feelings which can now be seen to have gathered for MacLeish around the symbol of America. There is the feeling for “our country-earth, our blood, our kind”, backed by MacLeish's love of the American country side; there is the populist feeling for democracy, with its sympathy for the forgotten man and its scorn of men who have too much money; there is the distrust of all those who do not understand the real America; of rich men, and revolutionaries, and foreigners; and there is the difficulty of reconciling himself to the fact that so much of America either lacks a tradition altogether or has an obviously faked one: “Neither a place it is nor a blood name.”

From the beginning the “Niggers with narrow heels” and the “Bright Jews” had seemed to him one of the ironies of New York; and the emphasis on “family” and the mild, bridge-table anti-semitism of the upper middle classes must inevitably have been a part of his early environment, making him feel that the America he saw was a parody of the nation and race which ought to go to make a “people”.

Black white yellow and red and the fawn-colored
Bastards all of them, slick in the wrist, gone
Yank with a chewed cigar and a hat and a button,
Talking those Inglish Spich with the both ends cut:
And the New York Art and the real South African Music

(Written in Cincinnati by Irish Jews). …

By the time of Frescoes much of this exile feeling about America had been modified, but the feeling that revolutionaries, and perhaps particularly Jewish revolutionaries, did not understand the real America was still there, and their assurance that they did was a source of irritation to him. To him it appeared to be just one more attempt to substitute for a feeling an intellectual formulation:

Dialectical hope
And the kind of childish utopia
Found in small boys' schools—
Destiny written in Rules:
Life as the Teacher left it. …

The mild anti-semitism which he brought with him from his past was just one more weapon of satire to be used against the schoolboy assurance of these people:

Also Comrade Levine who writes of America
Most instructively having in 'Seventy-four
Crossed to the Hoboken side on the Barclay Street Ferry.

Michael Gold, reviewing Frescoes in the New Republic, took the anti-semitism of this section for a fundamental attitude, and raised the cry of Fascism; one might as well call fascist all those mild and silly middle-class people who will not stay at a hotel frequented by Jews. That attitude is ugly and stupid, but it is not the product of a systematized racial cult, and to suppose so is to suppose that America is already fascist. MacLeish not meaning or perhaps not quite realizing that he was inclined to think, that all church-going and doctrinaire revolutionaries were likely to be Jews, saw Mr. Gold's review as “the hysteria with which the literary Marxist attacks and exterminates (as he believes) his literary enemies …” and finished his comment on the review⁷ by stating precisely what he had intended by his satire: “Nothing which does not conform to the official dogmas will be endured [by literary Marxists] and any man who questions them, and certainly any man who makes fun of them, will be strung up to the nearest lamp post of Marxist invective.” Because he knew how unimportant the anti-semitism was to the real point of the satire, and because he did not want his poem misunderstood again as Gold had misunderstood it, MacLeish quietly changed “Levine” to “Devine” when the Frescoes was republished in Poems. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to examine more closely that feeling of his about Jews and Niggers—not this Jew or that Nigger, but the idea of each as a group to which his traditional feeling was attached—and to realize that this unexamined feeling in him was emotionally illogical and, once one got beyond the poet's use of poetry, dangerous.

The use of this symbol of America with all its corollaries in MacLeish's poetry was exactly similar to the use of the First World War. The fact that MacLeish believed the symbolic “well known New York literary type” did not understand the America about which he felt so deeply, no more proves him anti-semitic than his emotional loyalty to the World War his brother died believing in proves him a lover of war. And the fate of those two symbols has been much the same. The comradeship of the war has been absorbed into the larger symbol of a greater brotherhood. And as more and more of the unconscious superstitions of his cultural background have disappeared from MacLeish's America, the focus of his attention has been less and less on those who mean well and sometimes are nonetheless ignorant and arrogant, and more and more on the common people whom, in their sometimes blundering way, these revolutionaries are trying to help too. “Not myself, my soul, my glycerine-dropping eyes, but these unknown and nameless men, anonymous under this sky, small in those valleys and far-off and forever there.” The focus has been more and more on those who are addressed in “Speech to a crowd”, and “Speech to those who say Comrade”, and on what will help them:

Liberty and pride and hope
And every guide-mark of the mind
That led our blindness once has vanished.
This star will not. Love's star will not.

And on the possibilities of danger for them:

The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty:—

Until now that shift is complete and in “Speech to Scholars” MacLeish identifies himself with them and calls on the scholars, both for their own sakes and for the sake of those who need their help, to “Arise! Enlist! Take arms and fight!”

I have dwelt on these last two symbols not only because they illustrate from MacLeish's later work the function of ideas in his poetry, but because they show clearly the change in MacLeish's emotions behind these symbols. This change has taken place in spite of the survival of many of the familiar attitudes, including, though it is less prominent, much of the central attitude of his earlier poetry, that sense of the frequent inadequacy of human emotions to human ideas, which is still present in poems like “Speech to those who say Comrade”. This continuity of fundamental feeling, is one of the great rewards of MacLeish's approach to the world. His sensibility may develop—it has done so continuously up to the present—but there is never any sharp break. There is never the attempt to invent the feelings appropriate to a new idea, which is seen so frequently in people for whom the idea is more important than the attitude toward it, and which has been the cause of so much bad poetry. There is an organic and continuing relationship in MacLeish's poetry because he has so very rarely been false to what he felt, no matter what the cost. And the cost has sometimes been considerable. MacLeish knows well that “the creative intelligence … requires a transparence of mind, a naked sensitiveness, which puts it outside the protection of the stoic arm.” Yet to present the poem embodying this naked sensitiveness to the kind of criticism MacLeish has frequently met, knowing that he has deliberately cleared the poem of all hedges and dodges, is no easy thing to do.

But the change, the development, which may be followed by studying the career of these two symbols, has been considerable. It indicates, I think, that the time is approaching, if it is not already here, when MacLeish will be faced by the necessity of a new definition of his central feeling similar to the new definition stated in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. For the cumulative effect of this gradual but steady change in MacLeish's feelings is such as to have shifted their center. The readjustment which began with his return to America appears to be approaching or to have reached a temporary completion. If that guess be correct, then we may look for a poem which will do for MacLeish's present attitude what The Hamlet of A. MacLeish did for his attitude in 1928, and what, on a smaller scale, Frescoes did for his attitude in 1933. Unless, and there is evidence for this, one chooses to believe that this kind of definition does not come until MacLeish has begun to advance beyond the attitude dealt with in the definition.

Notes

Or to Rapallo.
There is in the Yale Library the manuscript of an early version of this article. Since the published essay is more impersonal and its author's feelings are communicated by a pervasive irony which it is not easy to convey by short quotation, I have frequently resorted to the early version for my illustrations.
The significance of this key passage to “The Hamlet” is indicated by its early career. It began as “Memories of A—” (1926), and appeared, substantially as it stands, under the title of “Fragment of a Biography” in the first American Caravan (1927), before being finally incorporated into “The Hamlet”.
The resemblance between MacLeish's position in our world and Matthew Arnold's position in his might be worth working out, not merely for historical reasons, but because they resemble each other as poets. Their resemblance as poets is suggested by the similarity of section five, particularly the middle passage, of “The Hamlet” of A. MacLeish” to “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”; or of “Land's End” to “Rugby Chapel”. Indeed, the image of land's end, which is the central image for this group of poems, has much the same function in his poetry as the Dover Beach image has in Arnold's. It is almost as if MacLeish recognized that resemblance when, beginning to move away from the attitude of “The Hamlet”, he wrote “‘Dover Beach’—a note to that poem.”
The influence of Eliot's means, insofar as means are separable from ends, has left its mark on MacLeish as well as on his contemporaries. “The new generation,” as he wrote in 1925, “is first and foremost Mr. Eliot. It is an introspective, self-conscious, sensitive, doubtful, deeply stirred generation, a deflected generation compelled to difficult utterance, a passionate generation afflicted with that maladie du siècle—‘ne pas vouloir être dupe.’”
The importance of his brother Kenneth's death in determining the value for MacLeish of this version of the War is perhaps best indicated by the fact that “Lines for an Interment” (from which the above passage is taken) is a reworking, with a more general referent, of a poem published in the Nation four years earlier and entitled “October 14, 1928 / For K. MacL.”
These remarks were made ostensibly as a general observation on “American intellectual Marxism”, and it is only a deduction that MacLeish was thinking of Gold's review of “Frescoes” when he wrote them. The connection is so clear, however, as to leave little doubt of MacLeish's reference.

Dayton Kohler (essay date 1939)

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SOURCE: Kohler, Dayton. “MacLeish and the Modern Temper.” South Atlantic Quarterly 38 (1939): 416-26.

[In the following essay, Kohler describes MacLeish as a “spokesman of the modern age” whose social poetry reaffirms the American ideal of human freedom.]

Archibald MacLeish has brought poetry back to the language of public speech, poetry that is once more a record of man's common fate. Written in an age of crisis, his work is an act of participation in the living world. For the problem of the modern writer is a search for the moral subject, one that will support a literature of belief and meaning, and relate that literature to the disordered life of our time. Nowhere is this search better illustrated than in the career of Archibald MacLeish. Step by step he has emerged from private association and the scholarly influences of his apprenticeship. Today his poems exhibit a craftsmanship of passion and intelligence. He has added his own intellectual equipment and the vigorous imagery of the present to the cultural tradition of the past, and the expression of his belief is an Americanism that goes beyond geographical or party loyalties.

For him the problem is also one of communication. Like all poets who have something to say, he has forged his own instrument of expression, and toward this end he has experimented daringly at times, attempting to enlarge the references of his themes by the use of technical devices borrowed from the radio and the talking picture. Behind the modernity of his technique, however, is a poet of passionate and austere vision. In his Poems, 1924-1933, we can trace the stages of his development: a young poet's awareness of his natural world, a struggle for self-identity, and at last a realization of the artist's responsibility in a period of social collapse and the decay of ancient faith. Public Speech carried him forward into the ranks of a collective society. The Fall of the City and Air Raid pose dramatically a problem of our age, the menace of the dictator and man's dwindling impulse toward freedom. Land of the Free asserts the necessity of action; in a stricken land men must stand up to live.

The verse plays for radio are interesting both for the poet's use of broadcasting technique and the extension of a literary philosophy which gives meaning and value to his later work. The Fall of the City has for its theme “the terror that stands at the shoulder of our time”—the submission of the masses before the Strong Man of modern destiny. The poet presents his drama as originating in a broadcasting studio of a large city, where the announcer stands overlooking a market place in which the citizens have gathered to hear the words of a woman returned from the grave to foretell bloodshed and disaster. When she comes to the square at noon, shrilling her ill-doomed prophecy, panic takes the crowd. Disorder spreads with the arrival of a runner bringing word that a great conqueror is marching against the city. There is much confusion and shouting, above which rises the voice of the announcer as he describes the tumult in the square below him. An orator argues for peace. A second messenger reports that other cities in the conqueror's path have surrendered. When the priests speak, a mob led by a young girl storms the temple. An old general tries to reason with the crowd. He tells them that their grandfathers died to be free, but now they are juggling with their freedom. He urges them to die fighting; otherwise their children will crawl before the invader. Voices lifted in terror drown his words. The guards retreat from the outer walls; smoke of a great burning fills the sky. Then the conqueror enters the city. His shadow looms large in the afternoon sunlight and the people fall prostrate before him. Only the announcer remains standing; he alone sees that this is no man but a warlike, hollow shape of metal. And he proclaims.

The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty:
The long labor of liberty ended!

But the city has fallen. The masterless men have found their master.

In Air Raid MacLeish again uses the announcer as a dramatic character to give his play the effect of a spot news broadcast. The scene is an old border town in middle Europe, and the action is a symphonic contrast between the sharply visual details of the attack and settled habits of a simple, racial culture, revealed in the speech of the characters, that is being destroyed by modern warfare. Stationed in a house overlooking the public square, the announcer waits for the enemy planes from across the border. From time to time the microphone picks up the sounds of everyday village life, the gossip of housewives at their morning work, a sick woman's monotone, the voices of young lovers. Then the planes roar overhead. Death falls from the sky upon these people. Stories of former battles had not prepared them for a new conqueror who kills women and children in the totalitarian wars. The play illustrates the announcer's commentary:

In the old days they watched along the borders:
They called their warfare in the old days wars
And fought with men and men who fought were killed:
We call it peace and kill the women and the children.

Land of the Free is completely documentary in theme. On one side of the page are pictures that range from background shots of small towns, farm lands and crowded cities to close-up studies of American faces—farmers, workmen on relief, hitchhikers, underfed children—a graphic cross-section of America under the discipline of recent social experience. Beside these camera shots the lines of the poem have been placed like the sound track of a talking picture, a running commentary upon the wasted land and its impoverished people. The result is a new kind of American picture book, in which text and illustrations are woven together by the theme of the poem itself: in our land today freedom is more than frontier earth-room or elbow-room; it is a liberty of men, not land. This is poetry that rises above the slim volume on the parlor table into a larger world of thought and action.

The implications of these poems are clear. For Archibald MacLeish the moral subject is the problem of men's freedom in a world threatened by mass politics and social upheaval. He has made his own compromise with the time-spirit, but his art bears the marks of a battle fought along several critical fronts. No longer a poet-wanderer knowing confusion and doubt, he has become a poet of participation and declaration. In Public Speech he shows clearly the issues of the class struggle, although his interests are determined by the human problems of the cause and not entirely by the political systems involved. Those critics who have welcomed him into the Marxist ranks because he attacks Fascism in “The German Girls” and his radio plays should remember his insistence that men are not made brothers by words in a book.

The brotherhood is not by the blood certainly:
But neither are men brothers by speech—by saying so:
Men are brothers by life lived and are hurt for it.

Here is an indication of his political belief. Because he writes in the present he is aware of strikes and breadlines and the dictators' wars, but he speaks only for the common man in the inevitable drift of time. And although he believes liberty and brotherhood possible of attainment, he carries no banner in a political parade. He states thoughtfully and sincerely that experience shared is the common lot of men, a vision of human destiny that attempts to rationalize present needs by past greatness and future good.

The predicament of Archibald MacLeish as a poet is this: he is writing in a period overshadowed by economic and political determinism. Modernism alone is not enough, for modernism is an attitude of disbelief in contemporary values that begins with weariness and disillusionment and ends in defeatist snobbery and despair. At its best it produced the historical catalogues of Ezra Pound's Cantos and the splintered classicism of T. S. Eliot. But the Wasteland of the Twenties could not be changed by neoclassic charting within its borders and a definite movement to politicalize our literature began with the crisis of 1931. The literary manifestoes of our time—the humanism of Thornton Wilder, the withdrawal of Eliot toward an ancient ritual and royalist state, the agrarian revival in the South, the swing of Dos Passos and others toward the revolutionary left—showed the desire of these artists to reintegrate themselves into the social group so that some measure of security might be found in a world in which economics and social and political warfare have destroyed the values that ordered the lives of men in earlier ages.

As a poet MacLeish has shared the hopelessness and confusion of the present age. Man has been challenged by the systems which he created; before he can remold a civilization instinct with chaos and decay he must reaffirm the motive of his existence in the modern world. He must find an image of mankind in which men with common faith can still believe. The time of the poet as a prophet and myth-maker has passed. Today the sincere artist must justify himself in his own age. He is no longer the creator of systems, but their interpreter or critic. Speaking to the second National Congress of American Writers in Carnegie Hall in June, 1937, MacLeish made clear his allegiance in the class struggle. He declared for the freedom of art and the common man when he said: “The war is already made. Not a preliminary war. Not a local conflict. The actual war between the fascist powers and the things they would destroy, the war against which we must defend ourselves. … And in that war, that Spanish war on earth, we, writers who contend for freedom, are ourselves, and whether we wish so or not, engaged.”

Two currents of poetic attitude can be traced through the poetry of Archibald MacLeish: his sense of the past and his deep loyalty and passion for the American land. This strong feeling for a place marked his departure from the cactus-clumped stretches of the Wasteland, and his image of America, the brown woman “with the mouth of no other country,” is a symbol of his love for the American earth and his people.

Although he disdains classicism as a formal motive of art, MacLeish is a traditional poet in the same way that Eliot and Pound are also in the stream of tradition. That is to say, he is not lacking in the historical sense which links his work with the literature of the past. He has borrowed much from older writers and from anthropology, not by way of passive imitation but to provide a proper background for his own imagination. Legends of fertility, conveyed in images of sun and water and man's earliest beliefs in primitive religion and custom, give an atmosphere of racial mythology to The Pot of Earth and The Happy Marriage. Elpenor, fated companion of Odysseus, speaks again to the wandering, anonymous generation of “1933.” Conquistador takes its structural framework from the account of Bernal Diaz in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain. This sense of the past and the present together serves to mold the structure of his thought and the movement of his poems.

MacLeish has always insisted upon the honesty of the poet's vision. He himself looks at life in terms of conflict. In The Hamlet of A. MacLeish this struggle is an internal one. He presents man—the Western man of the twentieth century—as a timeless Hamlet knowing the frustration of indecision and doubt, unable to find in his own time the greater, external symbols that correspond to his inner will-to-believe. The poet has built his theme upon the stage directions of the Elizabethan play, borrowing from Shakespeare the frame into which he has fitted scenes of his own devising as reflective or illustrative of contemporary life. The whole is a dramatic condensation of the hopes, doubts, and fears that confused a rootless generation in the aftermath of war.

Conquistador projects a conflict of civilizations. It is also the great American fable, for the conquest of Mexico is the climax of romantic, individual achievement upon the Western continent. The story follows the progress of our civilization: the pioneers who took the savage land, the organizers who followed them, the growth of cities, the coming of machinery, the lost villages and forgotten hopes, and in the end a collapsing social fabric while the great dream lives only in the scattered memories of a few old men dulled with age and broken by the struggle to endure. “That which I have myself seen and the fighting. …” This is epic, a story of heroic achievement in the recollections of Bernal Diaz, as strong and violent as the American temper, a narrative that reasserts the need of heroism and action.

In Panic he faced his problem directly for the first time. This play is a morality drama of the class struggle, when the banking crisis of late February, 1933, made real the death-will of a capitalistic class, deprived of the symbols of its power, in contrast to the blind, obstinate will-to-live of the masses. The suicide of McGafferty, the chief banker, symbolizes the crumbling faith and economic fatalism of a social class. But for the proletariat it is a victory without honor; their will-to-live holds no belief in man's common destiny.

For MacLeish himself the problem of man's fate depends upon the preservation of a national tradition. His Americanism is as far removed as possible from the easy nationalism of a Walt Whitman or a Paul Engle, and his poetry makes evident the fact that his choice was deliberate and difficult. It is a strange thing, he says, to be an American, one of a nation dwelling “on the open curve of a continent.”

It is strange to sleep in the bare stars and to die
On an open land where few bury before us:
(From the new earth the dead return no more.)
It is strange to be born of no race and no people.

This is not a country where men have lived their generations of common ancestral belief and custom, but

This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.
Here we will live our years till the earth blind us.

In his later work MacLeish has accepted the folkways and familiar earth of his inheritance. The distinctive quality of his Americanism is not an attitude in the abstract or political sense but the determination of a man to understand himself in his own time. He has insisted again and again that the poet must return to his own land or be forever rootless. His own feeling for the American land is at all times a responsible emotion. It is clear that his imagination has been stirred by the contrast between the promise of a new way of life in a new country and the tragic unfulfillment of that life grown mean and hopeless in a land wasted by pioneer prodigality and further exploited by capital and machinery. The promise of freedom and plenty has dwindled to a waste of human impulse and effort in a nation of floods, dust bowls, strikes, unemployment, and government subsidies. His contempt for those who have despoiled the land for private gain or would exploit it for political experiment shows a love of country that goes beneath social change and economic theory.

The Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City were not, as many believed, a topical American version of the hymn to Horst Wessel. They were poems in praise of the land itself, and their purpose was to trace man's relationship to the American scene through the Indian wars of frontier days, the laboring life, and the mixed motives of expatriate artists, capitalists and communists. With quiet violence he contrasts the records of the empire-builders, to whom the land was all prices and the inked pages of their ledgers, with the letter Meriwether Lewis wrote to Thomas Jefferson “when the land lay waiting for its westward people.” And having satirized the despoiling industrialists, he speaks to revolutionaries with ironic warning:

She's a tough land under the oak-trees mister.
It may be she can change the word in the book
As she changes the bone of a man's head in his children:
It may be that the earth and the men remain.

For the earth does not change. This nation could be a fruitful land again. But somewhere there must be a new beginning, a new history of unknown, nameless men, many together in a common democracy. In the Frescoes for the first time MacLeish identified his feelings for the land with his sympathy for men exploited by the same systems of rapacity and greed.

III

Our course is forward, the poet tells us in “1933,” carrying with us what we have saved from the wreck of recent years, forgetting the soft words of rich men, teachers, dictators, and rebels who would delay us for time, until we come to the future and a “clean beach, an unplowed country,” there to “begin it again.” This singleness of purpose holds true also for the individual and the artist. He speaks for the nameless man in Panic:

The world's to the unnamed man with the
Reckless speech who will stand to the
Cold marching stars and
Shriek in the face of it hardening
Man's mortal body to
Bear and endure like a god. …

And for the artist in “The Social Muse”:

He that goes naked goes farther at last than another:
Wrap the bard in a flag or a school and they'll jimmy his
Door down and be thick in his bed—for a month:

(Who recalls the address now of the Imagists?)
But the naked man has always his own nakedness.
People remember forever his live limbs.

The poems in Public Speech speak with a keener social awareness. He says that “hope that was a noble flame has fanned to violence and feeds on cities and the flesh of men,” and man's only light today is love—not a personal, romantic love but a community of experience revealed in the “love that hardens into hate—that leads now when all other darken.” He counsels the oppressed who are history's victims, telling them to write the new history for themselves. “Tell yourselves that the earth has food to feed you.” And he urges them to fight for their freedom, if necessary, in The Fall of the City:

There's nothing in this world worse—
Empty belly or purse or the
Pitiful hunger of children—
Than doing the Strong Man's will!
The free will fight for their freedom.
They're free men first.

Behind his love for humanity and the land lies the poet's desire to re-establish communication without shame or terror between man and his native ground. For him nature is not the healer or teacher but simply the good earth, and he could re-create a familiar world in which men could move from birth to death with common heroism and common customs toward a mutual destiny. This is a view of the democratic tradition transcending all regional coloring, politics, or social economics, the reason for his difficult neutrality when he refuses to go into camp with the Marxists with whom he sympathizes most. He has written: “It is no longer A Man against the stars. It is Mankind: that which has happened always to all men, to the particular incidents of particular lives. The common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon, of time, of disappearance-and-their-place-knowing-them-no-more. The salt-sweating, robust, passionate, and at the last death-devoured lives of all men always. Man in the invisible sea of time that drowns him. Man in the sun, on the earth, under the branches—and, as he breathes, time sweeping him away.”

Archibald MacLeish is a spokesman of the modern age, and, I believe, the most challenging poet in America today. From him the poetry of nameless men of anonymous generations, not a poetry of collective dialectics but a literature of beliefs and emotions that form an enduring pattern of human life.

On the side of technical experiment he is equally important. The subtlety and beauty of his diction is the result of patient discipline in the practice of his craft. He has achieved a complete individualization of language to express new levels of thought and emotion in his use of the compact, sinewy line, a cumulative effect of imagery, and suspended overtones of sound gained by rhyming final accented syllables. He has attempted also a rehabilitation of language in the Anglo-Saxon tradition—what he has called the “hard iron of English”—by which the likeness of the word carries the weight of its meaning and the names of things create their own image-shadows. His preference for Anglo-Saxon words, a realistic imagery, and the clipped, alliterative ancestral speech was carried to its logical development in Conquistador, where it gives a richness of imagination and poetic invention to the assonance echoes of a terza rima line that the poet has made effectively his own.

In Panic he made another departure in the technique of dramatic poetry. Recently the stage has been changing from realism toward a poetic imagery to express complex passions and ideas, but Elizabethan blank verse has not proved a suitable vehicle for the nervous, excited rhythms of American speech. For his purpose he used trochaic and dactylic measures in which the rhythm falls from a stressed syllable. The result is an idiomatic structure that holds the vitality of a spoken language within the sharpness of its accent. These measures he employed again in The Fall of the City and Air Raid. The value of technical experiment in these plays lies in his attempt to make the radio a stage for verse by means of the spoken word alone. He believes that the radio is especially adapted to the needs of the poet because its mechanical effects are entirely those of sound. There are no actors to watch, no settings, no other visual devices of stage drama. There is only the spoken word to dress the stage, bring on the actors, carry the meaning of the lines; and this drama of word-interest has always been within the special province of poetry. An even greater aid is the character of the announcer himself. He is the most effective device for interpretation and comment that writers have had since the chorus of Greek drama, a modern dramatic image that provides a classic order of suspense.

Archibald MacLeish has created a renewal of technique in his search toward a modern manner of communication, and for this purpose he has brought to hand the speech arts of the radio and the talking film. Land of the Free is made more effective by the fact that the pictures present a camera record of American life, while the lines of the poem itself are an accompanying sound track of meaning and purpose. Not the least of his services to poetry is his attempt to adapt its language and imagery to the modern arts of sound.

His public interests are reflected in his own life as in his poetry. His recent appointment as Librarian of Congress marks still another direction in his distinguished career as a scholar, editor, journalist, and poet.

Certainly he is one of the few contemporary poets in whose work there is evidence of progress, for he has turned from minor, derivative themes, like the nostalgia of old loves, early times, other places, the hard lot of the poet in exile, to the subjects of great verse, praise of the land and the difficult histories of men. The public speech of his later poems, a recognition of the needs of common life and habits and feelings of common men, resolves a personal conflict into the anonymous artistry of action. He reaffirms the idea of human freedom in poetry that belongs to our country and our times.

Hyall Howe Waggoner (essay date April 1943)

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SOURCE: Waggoner, Hyall Howe. “Archibald MacLeish and the Aspect of Eternity.” College English 4, no. 7 (April 1943): 402-12.

[In the following essay, Waggoner explores the role of scientific thought in MacLeish's poetic representation of infinity and eternity.]

Since the time of Edward Taylor the chief philosophical problem for American poets has been the resolution of their beliefs in relation to the ever swelling current of positivistic naturalism. Responding to the insistent need of man to see himself and his life sub specie aeternitatis, our poets, from Bryant to MacLeish, have sought over and over to fit their intuitions into systems often too narrow or too vague to endure.

But the inadequacy of their metaphysics to make intelligible all the facets of experience and to satisfy all the demands of intuition has not removed the need for a system that would clarify the life of man as seen both in time and in eternity. In an age and a land predominantly secular, practical, and positivistic—an age and a land typified in Franklin, P. T. Barnam, and Edison rather than in Edwards, Emerson, and E. A. Robinson—they have endeavored to make their total experience intelligible by considering ultimate questions and answering them in terms of Calvinism, Nature, or the Divine Average. All our greater poets have wrestled with this problem, but the need of a satisfactory solution based not on fluid faith but on rational comprehension has become more urgent as the tide of positivistic naturalism has swelled; for the old answers have seemed ever less satisfactory, while the old need to see life under the aspect of eternity has, for the sensitive and thoughtful, diminished not at all.

Between Taylor and MacLeish—metaphysicals both—American literature has swung full circle. The Puritan outlook is far less foreign to MacLeish than it was to Whitman, Emerson, or even Franklin, who began life as a Calvinist. Edward Taylor was scarcely more concerned with time and eternity man's feebleness, and the rotting of the flesh than is MacLeish. The difference between the two poets is less in their vision than in their metaphysics: Taylor could accept a system adequate to the needs of his vision, but MacLeish has not yet found one.

Critics have made much of the fact that MacLeish has reflected in his poetry, especially in his “middle” period, from about 1925 to about 1933, all the bewilderment, isolation, and despair characteristic of the intellectuals of his generation. They have pointed out that MacLeish, like Joseph Wood Krutch, speaks in “the voice of our time”; that he is, or has been, the poet of the waste land and the lost generation; and that, with Eliot and Aiken, he was one of the first to express the new nihilism. On the other hand, Professor Cargill, in his recent Intellectual America: Ideas on the March, has explained this aspect of MacLeish's poetry by relating it to the ideology of the French Decadents. But may it not be that MacLeish's awe in the face of “the undigested mystery,” his constant, unanswered questioning of “the vacant light, the bright void, the listening, idiot silence,” though closely related to the nihilism of The Modern Temper, suggestive of some aspects of The Waste Land, and no doubt influenced by the ideology of the Decadents, was neither nihilism or the gibberish of hollow men, on the one hand, nor mere literary posturing in imitation of his French masters on the other? After one has recognized the influence of the Symbolists and of the cynicism that is connected with, though not completely accounted for by, the aftereffects of the first World War, one must finally conclude, I think, that it was, after all, the scientific outlook of the twenties that was the principal source of the ideas and points of view in MacLeish's early poetry. But the outlook has not operated as most critics believe.

If we leave out of account the earliest pieces which the poet later excluded from Poems, 1924-1933, pieces written before the poet had really found himself, we may look for the key to MacLeish's early attitude in the opening lines of Hamlet:

From these night fields and waters do men raise,
Sailors from ship, sleepers from their bed,
Born, mortal men and haunted with brief days,
They see the moon walk slowly in her ways
And the grave stars and all the dark outspread.
They raise their mortal eyelids from this ground:
Question it. …
                                                            What art thou. …
                                                                                                                                            And no sound.

The conclusions that the people draw from the vast silence is simply the rather obvious one that the stars do not answer questions. But when the apparition appears “the stench of death, of flesh rot,” chokes and terrifies Hamlet. The dreadful shape, the unknown terror, we are told, haunts all Hamlets, making “sick men of us, haunted fools / Hag-ridden blinking starers at the dark.” Hamlet is disturbed by the reflection that the stars do not darken when we die: “I say there were millions / Died like that and the usual constellations.” The implication of all this is, of course, that we are in an alien universe. But Hamlet is not certain; he continues to search for understanding.

Searching, he gropes to the very borders of the waste land. He hears the “Giggle of the wind along / The empty gutters of the sky. / Snigger of the faint stars. Catcalls.” Questioning, terrified by the cold between the stars, he realizes that there is no answer to our questions because we do not know what to ask. “We have learned all the answers, all the answers: / It is the question that we do not know.”

We do not know what to ask, for what Sorokin calls our “sensate” culture allows us no technique for putting ultimate questions. Having rejected both philosophy and theology as knowledge, we are left with the scientific method only, in terms of which man can neither put final questions nor find answers to them. Hamlet's rejection of the old answers and his inability to frame a proper question remind us of passages in so many well-known works of the last forty years that we seem to be reading a paraphrase of a hundred of them. One of the most widely read of the countless popularizations of science that our scientific age has produced, Sir James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe, began in a similar vein:

Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time. Our first impression is something akin to terror. We find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances, terrifying because of its inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye, terrifying because of our extreme loneliness, and because of the material insignificance of our home in space—a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world. But above all else, we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own; emotion, ambition and achievement, art and religion all seem equally foreign to its plan.

But Sir James invited the scorn of “realists” by turning from science to Platonic philosophy for his questions and his answers. Stimulated by the new discoveries in physics, he plunged into the deep waters of philosophy to conclude that “those inert atoms in the primaeval slime which first began to foreshadow the attributes of life were putting themselves more, and not less, in accord with the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Without his plunge into the deep waters the scientist would have been unable to reach any rational metaphysical conclusion whatever. But MacLeish has been unwilling or unable to go to philosophy or religion for his questions and answers. Hence he has presented the facts of man's position in the physical universe, but he has been unable to find meaning in the resultant picture.

“It is colder now / there are many stars / we are drifting / North by the Great Bear”—these, the opening lines of “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” suggest the outlines of MacLeish's thought on man's place in nature. Reading them, one thinks of the alien universe pictured in Bertrand Russell's “A Free Man's Worship” and since become the basic premise for the thought of many. One thinks, too, of that great stumbling-block in the way of those who would construct optimistic evolutionary philosophies, the concept of a universe that is running down. Certainly the second law of thermodynamics has been one of the most frightful of the specters haunting the modern Hamlet. Although the law is two-edged and may be interpreted as proof of the world's creation by a creator at a definite time, the climate of modern opinion makes such interpretation almost unheard of today among those sufficiently well read to be acquainted with the law at all. So it is that this law, which Sir A. S. Eddington has called “supreme … among the laws of Nature,” serves primarily to call up pictures of a dead universe: “It is very cold / there are strange stars near Arcturus / Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.”

But MacLeish has not been content to appropriate the concepts of astronomy and accept them unquestioningly as the cosmic setting for man. He has probed the meaning of scientific meanings. Attempting to arrive at an evaluation of scientific data without having recourse to metaphysics, he has shown himself exceptionally well acquainted with the epistemology of scientists. In that much but seldom intelligently discussed poem, Einstein, we see the poet pondering the problem of knowledge as it is affected by modern theoretical physics and especially by the theories of relativity. The solid world of matter, Einstein discovers, dissolves before him as he seeks to understand it. Matter, space, and time—all are left mere concepts in the knowing mind:

                                                                                          Still he stands
Watching the vortex widen and involve
In swirling dissolution the whole earth
And circle through the skies till swaying time
Collapses crumpling into dark the stars
And motion ceases and the sifting world
Opens beneath.
                                                                      When he shall feel infuse
His flesh with the rent body of all else
And spin within his opening brain the motes
Of suns and worlds and spaces.

That the poem is not merely a poetic fancy but a serious imaginative treatment of the problem of knowledge in the light of recent science becomes apparent if we compare with it the statements of one of the world's foremost scientists. Eddington has put the matter thus: “Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. … The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.” Einstein in the poem wrestles with “the world of shadows” that he has created to be symbolic of the world of experience; but he finds that his symbols are too insubstantial to be grasped, too elusive and shadowy to be questioned. He cannot bridge the gap between his flesh and the shadowy world of his symbols. He cannot, to put it simply, see himself—his flesh, his experience, his life in all its felt reality—and the world presented symbolically by his scientific knowledge as one coherent whole. He cannot find a place for himself in the universe he has scientifically constructed—the universe that is in his mind, yet not under his control; that is symbolical only, yet more real than his frustrated desires and not to be bent to their ends:

But still the dark denies him. Still withstands
The dust his penetration and flings back
Himself to answer him.

We cannot, then, be sure of what our scientific knowledge means. The most important two lines in Einstein, the lines that contain the point toward which the whole poem moves, are the last two. (Strangely enough, they are the least often quoted or referred to in discussions of the poem.) The dust which has withstood Einstein's penetration “flings back himself to answer him. / Which seems to keep / Something inviolate. A living something.”

Einstein is left, that is, not a hollow man in a waste land but, in relation to his knowledge, the one reality. Here is an affirmation of the centrality of the knowing mind which, if it approaches solipsism, does so no more closely than interpretations of scientific knowledge that have gained wide currency in the last twenty years. MacLeish's conception of man's place in nature is based on a wide acquaintance with physical science; but his conception of the nature of man repudiates the genetic fallacy in all the varied disguises in which it insinuates itself into our thought. For MacLeish an adequate description of man does not begin with the words, “Man is nothing but.” Man, the “something inviolate,” is the one reality of which we can be certain. And not man as pictured by the behaviorists, not man without a mind, a memory, or a will, not man the biological automaton, but man as we know him because we ourselves are men—this is the man in which MacLeish believes, this is the ultimate reality.

When, in “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” the poet attempted to sum up all that man has learned, all that he knows or presumably can know, he emphasized the dichotomy between the knowing mind and the thing known, a dichotomy so great and so apparent that the end of man's quest for ultimate meaning must be acknowledgment of mystery: the knowing mind finds consciousness nowhere but in mind; when it turns to the stuff from which it sprang, it is unable to bridge the gap between “mind” and “matter.” “I will tell you all we have learned … the lights in the sky are stars / We think they do not see / we think also / the trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses.” Again, as in the case of the ideas in Einstein, this is no mere poetic fancy or imitation of a Decadent attitude. The philosopher F. S. C. Northrop has stated the problem succinctly in prose:

In other words, the task which we now face is to reconcile the obvious presence of colors and sounds and pains and pleasures [consciousness] with the equally obvious extensive facts of stuff and change [the world studied by natural science].

Since he has so far been unwilling to go to metaphysics for a solution, MacLeish has had to stop with the statement of the problem. This is the great unanswered question in his poetry which the critics make so much of and interpret so variously. It is because this problem remains unsolved that the modern Hamlet can think of nothing meaningful to ask of the universe. But the formulation of the problem and the emphasis which the poet has given it are not the only effects of science on his poetry. The mere stating of a problem which must be left unsolved can create a mood and determine a perspective. The problem of the place of man and his mind in nature has done so for all of MacLeish's early and for much of his later poetry.

It is surely no mere coincidence that Aldous Huxley has developed what one reviewer has called a “religious mania”; that such diverse figures as T. S. Eliot and M. J. Adler have become convinced of the imperative need of our recognizing philosophy and theology as real knowledge, not just opinion or rationalization; that many theologians, convinced of the falsity of the outlook of Protestant modernism, have reaffirmed some of the insights that vitalized the poetry of Edward Taylor—and that all this and more has happened in the last fifteen years. One popular explanation of these phenomena is that, having reached the nadir of belief, we have been forced to turn and clutch at straws in order to make life seem worth living. Such an explanation makes the philosophical developments of the last fifteen years mere rationalizations of human needs. Another explanation runs thus: Since world conditions are now intolerable for sensitive minds to contemplate with equanimity, since hope has been taken out of life on the economic and social levels, we are escaping from an unpleasant situation by carefully constructing otherworldly hopes to compensate for this world's patent failure. This view makes philosophy a by-product of economic and social conditions. Needless to say, in a culture still predominantly positivistic, these two explanations are much in favor.

But I want to propose another. It is that one of the unlooked-for effects of contemporary science has been to make sensitive and imaginative minds ever more conscious of the stature of a man against the sky. This tendency to view man under the aspect of eternity can lead to the transcendental faith of a poet like Robinson or to the intense pessimism of a poet like Jeffers; it can lead to the Catholicism of Eliot or to the mysticism of Huxley. Or, as MacLeish's development testifies, it can lead simply to a new perspective accompanied by no dogmatic faith, supersensate philosophy, or genuinely religious mysticism. Such an explanation suggests that the new outlook so common today is neither a mere swing of the pendulum nor a physically determined by-product of an economic revolution, but a rediscovery of an old truth, a truth known to Taylor and Jonathan Edwards but since too often forgotten: that man's days are few and his powers feeble, that no “religion of humanity” is enough.

MacLeish laid the basis for this point of view in one of his best early poems, “Seafarer”:

And learn O voyager to walk
The roll of earth, the pitch and fall
That swings across these trees those stars:
That swings the sunlight up the wall.

And learn upon these narrow beds
To sleep in spite of sea, in spite
Of sound the rushing planet makes:
And learn to sleep against the ground.

The poet had to learn to walk the roll of earth because, as he said in his “Lines for a Prologue,” “These alternate nights and days, these seasons / Somehow fail to convince me. It seems / I have the sense of infinity!”

It is hardly too much to say that of all the poems written before 1933 the majority are concerned with or grow out of this “sense of infinity.” “Cinema of Man,” “L'An Trent,” “Le Secret,” “Immortal Helix,” “Verses for a Centennial”—all play variations on this theme. Two other short poems may speak for all that I have named. “Signature for Tempo” opens with this stanza:

Think that this world against the wind of time
Perpetually falls the way a hawk
Falls at the wind's edge but is motionless—

Obviously no prose statement can convey the total meaning of a stanza of poetry, but if one were to attempt to suggest in a phrase or two the concept imaginatively embodied in the opening lines of “Signature for Tempo,” would not the phrases be “a sense of cosmic space,” “the world's position in the galaxy,” and “relativity”? Such concepts derive from astronomy and, particularly, from Einstein. The influence of the latter on MacLeish's thinking and so on his poetry becomes more obvious if we read further in the poem:

These live people,
These more
Than three dimensional
By time protracted edgewise
          into heretofore
People,
How shall we bury all
These queer-shaped people,
In graves that have no more
          than three dimensions?

A poem that would be quite undistinguished but for the sense of infinity that informs it will serve as a last example from the short poems. “Nocturne,” after presenting in symbols the aching incompleteness of modern consciousness, ends with a question and a statement:

What is it we cannot recall?
Tormented by the moon's light
The earth turns wandering through the night.

Much has been written in the last few years about MacLeish's failure in Conquistador to present either a “true” historical narrative or a usable modern interpretation of the historical events dealt with. On the one hand, some critics charge that the actions of the conquerors are shadowy and vague, determined by a dimly understood fate; thus, since this is not the way the conquest must have seemed to the men who took part in it, the poem perverts history. On the other hand is the charge that, since history is always the interpretation of the past in terms of our own concepts and for our own purposes, the poem, in presenting only a riot of sense impressions and unexplained marching and slaughtering, in no sense presents a usable interpretation of the past. It seems to me that two things should be said in answer to these charges. First, and less important, is the fact that the poem purports to be the memories of an old man approaching death; it is remembered experience, and the memory of an old man may cling to sense impressions and forget reasons and military strategy. Second, the poem presents a series of episodes in history as seen under the aspect of eternity. The fact that the narrator in the poem is old and approaching death is the device which makes this perspective plausible; but the reasons for the adoption of the perspective are not merely those of literary effectiveness. Like Pot of Earth,Conquistador is MacLeish's attempt to tell a story of human events in time from the point of view of an observer who is aware of eternity.

One who is, like Bernal Diaz, aware of the imminent approach of death may recall with an unnatural keenness the stream of impressions that were the living reality of a series of events in the past while those events were taking place; but he is likely also to be preternaturally aware of the ephemeral nature of the very sensations that are so vividly recalled. He may be acutely conscious of the dilemma at the heart of modern thought: fleeting, transitory, insubstantial consciousness seems at once the only indisputable reality and a flickering light in the darkness of cosmic space. So it is that a poem that seems chiefly concerned with the sights and sounds and odors, the food and blood and Indian girls that made up the reality for Bernal Diaz of the interminable weeks of marching and fighting, leaves the reader with a curious sense of the unreality of the experiences so vividly described. For even for Bernal Diaz they are in a sense unreal: the living, throbbing reality of them has been replaced by vivid but inconsequent memories, memories that assert the connection between the young man and the old chiefly to satisfy the old man's pride. But in another sense also the events narrated affect the reader as unreal: under the aspect of eternity, marching and eating and making love are seen as insubstantial, unreal even. The sensations, that is, that are the subject matter of the bulk of the verses of Conquistador take place in time but are seen out of time.

It is natural, then, that a blending of sense impressions and intuitions of infinity should be the distinguishing mark of the poem. Such lines as these give us the keynote of the mood of the whole work:

Ah but the mark of man's heel is alone in the
Dust under the whistling of hawks! Companion of
Constellations the trace of his track lies!
Endless is unknown earth before a man. …

The modern sense of the mystery of life and death, of the vastness of space and the physical insignificance of man—the tendency, in short, of many sensitive modern minds once more to concern themselves with eternity as well as with time—all this is read back into the story of the march of the conquerors through Mexico. The reader never is allowed to forget, as he reads the poem, that while the men march the earth turns on its axis and circles the sun, and both speed through the darkness of the galaxy among galaxies. The poem is actually a commentary on the present given through an interpretation of the past, an allegory of the life of man dwarfed in a vast, strange land under foreign stars.

Hence it is that the poem is full of violent sensations without meaning. Hence it is that bewilderment, nostalgia, a sense of the mystery of life, the smell of death, dominate the poem. The gap between conscious experience and an apparently alien universe, left unbridged, precludes the possibility of a rational ordering of the senseless flux of experience. The eerie light of the stars flickers ominously over the figures of the conquerors.

III

But the conquerors remain intensely human. Their hopes, their fears, their vividly remembered sensations are central; they are neither explained away nor ridiculed but are presented for what they are. The question implied throughout the poem, the question that inevitably arises in the mind of the thoughtful reader—how the experience of the conquerors and the external universe in which it takes place can be made to fit into a coherent whole—is left unanswered. The task of conjoining (to use a phrase of Edward Taylor) infinity and finity is not attempted, but the need to do so is clearly implied.

That need MacLeish has frequently expressed in his prose. The reason for the urgency of the need has been so often discussed by both the poet and his critics that it need only be mentioned here. As MacLeish wrote in 1923, ours is a time of great restlessness, bewilderment, confusion, and cynicism. The knowledge and discoveries concerning man and the universe amassed during the nineteenth century have, he felt, so overborne the human mind, so shattered traditional beliefs, that as yet no explanation, no synthesis in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the significance of this knowledge for man, for the future, and for man's relation to nature, has been made. We have knowledge with no explanation of it, no unifying philosophy or interpretation of it, and instead of trying to deal with existing knowledge, we try to gather more. Poetry, then, as MacLeish wrote in 1931, “which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt—an image of mankind in which men can again believe.”

One way, if not of creating such an image, at least of putting off the necessity of doing so, is to turn one's attention from man to men, from the individual as both an individual and a representative sample of mankind, to problems of social organization. Thus to shift one's interest from man to society is, of course, to cease concentrating on ends and turn to means; it is, consequently, a common philosophical phenomenon when the chain of reasoning being pursued promises to lead to unsatisfactory conclusions. Just as the “advanced thinkers” of the eighteenth century, when they began dimly to suspect that the reasoning on which they had built their optimism would lead to something less than the best of all possible worlds, turned their attention from speculative philosophy to practical reform, so many thinkers during the past decade, despairing of finding any satisfactory answer to the problem of man's place in the universe, have turned their attention to social problems. This evolution has been very marked in MacLeish's poetry and has been commented on by many of his critics. As he himself has explained in “Nevertheless One Debt,” society has become more important than the individual. Without rehearsing the reasons which the poet himself gives for this change, without attempting to minimize or oversimplify the factors involved in it, we may re-emphasize one thing: that it is in part at least the product of frustration. It is an emotional answer to logical questions, logical answers to which are either impossible to attain within the self-imposed limitations of thought or else are too unpleasant to be acceptable.

MacLeish is aware that transferring one's interest from philosophy to social security solves no philosophical problem, and he has continued to search for a satisfactory synthesis of individual experience and scientific knowledge. As he recently put it, “no purposed human action is conceivable without an image of the world which is coherent and distinguishable.” It is his hope, apparently, that out of the intellectual chaos of our day a new vision will come. Meanwhile, as he says in his “Dover Beach: A Note to That Poem,” the ebbing of the sea of faith itself provides “a fine and wild smother to vanish in.”

The smother is fine because it is wild. It is fine because it has shocked man out of complacent secularism. In short, it is fine for MacLeish because it has given him “the sense of infinity.” And although he has turned from philosophy to economics and politics, although he has recently turned his attention to the promises inherent in America and has called upon artists and scholars to join in the fight to preserve and extend them, he has, even during the past decade, kept his sense of infinity and attempted, gropingly and without recourse to speculation, to arrive at a more or less intuitive synthesis. No longer does he concentrate on widening the gap between infinity and finity as in “The End of the World.” More typical of his new mood are “America Was Promises,” “The Sunset Piece” and his poetic note on “Dover Beach”—poems which enunciate no answers but imply the faith that an answer will come. And MacLeish has given hints of the sort of image he thinks it may be; though he has not ordered his materials in a rational system, he has presented and implied an outlook.

First, he has always attempted, perhaps less successfully since the 1933 collection of poems than before that date, to achieve what he has called the function of true art: to catch “the flowing away of the world.” The very way he has phrased this statement of the purpose of art—a statement tossed off in debate, it is true, but paralleled by others of his pronouncements—indicates that the image of the world, when it is arrived at, will attempt to conjoin infinity and finity, to make meaningful, in other words, the relation of time to eternity and finite human experience to the cosmic process. The “flowing away” is the chief characteristic of consciousness, but “the world” is the backdrop of comparative stability against which consciousness flows away, a backdrop which is at once a part of consciousness and yet not reducible to it or manageable by it. Evidently it is MacLeish's guess that the image of the world which will become a common faith will be informed by the sense of infinity which is the result of any honest and sensitive attempt to probe the reality of the flowing-away of consciousness.

Second, though he has been much influenced by and has made much use of the knowledge of the physical world gathered by the physical sciences, he has never accepted the conclusions about the nature of man that have usually been drawn from biology and psychology and that are almost universally extended to history and sociology, where they serve as both methodology and philosophy. He has seen clearly and declared often that it is sheer confusion for sociologists to say in one breath that man is totally the product of his inheritance (genes and “folkways”) and his environment and to proclaim, in another, that the purpose of their “science” is intelligent social action and reform. He has seen clearly that to interpret history solely in terms of economic determinism is to be guilty of the confusion of a narrow (although, if understood, serviceable) abstraction with a complex reality; and it is to be guilty, also, of another sort of logical confusion, for the very people who most dogmatically interpret history as “determined” by economic forces most loudly call for reform, thus conveniently forgetting that they have just been saying that acts of will do not count in a world beyond their control. MacLeish has never reflected in his poems or his prose the picture of man presented by the two most influential psychologies of this century, Freudianism and Watsonian behaviorism. It is obvious that the men and women in his poems are not personifications of Freudian complexes; that their experience is not completely explainable in terms of “the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry”; that they are men and women presented as known in experience, not as variously pictured by the various psychologies. Although J. B. Watson has swept away such medieval superstitions as mind, consciousness, will, and memory, it would be clear, I think, even to Watson, if he should ever read the poems, that they are written out of a firm faith in the reality of these medieval superstitions. In short, MacLeish has remained unaffected by the manifold “disillusions” about the nature of man that have emanated from scientific laboratories and studies—the disillusions of the laboratory (glands and bodily mechanisms), of sociology (folkways and Pareto's banishing of mind from society), and of psychology (reflex mechanisms and the “dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers” that are said to govern the human mind, if any). The assertion, in The Irresponsibles, of faith in the reality of “moral law … spiritual authority … intellectual truth” in no sense represents an about-face, as some have supposed; for nothing that MacLeish has written denies the reality or the centrality in man's experience of those values.

Thus, although he has not presented in his poetry the “clear and recognizable” image of man that he calls for, he has held fast at once to concrete experience (refusing to deny its reality in order to be “up with” the latest scientific theories) and to his cosmic sense, which enables him to concentrate on naïve and sensuous experience while yet presenting it against the background of a cosmic setting. While moving, as have so many thinkers and artists recently, toward the “unified sensibility” and unified consciousness of Donne and Taylor, he has accepted the conclusions of science that emphasize again truths long known but often forgotten in the last two centuries and has rejected those conclusions of science that seem to him to contradict experience. The unarticulated question that haunted him when he wrote his Hamlet and that determined the nature of Conquistador remains unanswered. He has indicated that when it is answered it will be in terms that respect both experience and knowledge. Meanwhile, however, the unanswered question has served him well, for it has given universal significance to his poems of romantic emotion, social problems, and history. MacLeish's debt to science is that it has kept him aware of the aspect of eternity.

Randall Jarrell (review date April-June 1943)

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SOURCE: Jarrell, Randall. Review of The Fall of the City, by Archibald MacLeish. Sewanee Review 51, no. 2 (April-June 1943): 267-80.

[In the following essay, Jarrell critiques MacLeish's political/allegorical radio play The Fall of the City, finding it riddled with inconsistencies and calling it a “melodramatic oversimplification.”]

Any successful play in verse—in a time when the phrase sounds like an Irish bull—is worth an analysis; and The Fall of the City has been extraordinarily successful. Almost anyone with a radio has heard it, almost anyone with an anthology has read it; even the college textbooks print it, with prefaces calling it a really topical play, one that has both comprehended and predicted the actual history of our times. “Pioneering in a new medium, the verse play for radio, MacLeish foretold the fate of Vienna by eleven months,” one editor writes; “Prague, Warsaw, Oslo, Amsterdam, Paris—the play was repeated with tragic variations.” But if this is so, The Fall of the City is exactly what everyone has been wanting—a good poetic drama about contemporary reality; Poetry and Drama and Society, miserably separated for so many ages, have at last been reunited. How has it been done?

The play begins with the “orotund and professional” voice of the Studio Director. After the conventional “Ladies and gentlemen: / This broadcast comes to you from the city,” he rises for a moment into orotund and professional verse, in a passage full of the abstract, glossy, and geographical lyricism that is a MacLeish trademark. He gets back to business with, “For three days the world has watched this city”; through the newspapers and through broadcasts like this one, the audience assumes. Each day, at twelve o'clock, a dead woman has risen from the grave! MacLeish's exclamation point notes how unusual such an event is; that such an event is being broadcast is still more unusual, most hearers will think. It is very easy to believe in broadcasting, fairly easy to believe in dead women rising daily from the grave; but to believe in both at the same time takes the Red Queen. The hearers cannot help distrusting the Studio Director when he tells them, in a conventional Shakespearean passage about omens, that “in a time like ours seemings and portents signify”; that this old-fashioned miracle is a finally important expression of our time, and not merely an expression of the author's liking for a sensational dramatic device.

The announcer takes us away to the city, at “precisely four minutes to twelve,” in order to broadcast the fourth resurrection of the dead woman. (Where was he the second and third times? By the fourth time any real broadcasting company would have made it a regular program with a sponsor.) It is a city more suited to miracles than to microphones: a kind of generalized Aztec town, far away in space, farther away in time; there are temples, pyramids, hawks, kites, water-sellers, peasants, horse-raisers, cattle-herders, priests with knives (stone, I regret to say). The announcer, a country boy from way back, is much impressed with the “enormous crowd” of ten thousand people; in their midst, surrounded with plumed fans, sit the “cabinet ministers”! One can see already that the play is a queer and sometimes unfortunate mixture, a kind of allegory: it exists on two levels, one a literal Aztec level, the other an allegorical topical level. These levels, by their conflict, produce all sorts of surface incongruities and anachronisms; and perhaps, under the surface, they never fuse, but remain contradictory—the reader can judge.

The announcer's description of the exotic city rises into suspense; it is almost noon. The dead woman punctually, miraculously rises; she recites a mannered, consciously archaic, conscientiously vague lyric about death. Then after mechanically repeating a prophecy she does not understand, she trails away in a few elegiac measures. Her prophecy is: “The city of masterless men / Will take a master. / There will be shouting then / Blood after.”

To see all the laws of nature broken, four times running, because a small Aztec city is about to be conquered, may very well seem disproportionate to a modern audience. Shakespeare has these miraculous omens because he and his hearers were sure that the world is made that way, that such things always happen; since we are just as sure of the opposite, a contemporary playwright needs an overwhelmingly good reason for using such miracles, especially if his play is an allegorical representation of modern history. MacLeish has none; he simply wants a sensational exotic device to make his play more impressive, and he feels that the play's sensational and exotic setting, along with the announcer's continual reassurances, will soothe us into belief.

The announcer, still afraid that we may still be doubting, makes another Shakespearean speech on the validity of omens; meanwhile the people, after reiterating fragments of the prophecy, suddenly go to pieces, and run yelling around the square, “milling around us like cattle that smell death.” Before this MacLeish has made the crowd seem very tough and stolid, full of peasants, farmers' wives, armed horse-raisers and cattle-herders who “look at the girls with their eyes hard / And a hard grin and their teeth showing.” Why do they suddenly act like a Girl Scout troop with hysterics? like frightened animals? Because MacLeish makes them act that way throughout the play, no matter what the situation; they are without sense, courage, or any other creditable quality; they respond to everything like complete fools and cowards, are several times compared to animals, and remind you of nothing so much as Hamilton's “great beast.”

Suddenly the First Messenger staggers in; helped over to the cabinet ministers, he gives a couple of perfunctory ritual pants, and speaks—not a few gasping sentences, but an energetic and rhetorical two pages. He has run day and night, all the way from the ocean (presumably he was on bad terms with the broadcasting company). The bouncy two-stress lines, like unrhymed Skeltonics; the Anglo-Saxon alliteration (“He was violent in his vessel: / He was steering in her stern: / He was watching in her waist: / He was peering in her prow …”); the mannered archaic parallelism; the primitive syntax (“East over sea-cross has / All taken / Every country …”); make one think of Hengist and Horsa carrying a message to Garcia, and lend the messenger a charming but slightly Mother Goose-ish air; his method is one of simple exaggeration. He warns that a mighty conqueror has landed, after overcoming all the lands east of the sea. Those he conquers lead lives of unbelievable shame and degradation; nevertheless, says the messenger, many or all of you will welcome him. Why? The messenger doesn't say. We know all about Fascism, so we are prepared to believe that some of the people will welcome him; but dramatically, in terms of the play, not of its topical application, the welcome is quite unmotivated—we have to assume, as MacLeish does, that the people of the city have some sort of tropism toward slavery and degradation.

How do the people take this additional bad news? with additional hysterics? Their response is exactly the opposite: not one speaks, not one moves; they stand there like docile animals, patiently waiting for the ministers to tell them what to do and what to think. A minister comes from the “huddle” (notice the weight of this word) on the platform; and this First Orator makes a long, highly rhetorical speech. (There is no dialogue in the whole play—nothing but long speeches, songs, the announcer's descriptions, and choppy phrases from the crowd.) His oration is full of vulgar and specious effectiveness, inflated generalities, plays on words, childish logic-chopping, mechanical and repetitive antitheses and analogies. MacLeish wants the speech to sound entirely false and unsympathetic to his own audience; it does; but he makes most of it so obviously pompous and empty that the crowd in the square could not have been fooled by it either. MacLeish, out to discredit the orator and his position, the crowd and its response, has none of the objectivity or breath of sympathy of the true dramatist, and consequently gives the orator none of the genuinely effective things he might have said. The people are, of course, entirely won over by the speech; forgetting the Dead Woman and the Conqueror, they shout with joy, sit down and eat their lunches (wrapped in corn-shucks), play on flutes—the children and old men begin to dance. What could the Orator have said to reassure them so completely? to make them act like complacent fools?

He has made them a speech about pacifism, about passive resistance. These Aztecs, with their spears and bows, their human sacrifices, their generals in feather mantles, absolutely eat up a speech that would embarrass the most confirmed pacifist. This is false on the literal Aztec level of the play, quite as false on its allegorical topical level: when countries have been threatened by Fascist conquerors, their governments have not made empty pacifist appeals—it would not have worked either with their own people or with the Fascists. This minister is made a wordy demagogue, Hitler's idea of a parliamentary orator. The first half of his speech consists of inflated variations on They that take the sword shall perish by the sword. Then he asserts that doing nothing will conquer the conqueror; that the snickers of road-menders, the titters of laundresses, the coarse guffaws of chambermaids will make the conqueror “sweat in his uniform foolishly. / He will disappear: no one hear of him!” He says that “scorn conquers,” mentions reason and truth, and concludes with a thoroughly disgraceful and thoroughly unlikely peroration: “Words … win!”

MacLeish shows contempt for the Orator even more drastically by having the announcer, at the climax of the speech, break in with a Fitzpatrick Traveltalk description of the scene. This immense discourtesy (it would be as plausible for an announcer to interrupt one of Roosevelt's speeches with a description of Washington) shows the audience, as forcibly as a blow, that the minister is not even worth listening to; that his empty talk is less important than a travelogue's local color. And the empty romantic exoticism of the description shows the critic, just as forcibly, how completely MacLeish has managed to dodge the whole problem of representing contemporary reality; how much he values these gaudy properties for their own sake.

The people's little fair is broken up by the arrival of the Second Messenger, as panting, exhausted, and long-winded as the first. “Stand by: we're edging in,” says the announcer, reminding his hearers as sharply as possible, with the cliché, of the incongruity between the radio and this horse-less (and, presumably, signal-drum-less and signal-fire-less) culture of the Messenger. The conqueror is coming fast, warns the Messenger; “No man opposing him / Still grows his glory.” It seems that the Conqueror has a straw-man, a bloody and hateful figure of horror, whom he sets up and fights with “at every road-corner”; and the alien people everywhere, overwhelmed by his prowess, bring him flowers and gold, sing songs to him, hold his hands and feel his thighs, worship him and are conquered. (This odd method of conquest is quite incomprehensible on the literal Aztec level of the play—the reader can make sense of it only if he knows that it represents the Fascist use of anti-Semitism.) This great conqueror is already crossing the mountains.

There is another complete shift in the people's behavior; “frantic with anger and plain fear,” they behave like vindictive lunatics. “The mob … crazy with terror” is “boiling around us like mullet that smell shark.” (Before they “milled like cattle.”) “Down with the government!” they shout. “Down with liberal learned minds!” (For pure bathos, for inexcusable incongruity and anachronism, this italicized phrase is hard to beat.) Unless the people are completely inconsistent fools, sure to respond in the worst way to anything, this response to the Second Messenger—fifteen minutes after an exactly opposite response to the First Messenger—is impossible.

The priests interrupt with the second panacea, religion. They are made to seem emotional obscurantists, pure escapists; their arguments are specious and hackneyed; nevertheless, the people immediately fall for them, for the second time forgetting all about the Dead Woman and the Conqueror. The announcer, whom MacLeish makes gullible as a stage Watson, has helped discredit the minister's speech by his vacuous acceptance of it; he receives the priests' speeches with the same enthusiasm, describing the people's response in approving clichés that would, as Wilde puts it, compromise a locomotive. The priests, with drums and songs, promptly move the people to frenzy; the crowd dances to the pyramid, tears the clothes from a girl's “bare breast,” drags her to the altar, and “shrieks” (notice how the orgiastic shrieks influences us against the crowd) in ecstasy. All this is unlikely enough on the literal level of the play—the Aztec priests who cut the hearts from tens of thousands of prisoners are not likely to advise submission to an alien conqueror, a withdrawal from the world of action. On the topical allegorical level of the play this is senseless: no country has met a Fascist attack with hysterical religiosity—it is the last thing that would occur to anybody except a tent-show revivalist or a playwright. MacLeish makes his democracy fall because its people stupidly follow their political leaders when they counsel passive resistance; because its people stupidly follow their religious leaders when they counsel a religious withdrawal; because they stupidly and cravenly forsake their military leaders when they tell them to fight. It is hard to see how anyone could make so bad an analysis accidentally.

But now MacLeish pulls from his Sodom one lonely Lot, a brave, honest, and intelligent man of action. He is—a general! Yes, a tough old general in a feather coat. He rescues the girl, drives the people down from the pyramid, and bawls them out in the most hard-boiled and violent rhetoric the admiring MacLeish can find for him. In a deep voice that drowns the “chatter” of the crowd, he shouts: “You ought to be flogged for your foolishness! / Your grandfathers died to be free / And you—you juggle with freedom! … You thought you could always quibble!” And so on. Those grandfathers have a familiar ring.

The general then makes a speech about freedom (libretto by Dorothy Thompson). All he thinks about is freedom; “there's nothing in this world worse,” he warns them, “than doing the Strong Man's Will.” Generals are famous for feeling that way about democracy and authority, I am told; and for trying to save the rights of the democracies from Fascism, when the people of the democracies want to throw those rights away. Certainly in MacLeish's New Found Land they're famous for it; though I'll bet that, before long, some repressed general breaks up a performance of The Fall of the City by establishing a military dictatorship and successfully defending the city from its conqueror.

The General makes a last appeal to the people to fight and die for their liberties: in other words, to do what the Spanish loyalists, what the Chinese, what half the nations of Europe have done and are doing. But of the people of this democracy—who allegorically stand for The People, who topically stand for the people of our own time—not one even listens to the General, not one fights for his liberty or his life. As always in this play, they scream and run around and around the square in their terror. The square is choked with deserters. We have been told of no troops, of no resistance; their own government has ordered them not to resist; yet MacLeish twice calls the people who flee into the square deserters. The citizens (who behave, from beginning to end, exactly like a mob in Little Orphan Annie) now give up completely, shouting the most frantic, craven, vindictive, or ridiculous sentences. “Opinions and talk! Deliberative walks beneath the ivy and the creepers!” cries one, as men mad with terror will. “He's one man: we are but thousands!” reasons another pessimistic citizen—an emigrant from Through the Looking Glass, no doubt. The people tear off their plumes, make bonfires of their bows, throw away their spears (Aztecs would hardly do this, modern populations would hardly have the arms to throw away); they shout wilder and wilder things: “Freedom's for fools! … Freedom has eaten our strength and corrupted our virtues! … Fools must be mastered! …” They end with the extraordinary, “Chains will be liberty!” The mere prospect of a Conqueror makes the people become the Conquered, servile wretches who deny all their liberties, welcome their degradation in impossible speeches.

The announcer finishes the play with a long and extremely effective narrative. The people wait in breathless terror, minute after minute, until the Conqueror enters, helmed, mailed, “broad as a brass door: a hard hero.” The people “cover their faces with their fingers. They cower before him. / They fall; they sprawl on the stone.” The Conqueror mounts the pyramid, opens his visor; and the announcer whispers, cries out, “There's no one! … The helmet is hollow! … The armor is empty … The push of a stiff pole at the nipple would topple it.”

And the people?

They don't see or they won't see. They are silent …
The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty—
The long labor of liberty ended!
                                                                                                              They lie there!

Suddenly the Conqueror's arm rises, and the people “shout with happiness”; so great is their joy at being slaves, the conquered, that the announcer cries, “You'd say it was they were the conquerors.” The people, “like troops in a victory,” shout out exultantly: “The city of masterless men has found a master. The city has fallen.” The announcer repeats, flatly: “The city has fallen.” And the play ends.

The whole play has systematically discredited the people of the democracy, who are represented as stupid and treacherous cowards, without a single redeeming trait. It has discredited their leaders, who are represented as fatuous word-spinners. The people are conquered not by force, but by their own yearning to be mastered, to throw away their irksome liberties for the satisfying rule of the Strong Man. I have encountered such people before: in Hitler's and Mussolini's speeches. The only brave or intelligent man in the whole democracy is a professional soldier, a Strong Man; because of his rather implausible passion against authority and for “freedom,” he does not take command of the city, but only implores the people to fight—as a result the people are conquered. (If I were a general about to set up a military dictatorship—in order to save people from themselves, of course—I should be able to think of no other play that would so suitably influence the public and my troops.) The author's tone is: “I don't care what you want—you'll be free if I have to make you.” This is the message of the play: the people are cowardly fools who want to be degraded, to be subjugated, to throw away their freedom—we must force them, in some way, to fight for it. The play must surely have reminded many people of Huey Long's remark that Fascism in this country will have an anti-Fascist platform. “The people invent their oppressors”! A man who has spent time interviewing those oppressors for Fortune should know better than that. The oppressors are real; that suit of armor was never empty: it is MacLeish who has invented, not the people. In these last years many millions of these people, over the entire world, have died fighting their oppressors. Say to them that they invented their oppressors, wished to believe in them, wished to be free of their freedom; that they lie there.

If MacLeish put his philosophy in a book, he should call it The World as Will and Nothing But Will. He is an extraordinary case of arrested development, a survival from an almost extinct past; there is something consciously neo-primitive about his eager adoption of the optimistic voluntarism of frontier days, when—with plenty of land, plenty of jobs, and plenty of room on top—plenty of people thought that you can if you think you can; that the world is what we make it; that there's no limit. This is as far as possible from any tragic view of life, from the point of view of any great dramatist—who is, necessarily, a specialist on limits; who knows that the world is, at a given moment, what we find it; who understands well enough to accept, with composure even, the inescapable conditions of existence. MacLeish passionately dislikes any determinism, even an optimistic one; his one response to an inescapable condition is to look strong and deny that it exists. So, in his play, it's the people's fault; they choose to be slaves; they are weak and bad. Burke said that you can't condemn a whole people; I'm sure MacLeish would reply, “Why not?” Why not write a play condemning them? exhorting them to reform, to act just like their grandfathers, to stop quibbling about freedom and fight? MacLeish does not have any sort of religious or philosophical determinism, as most of the great dramatists had; the determinism of character or motivation he neglects—there is not a character in the entire play; and all the economic and social factors that may, in modern plays, furnish a kind of substitute for Fate or Necessity, he has made it his profession to avoid. So there is something curiously partial and shallow and oratorical about the play: it represents a positively political view of life.

As everybody since Aristotle has said, a play must have struggle, conflict, action—and this means more than waving weapons and making violent speeches. There is no real conflict in The Fall of the City. It is a play-by-play account of how an ignorant and cowardly people slide into their ruin, continually hoodwinked by everybody, until the crowning swindle is put over by an empty suit of armor. The city is not taken, it falls. (And we are convinced from the beginning, that it is going to fall; surely God—MacLeish either—doesn't raise women from the grave to tell us lies.) People talk, talk, talk, may even run around and around the square; but no one really does anything—not even the Conqueror. The General, late in the play, attempts to put some conflict into it; and is promptly disregarded. The structure of the play is extraordinarily simple, like a series of arias or recitations; it is extraordinarily unlike the complicated system of stresses and strains that is the structure of a real play.

Let me give a simplified structural analysis. The Dead Woman prophesies the fall of the city; the people become frightened. The First Messenger warns them that the Conqueror is coming; the people wait dumbly for advice. The Minister (First Orator) tells them to do nothing; they forget their fears, and dance or eat lunch. The Second Messenger warns them that the Conqueror is nearer; the people become very frightened. The Priests (Second Orators) tell them to be religious; they forget their fears, and dance religiously. The General (who, structurally speaking, combines the functions of Third Messenger and Third Orator) warns them that the Conqueror is upon them, that they must fight; the people go mad with fear. The Conqueror, an empty suit of armor, marches in and raises its arm; the people don't or won't see, and shout with happiness at being conquered. I am not sure what this is the structure of; but it is certainly not the structure of a play.

The Fall of the City exists on two levels: the literal or Aztec level; the allegorical or topical level. Its action is impossible on either of these levels alone: taken as a play about a primitive people, it is absurd; taken as a play about contemporary reality, it is equally absurd. It never really joins these levels at all, but gets along by uneasily and surreptitiously shifting back and forth between the two, in an attempt to evade the difficulties that would be insurmountable if it stuck to either. MacLeish makes his easy equation between a generalized Spanish conquest of an Aztec city, a generalized Fascist conquest of a democracy, only because, as a dramatist, he has no conception of the real forces that operate in either culture: he does not bother to observe or understand how people act, why they act as they do—and so makes them do impossible things, or do possible things for impossible reasons. The one thing a dramatist must understand is motivation; if he does not—and MacLeish does not—his play can have only an external and arbitrary unity, the specious organization of a fallacy. The people of MacLeish's city are fantastically unlike the real Aztecs, the real population of any traditional, agricultural, non-industrialized culture. If a culture is archaic and exotic enough, he seems to think, economic and technological factors stop operating. Who are the people with power in this city? The elected demagogues? Apparently; but the question never occurs to him. There everything happens because of emotions, of will; it is a city of free choice. This horse-less and metal-less city, with its spears and pyramids and cloaks of feathers; the corpse rising from the grave with its prophecy; the priests with their human sacrifice; the empty and all-conquering suit of armor—are these necessary to a play about contemporary political reality, about Fascism? Obviously not. They are gratuitous decorations, employed because they satisfy the author's taste for the romantic, the exotic, the sensational; because he believes that “verse is easily accepted on the stage only where the scene is made remote in time and so artificial to begin with”; because, after Conquistador, they were a familiar machinery that he had already learned to employ effectively; because they made it possible for him to distort or disregard facts, contemporary reality, and to present as real actions that would be plainly false in a contemporary scene; because his point of view is, essentially, as romanticized as his machinery of effect. His play, by accident or design, completely disregards what anyone knows: that Fascism is a highly specialized economic and political manifestation of a late stage of our own particular economic system, capitalism; that it springs from all kinds of real causes, not simply from people's cowardice and stupidity, their shameful longing to be slaves. Since he disregards all the characteristic and essential aspects of our own culture, his explanation of how Fascism operates seems not merely mistaken but childish.

The Fall of the City is false as an interpretation of reality. It is a schematized, arbitrarily one-sided, and melodramatic over-simplification, full of useless sensationalism and exoticism; a black and white political cartoon, plainly at variance with most of the facts. It is also false as an imaginative creation; the world the author creates is internally inconsistent, full of incongruities, anachronisms, arbitrary or impossible behavior; there are no characters, only the blankest of types; the motivation and organization of the play are wholly inadequate. A good deal of it, as a dramatic creation, is impossible, since it can be understood only if it is referred to some contemporary political event, accepted only if we are willing to concede, “All right, since it really happened that way.” We need to suspend not only our disbelief, but our capacity for disbelieving: to open our mouths and shut our eyes and take what the mother bird gives us.

This essay is not intended to be a sympathetic or comprehensive analysis of The Fall of the City; I came to bury it if I could manage to. Let me admit that it is not still-born, as most verse plays are, but has a hump and teeth. I believe that, on a fairly low level, it is an effective play; I have not tried to show why it is effective. I believe that it is a bad play; and I have tried to show why it is bad. But the point of view from which the play is written, the “message” of the play, seems to me far worse than the play itself. A critic, as critic, can say that the poet's analysis seems mistaken, his point of view unfortunate; but, speaking as a private citizen, the critic may want to be a good deal blunter. A philosopher I know once lent a copy of Alice in Wonderland to an old lady; when she returned it he asked, “Well, what did you think of it?” She murmured: “What a lie!”

Reed Whittemore (review date October-December 1953)

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SOURCE: Whittemore, Reed. “MacLeish and Democratic Pastoral.” Sewanee Review 61, no. 4 (October-December 1953): 700-09.

[In the following review of Collected Poems, 1917-1952, Whittemore highlights the pastoral element in MacLeish's poetry.]

Archibald MacLeish's Collected Poems, 1917-1952 contains perhaps eighty poems written since the publication of his earlier volume of collected poems (1924-1933). It also contains twelve poems written in the period covered by the earlier volume though not to be found in that volume, and several pre-1924 poems that, in 1933, MacLeish presumably thought of as juvenilia. Conversely only one poem, “Insomnia” (a poor poem), is to be found in the 1933 volume and not in the new one, so clearly the new volume gives a much more complete account of MacLeish's activities than the old. That it does not include his wartime radio verse plays (Air Raid, etc.) is a fact I can't bring myself to worry about, since his long-poem ventures are amply represented otherwise by everything, that I know of, from The Pot of Earth to The Trojan Horse.

In the old volume MacLeish asserted at the outset that “this book is not a ‘collected edition’ of my poems nor does it purport to trace my development as a poet.” In the new volume he asserted nothing, but I think I can safely say that it is a collected edition and that it does trace his development as a poet.

So much for the news.

Reading it as a prospective reviewer I was immediately depressed by the variety of materials MacLeish was presenting for review. A reviewer's lot is a hard one (though not as hard as the lot of the poet reviewed) when he is faced with thirty-five years of continuous production. Like a tourist under the guidance of Messrs. Cook, he has entirely too much at his disposal. He must choose between the tour of the Louvre and the tour of the bars. So I was, as I say, depressed; I don't like to be picky. First I considered picking the best poems and setting down a few wise words about them. Without much effort I produced the following list: “Invocation to the Social Muse,” “End of the World,” “You, Andrew Marvell,” “Lines for a Prologue,” “Critical Observations,” “Eleven,” “Voyage West,” “Journey Home,” “Where the Hayfields Were,” and “Crossing.” It wasn't a list I was prepared to go to court about, but it was a list of poems I would have been happy to include in the anthology of modern poetry I have not yet been asked by a publisher to edit. The real trouble with the list was that I didn't have much to say about it after I had listed it. It was a dead end; the poems represented, though good poems, did not make a thematic or rhetorical group out of which I could draw something significantly MacLeishian. All I could do with the list was say to myself that it was a good list and a longer list than I would be prepared to draw up for most modern poets. This was something, of course; it served to remind me of that which a good many critics these days need to be reminded of, the poetry of MacLeish; but it wasn't enough for the solemnities of a serious review. Was it? Anyway I gave the list up.

Secondly, I considered dividing MacLeish's poetry up into various phases. Phases were old and reliable and MacLeish had certainly had phases. He had had an Impressionist phase and a Public Speech phase and a Nationalist phase and a Riviera phase and a good many others. His present phase, perhaps the least distinct of all of them, appeared to be a phase of Uncertainty, since most of the poems composing it were tentative, slight, occasional pieces lacking both the persistence and the garrulous ease of earlier MacLeish. I thought of concentrating on this present phase.

But no. The trouble with the phases, ancient or modern, was that I didn't really believe in them. They kept vanishing or quietly merging with one another. Their integrity as units was suspect. I gave them up with regret.

Thirdly, I considered discussing MacLeish as a pastoral poet. I will admit that I was driven to this by an irrelevancy, my present surroundings, and that possibly MacLeish is not a pastoral poet at all. My present surroundings are California where, as everybody knows, versions of pastoral are constantly thrusting themselves into view. The vegetation shading my sombre windows, for example, has been bred out of the desert by the watering and care of thousands of gardeners scattered liberally northward from La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fé. If it were not for these gardeners the vegetation would, I am told, rapidly be replaced by desert again; but because of them the vegetation is not merely suitable for shading my windows; it is also pretty, and the landscape which it composes satisfies completely my notion of a pastoral (a literary pastoral) scene by being both picturesque and homemade. Faced simultaneously with this landscape and MacLeish I could hardly avoid putting them together.

After putting them together for the wrong reasons I began to think there were also right reasons for doing so. MacLeish's connections with Yale, Harvard, Washington, and Farmington, Connecticut, were no deterrent, since pastorals have traditionally emerged from such places, not from places where there are shepherds and sheep. Even less discouraging was the absence in MacLeish's poetry of traditional pastoral settings or devices, since William Empson in his book, Some Versions of Pastoral, had opened the way—obscurely to be sure—to finding pastoral in everything and calling it Covert Pastoral. There seemed to be little to prevent a discussion of MacLeish as a pastoral poet, and a good deal to sustain one. The images to which he was most attracted, for example, and from which he expected the highest dividends appeared to be images from nature—the moon, trees, leaves, stars, wind, surf, sunlight and earth. And the theme dominating all his phases appeared to be essentially pastoral: life is richest and best in its elemental forms. Lastly, his rhetoric seemed to indicate that he was steadily, perhaps obsessively concerned with making the poet, himself, into the spittin' modern equivalent of a simple shepherd. Indeed in the mythmaking about himself he was far from content with the conventional pretense, not seriously insisted on in most pastorals, of the poet's being an uncouth swain. He felt obliged like Whitman to drive the notion home again and again. He wanted to be thought of as just a simple man with an “audience of men like other men who understand the sun on the side of a wall, and the shadow in the shade of a tree, and the feel of things, and the thinking of things, naturally and simply and with the hands and the mouth and the eyes.”¹ His insistence upon this did not make him at all like Whitman, but it put him, with Whitman, in with that body of poets who do not wish to be thought of as Literary, the body of poets who produce much, as it seemed to me, of what Empson called Covert Pastoral. Yes, the more I looked at the California landscape, the more convinced I became that MacLeish fitted in.

It was not and is not to his discredit that he appeared to fit in, but his fitting in led me immediately into difficulty with the phrase Covert Pastoral. I didn't care what Empson meant by it, but I began to wonder what I meant. There was certainly nothing Covert about MacLeish's pastoral assertions. In his Baccalaureate poem (printed in Tower of Ivory, 1917) he observed that, after the college learning from New Haven had gone down the drain, there would remain

                                        other, magic things—
The fog that creeps in wanly from the sea,
The rotten harbor smell, the mystery
Of moonlit elms, the flash of pigeon wings …

In “Eleven” (Streets in the Moon, 1926) he described a child tired of things of the mind who went out of the house to find an old gardener “smelling of sun, of summer,” with whom the child sat,

Happy as though he had no name, as though
He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem,
Like a root growing.

In “Seafarer” (Poems, 1924-33) he advised voyagers in this life that the important things to learn were “to walk / The roll of earth, the pitch and fall / That swings across these trees those stars” and “to sleep against the ground.” And in a recent poem, “Where the Hayfields Were,” he described an old man and his daughter who, in the process of burning off a meadow, left an impression with him not unlike that left by Wordsworth's solitary reaper:

Slightly she danced in the stillness, in the twilight,
Dancing in the meadows where the hayfields were.

These poems, moreover, taken pretty much at random from different periods of his work, were not thematically exceptional. They were the norm, and their pastorality was positively aggressive. I began to think that Covert Pastoral was the wrong phrase.

Not entirely. Though the pastoral themes were overt, the insistence, previously mentioned, upon the poet's being a pastoral figure was extremely deceptive. Empson had observed that most pastoral was about the People and about the virtues of their simple, close-to-the-earth lives, but that it was not normally by them or for them. The tricky part of MacLeish's case, however, was his insistence that his verse was both by and for the elemental man. Thus he constantly framed his poems as addresses to elemental persons of one hue or another. In “Memory Green” he addressed

          … you at dusk along the Friedrichstrasse
Or you in Paris on the windy quay,

“you” in this instance being the incoherent people of the world who feel things. In “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments” he addressed an elemental Woman whom he said he preferred not to describe in the conventional (contrived) sonneteer's manner, since she was no contrivance but Real:

I will [instead] say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair.

In “Sentiments for a Dedication” he addressed the men of his own time, the living men:

O living men Remember me Receive me among you.

And in “The Old Man to the Lizard” he addressed a lizard, a “natural” if there ever was one,

                                                                                          tell me, lover of
Sun, lover of noon, lizard,
Is it because the noon is gold with
Flame you love it so?

A different mode of address which he used frequently produced much the same effect. Instead of addressing an elemental “you,” he merged the “you” with himself and talked about an elemental “us.” Thus, in “America Was Promises,” he said

and we move on: we move down:
with the first light we push forward,

thereby identifying himself with all other Americans, all of whom were taking part in an elementary evolutionary movement into the west, the future, the unknown, the what-all. And in a poem entitled simply “Men” he said,

Our history is grave noble and tragic
We trusted the look of the sun on the green leaves,

thereby making it understood that he too was one who trusted the sun's look. The device was a familiar one, of course; it was the device used by Antony when he said to the crowd, over Caesar's body, “I tell you that which you yourselves do know”; and it was the device used rather less effectively by Coriolanus when he attempted, only half-heartedly and under advisement, to persuade the same old crowd that he was a “man of their infirmity.” Unlike Antony and Coriolanus, however, MacLeish was not a character in somebody else's drama; he was the dramatist, and he apparently wanted not merely the crowd on stage (Americans, Voyagers, Lizards and Promenaders on the Friedrichstrasse) but also his literary audience to think of him as being incapable of using an oratorical device. Or, to put it differently, he wanted to appear in the guise of the good and simple Othello who, on stage or off stage, was really capable of only a “round, unvarnished tale.” Even to the elect he wanted to appear as common.

I say this under advisement, for it seemed to me that he never actually appeared this way. The primitive in MacLeish was outweighed in every poem by his tremendous verbal sophistication. I could not imagine a very substantial audience for his poetry other than the elect. Who among his elemental American listeners could have been expected to know that MacLeish was addressing him when using the phrase “voyagers in these leaves”? And what soldier would have realized that he was included when MacLeish said, “we too have heard / Far off … the horn of Roland in the passages of Spain”? Constantly, while professing simplicity, MacLeish indulged in the complex forms of statement of his non-pastoral poetic compatriots. Constantly he was referential and indirect when, for his announced purposes, he should have been simply reportorial, specific, straightforward. This was not, I felt, an indication that his pastorality was so much waste effort, but it was an indication of confusion, on his part, about where the effort might reasonably have been expected to have any effect. Empson's assertion that pastoral was not by or for the People could only, apparently, have served to make MacLeish mad, and yet the assertion was just as true when applied to MacLeish's pastorals as when applied to Milton's or Spenser's.

Thus, Covert Pastoral. Perhaps after all the phrase was badly chosen; perhaps Hair-on-the-chest Pastoral or Democratic Pastoral would have described MacLeish's verse more accurately. He was not trying to hide Pastoral; he was trying to deny the literary shenanigans which have traditionally enshrouded Pastoral. I was reminded of the difficulty most elemental persons, like myself, have before those elemental pictures in the Museum of Modern Art. Underneath them a printed card normally announces that their creator has attempted “to regain a primitive sense of awareness” by concentrating on “essentials” and abandoning mere “representation.” Something like that anyway. The statement always seemed ridiculous to me. It was all very well to abandon mere representation, but it was a mistake to regard the abandonment as a primitive action. It was a very sophisticated action; it was an action going beyond representation, an action involving abstracting the essence of something from the something. Similarly, in pastorals an abstracting or idealizing process was involved which was caviare to the general, nothing to the million. MacLeish was therefore misled in expecting the million to identify themselves with his voyagers in the leaves.

There remained to be considered, however, the effect of MacLeish's delusions—assuming I was correct that they were delusions—upon the poetry itself. Though fashion made it pleasant to note that MacLeish's preoccupation with extending the audience for poetry had led to a great waste of his talents, I didn't believe this. In the first place waste was what MacLeish had, I thought very properly, noted among those contemporaries of his who were contemptuous of their audiences. As an editor of a little magazine I could only agree with him that the vacuum into which most contemporary poetry set sail was fabulous. And in the second place MacLeish's preoccupation with his audience seemed to me to have had one tremendously important effect upon his writing which was not a bad effect, not wasteful. It had made him write with the intent of persuasion. What he attempted to persuade people of was not, in some cases, to my liking, but what he tried to do rhetorically when he undertook persuasion seemed to me to be elementary and admirable: he assumed he was addressing not the air but someone; he assumed, therefore, that he had a responsibility to that someone as well as to himself. These assumptions, far from leading to waste, served to direct the rhetoric of many of his best poems.

“Invocation to the Social Muse,” for example, was addressed to a Senora Barinya. The girl was unimportant except as an object to address, but as such an object she served to establish immediately that the poem written to her would have to be aimed at her. In view of the fact that there was very little modern poetry aimed, in this sense, at anything, and in view of the fact that the aim made possible a very intelligently unacademic discussion of an academic subject, the girl seemed to me to be an important part of the poem. It didn't matter whether the aim was good or not (who cared if she was convinced?) and it didn't matter whether the girl was real or fictitious. What mattered was that the poet had concerned himself with more than saying what he personally found “sufficient”; he had concerned himself also with saying it in public.

There was another senora in “Voyage West,” of less importance but useful as a point of rhetorical focus. There was Andrew Marvell himself, by implication, as the addressee in “You, Andrew Marvell.” There were the dead poets in “Reproach to Dead Poets,” the crew of Columbus in “Lines for a Prologue,” and the lovers in “Selene Afterwards.” And there were also of course all the voyagers, the People of the American Front poems. That the voyagers and dead poets addressed never, probably, received the messages didn't mean that the messages weren't addressed. They were; and because they were they were framed in the form of public, not private messages.

Allen Tate's assertion, in The Forlorn Demon, that the poet is primarily responsible to his own conscience, was not something I was anxious to dispute. Even less did I wish to dispute with him about the dangers attending the poet's taking on other responsibilities than this, the responsibilities, for example, of persuasion. The dangers were unquestionably great. They were the dangers the teacher faced when he tried to sell Yeats to his Sophomores, the dangers the politician faced when he tried to sell himself to the People, and the simple dangers of salesmanship. They were, moreover, greater dangers for the poet than for the others because the poet was, as MacLeish himself put it, “strictly forbidden to mix in maneuvers.” He was obliged constantly to remember that,

The things of the poet are done to a man alone
As the things of love are done—or of death
                                        when he hears the
Step withdraw on the stair and the clock tick only.

What I did wish to do with Mr. Tate's assertion, however, was to suggest that perhaps MacLeish's concern with the problems of persuasion as well as of conscience was a healthy one and not something to be dismissed as mere “tub-thumping.” “Tub-thumping” was a nasty word anyway for a potentially respectable poetic activity about which, so far as I could see, one could only be severe in severe cases. If some of MacLeish's poems were severe cases, some of them were perfectly healthy. Even some of his American Front poems were a good deal more than tub-thumping.

“America Was Promises,” for example. There MacLeish had felt it necessary not simply to describe the promises America had been, but also to exhort his readers to make those promises come true. The exhortation was, I supposed, tub-thumping; the last hundred lines of the poem were the lines of a bully who just wanted his own way. But the first hundred lines were as good as any MacLeish had ever written, and it was not at all easy for me to see where persuasion ended and bullying began.

Thus, the difficulty. Against the objections to MacLeish's public pastorals, and against the objections to tub-thumping included in the pastorals, there stood the first hundred lines of “America Was Promises.” There stood also the lines to the senoras and dead poets. These had been written as public speech. These were lines of persuasion. And they were, it seemed to me, very good lines. Certainly, then, one couldn't say that MacLeish's impulse to write publicly, not merely to converse with his conscience, was in itself bad. Nor could one say that the impulse had been unproductive. Quite the contrary. It seemed to me therefore that my list of MacLeish's anthology poems—a list I was prepared to add to or otherwise adjust for my pugnacious readers—made the dangers of Democratic Pastoral and Public Speech, in MacLeish's case, worth facing.

Note

Not from a poem but from a dissertation by MacLeish on the audience for poetry. In Furioso, Volume I, Number 1.

Parley A. Christensen (essay date spring 1961)

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SOURCE: Christensen, Parley A. “J. B., the Critics, and Me.” Western Humanities Review 15, no. 2 (spring 1961): 111-26.

[In the following essay, Christensen considers critical reaction to MacLeish's verse play J. B. and defends the work from its detractors.]

The publication a few years ago of J. B., a play in verse by Archibald MacLeish, was generally regarded as a literary event of exceptional importance. The critical reception of the play was warm, even laudatory. A critic of recognized stature called it “the play of the century.” Another said, “It may well become one of the lasting achievements of the art and mind of our time.” It drew a Tony citation and a Pulitzer award. Revised and adapted to production in the theater, it was successfully staged at home and abroad. Though pronounced too big for Broadway, it played there for many months to capacity houses. Posing as it does an age-old problem in religion, and drawing its inspiration from the Bible, it immediately challenged the attention of church, synagogue, and seminary. Eminent theologians, Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic, expressed with eloquence and vehemence varying degrees of pain and pleasure.

Much of the critical response was paradoxical. While agreeing quite generally on the excellence of J. B. as a poem and a play, the critics, literary and theological, disagreed quite sharply as to its meaning. Nearly all found in it unresolved problems, distressing ambiguities. They could not decide whether in its final or total effect it is a religious play at all. Raising anew in a modern setting the universal problem of innocent suffering, did it reaffirm the Biblical solutions? Or did it in effect repudiate them? Did it say to suffering man in the modern world that he must look beyond the Book of Job and the old theologies for the meaning of his troubles and for the strength to endure them?

Difference of opinion was most marked among the men of religion. There, as Chaucer loved to say, “Diverse folk diversely they demed.” Reinhold Niebuhr missed a personal God in the MacLeish view of man's predicament. The play, he said, states its problem honestly and develops it with artistic ingenuity. But it emphasizes the meaninglessness of man's suffering and neglects the deeper problem, the meaning of man's life. In an age which has had the greatness to discover nuclear energy but lacks the wisdom to avoid nuclear annihilation, the most relevant problem is not the meaning of man's suffering but the meaning of his life. J. B. suggests, Niebuhr said, two solutions to the problem. One of them is negative. It is the solution of the Voice heard in the wind and the thunder: the meaning of human life lies beyond man's comprehension. The other is positive: man can build for himself “an island of love” in an ocean of meaninglessness, where life can be sustained and given a measure of purpose and direction.

Rabbi Louis Finkelstein saw symbolism in the play. In the character of J. B., MacLeish has created, he said, an image in which all of us see ourselves and our society “troubled and guilt-ridden”—hence the play's popular appeal, its capacity houses on Broadway. The theme of the play is found not in its particular texts but in its whole texture. And paradoxically, indeed, this theme, the Rabbi said, stems ultimately from the Comforter Elihu, who does not appear in the play at all, but for whom MacLeish himself is supposed to speak in the totality of his poetic conception. Hence, J. B. is rebuked in the play, as Job is in the Book of Job, not for sins committed before calamity falls upon him, but rather for his behavior in the midst of calamity, for his failure to transform his suffering into “a new vision of God, one not possible except in adversity.” Implicit, therefore, in J. B.'s agony is a consolation as old as Aeschylus and Sophocles: the way of suffering is the road to wisdom. But in J. B., as in the Book of Job, the new vision of God which would give meaning to all suffering is seen only through a glass darkly. MacLeish's insight has beauty and depth but not the penetration to see the Kingdom of God which awaits a humanity that has been purified, ennobled, and exalted in the fiery ordeal of universal suffering and disaster.

To Thurston N. Davis, S. J., editor of America, a Catholic weekly, J. B. as a religious play is entirely negative. If it is anything, it is “an urbane but shallow repudiation of religious faith.” Implicitly it is an assertion that there are no divine reasons for human pain, no ultimate justice that will set things right, no Mind or Providence at work in human affairs, no evidence of a God whose love envelops man through all his days of trouble. It is a play not about God but about man, man “liberated from old theologies.” On its positive side it is a weak “secular affirmation of human life and human love as the sole props and rationale of bewildered humanity.” Calling up the ghosts of MacLeish's literary past, Father Davis asserted that in J. B. the poet-dramatist stands religiously “on the same arid ground in which he pegged down his tents some thirty years ago.”

Literary criticism, like a fever, usually runs a course. Appraisals are normally followed by reappraisals. Having delivered first decisions, the most Olympian of judges are likely to remain restive, a bit uncertain that they have spoken for both time and eternity. Frequently they climb the mountain for another view, issue a second verdict, make a new bid for judicial immortality. The literary criticism of J. B. is apparently entering the period of reappraisal. John Ciardi, poetry editor of the Saturday Review, has recently written a “J. B. Revisited.” He has taken a second look at MacLeish, and is unhappy—almost petulantly unhappy—with what he now sees.

                                                                                                                                            O, woe is me,
T' have seen what I have seen, to see what I see!

For Ciardi's first look had filled him with prophetic enthusiasm. J. B. was born a classic and destined to life beyond life. In it, as nowhere else, verse drama in America had reached maturity, had found a poetic language in which the poet-dramatists of the future would fashion and express their art, their passion. The great issues of life raised in the play made it too good, too sublime for Broadway. But how different the critic and the criticism of the second look! The poet and his poetry have shrunk dismally to this little measure: MacLeish has left the main issue or theme of his play blurred or totally undetermined, and its resolution correspondingly shadowy or uncertain. What he had intended to be the resolution is in effect a sentimental excretion precariously sticking to the closing moments of the drama. J. B., his protagonist, who bears the burden of suffering, and expresses the substance of its thought, is a “fatuous” “fathead” “howling” his questions and complaints into the empty places of a senseless universe. All that Mr. Ciardi can salvage from his first pronouncement is the certainty that MacLeish “has gone farther than any man of his time toward forging a true poetic verse that works on the stage.”

I am not mentioning Mr. Ciardi or the custodians of religious truth to quarrel with what they have said. One who has grown old with the poets, and has known most of their critics from Plato to Mr. Ciardi, is not likely to die attacking or defending a literary judgment. It seems only yesterday that I. A. Richards—persuasive critical theorist—was telling us that the history of literary criticism is a description of graveyards, an account of abandoned theories of value. And no one has intimated that the end of such abandonment is yet in sight, unless it be in that Paradiso of Modern Poetry, where poets seem always to sit in beatific and ineffable vision, and critics are always masters of a divine exegesis. Those of us who still read Shakespeare and Milton in the original, without benefit of symbol or paradox, continue to doubt that anything currently said about J. B. by Mr. Ciardi—or even by me—is all that could be said intelligently. The same caution befits religious comment. In the variable field of religious thought the ancient Pilatean query, What is truth?, still remains a relevant one. Always in religion there are men who cry, “Thus saith the Lord.” Always it is good for religion and its truth that other men question the competence of anyone to speak for the Almighty.

Anatole France, the French impressionist of a generation ago, used to say that literary criticism, when doing its proper work, is a description of an encounter between a soul and a masterpiece—or, in less opulent terms, a report of a reading experience. In the pages that follow, I tell about J. B. as a personal experience in reading. And, in parenthesis, let me say that, in my judgment, the future of J. B. is in the library, not in the theater. MacLeish's finest poetic conception was what he published for readers, not what he was persuaded to give to the actors.

My first encounter with J. B. was troubled. I sensed uncertainties, ambiguities, particularly in J. B.'s Gethsemane. In his suffering there appeared to be no coherent progress, no evolution. There was everything to be endured, nothing to be gained or done—no relief or release through thought or action. Then it occurred to me that what I was experiencing in J. B. was what years ago I experienced in the Book of Job; that the obscurity of the one was an inheritance from the other; that to understand J. B. one must first understand the Book of Job. And that is not an easy task. It demands reading the Book of Job as scholars read it, finding in it various types of writing, composed by various writers, at different times, with different purposes.

In their accounts of it, scholars differ in details but agree in substance. Most of them find in it an ancient folk tale about a devout desert nomad, a man who has always feared God and eschewed evil, but whose loyalty and devotion to God are tested in a succession of calamities visited upon him as a divine concession to a cynical Satan or Adversary, who attributes Job's loyalty and devotion not to intrinsic righteousness but rather to God's sheltering care and bountiful gifts. But through the tests imposed—the losses, sufferings, sorrows—Job remains unshaken. He stoutly affirms the changeless goodness and justice of God: the Lord has given and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. Should a man receive the good and not accept the bad? In the end Job's piety and devotion are rewarded: his losses are made up and his prosperity increased.

Engrafted on or in this rather primitive tale is what scholars have called the great Debate or Symposium between Job and his Friends or Comforters. Here Job is no longer the simple sheik of the folk tale. He is now a philosopher-poet, arguing with other philosopher-poets the great problem of evil and the mystery of human suffering. Here he is not the patient, submissive nomad, unwavering in his confidence in the divine goodness and justice. He bitterly laments his existence, curses the night of his conception and the day of his birth. He recognizes the power and wisdom of God, but boldly questions His goodness and justice. If only he could lay his case before the bar of the Almighty, or find an advocate who would! But God seems lost in the vastness of His creations, and Job cannot find Him. The replies of the Comforters to Job's lament are variations of what is essentially the same argument: God is a god of undeviating justice; human misfortune and suffering are invariably punishment for human sin; Job is, therefore, a sinner compounding his sins with rebellious arrogance; he should humble himself, acknowledge his wrong and repent of it. But at the end of the Debate the Comforters are silenced; they yield to the force of Job's defense, a defense born of Job's own suffering and soul-searching. “Job was justified in their eyes,” says the Biblical writer. And apparently he was also justified or vindicated in the eyes of his Lord. God commanded the Comforters to offer penitential sacrifices for having contended wrongfully against him. Implicit in this resolution of the debate is a divine admission that Job's protests are just, that he is right in maintaining his integrity, right in employing his own conscience and intelligence in trying to solve the baffling riddle of human existence.

But in such a conclusion to the Book of Job there was a decided note of skepticism; there was a too obvious encouragement to question, to doubt, the divine Providence. So, we are told, new poets, poets of greater piety, added the speeches of the fourth Comforter, Elihu, to strengthen the arguments of the others. They added also the magnificent speeches of the Lord, speeches intended to overwhelm Job with a sense of his littleness and ignorance before the awful might and inscrutable wisdom of God. Thus they created another Job, one who accepts the divine rebuke, confesses his sins, particularly the sin of presumption, and repents in dust and ashes all he had previously said and done.

Thus the Book of Job as we have it presents us with three Jobs: the devout, sinless, patiently suffering Job of the primitive folk tale; the questioning, protesting and vindicated Job of the great Debate; the totally crushed and repentant Job of the late poetic additions. Correspondingly there are three suggested solutions to the problem of Job's suffering: his suffering is a test of his loyalty to his God; it is a punishment for his sins; it is a manifestation of the inexplicable will of an inscrutable Providence. What, then, is the meaning of the Book of Job? What does it say with definiteness and persuasive power about the mystery of human affliction, its causes, its justification? Really nothing. If the careful and informed reader turns from J. B. to the scholar's Book of Job to escape confusion and perplexity, he only finds confusion and perplexity compounded. If he goes from the Book of Job to J. B., he soon discovers that MacLeish has taken from his Biblical source all of its contradictions, and has woven them into the thought and feeling fabric of his own play. For, here or there in J. B., through one character or another, the reader finds restated, not only the somewhat formless essence of the Biblical poem, but also much of its detail. But he finds more than restatement. Though the total vision of idea and emotion in J. B. may to him seem somewhat blurred, he does find, I think, a point where the mist thins out, where something new and significant emerges, clearly seen and clearly stated. At that point MacLeish says what he wants to say. There the play reveals its meaning, delivers its message.

III

J. B. is, as everyone knows, a modern play. Its Job is a modern man subjected to calamities which only a modern world could impose. In pursuit of its meaning and message let us look hurriedly at the play itself, its setting, its people, and its action—and in so doing sample its poetry. The scene is a corner of a circus tent, where a side-show dramatization of the Book of Job is daily staged as part of the circus entertainment. The hour is late. The circus and side-shows are over; the crowds and performers are gone; most of the lights are out. Two circus vendors appear in the semidarkness, Mr. Zuss, with a bunch of balloons hitched to his belt, and Mr. Nickles, with a popcorn tray strapped to his shoulders. They are old men, old actors, professionally fallen on evil days. But the actor is still alive in their bones. The empty stage of the side-show is to them an alluring and irresistible opportunity. Why shouldn't they do the play of Job—and, of course, do it right? Mr. Zuss, big, florid, sonorous, orthodox, rather insensitive and unimaginative, casts himself in the role of God, and assigns Mr. Nickles the part of Satan. Mr. Nickles is gaunt, sardonic, skeptical, and bitterly discerning—anything, O Lord, but a beatnik! Throughout the play Zuss and Nickles play dual roles: in the masks of God and Satan they read the Biblical lines with which MacLeish links the episodes of his play together; in their own characters they comment like a Greek chorus on the tragedy that unfolds before their eyes. They agree that the title role of Job is not for either of them, though Nickles would like to try it. But whom will they get to play it? They remember that always in the world there is someone playing the part of Job. Yes, says Nickles, there are millions of men in the world, the war-torn world, playing, always playing, the part of Job:

Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated,
Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking!
For walking round the world in the wrong
Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids:
Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less.

All they will have to do to find a man for the title part is to start the play, pronounce the cues, and some Job or other among the millions playing the part will appear. Job is everywhere we go, says Nickles,

His children dead, his work for nothing,
Counting his losses, scraping his boils,
Discussing himself with his friends and physicians,
Questioning everything—the times, the stars,
His own soul, God's providence.

So mounting the lighted platform above the darkened stage—the heaven above the earth—Zuss and Nickles don the masks of God and Satan and begin to declaim the opening lines of the old Biblical drama:

GODMASK:

                                        Whence comest thou?

SATANMASK:

From going to and fro in the earth

And walking up and down in it.

GODMASK:

Hast thou considered my servant Job

That there is none like him on the earth,

A perfect and an upright man, one

That feareth God and escheweth evil?

The light on the platform above fades out and Zuss and Nickles are lost in darkness. Lights on the stage below come on disclosing J. B. and his family at Thanksgiving dinner. No shadow of misfortune has yet fallen upon them. They have wealth, health, home, mutual love and loyalty. J. B. and Sarah, his wife, are in their middle thirties, the children, David, Mary, Jonathan, Ruth, and Rebecca, range from thirteen to six. For J. B. and the children it is a festive hour, an hour expressive of vibrant health and robust appetite, calling only for food and drink, seasoned with love and good will. Sarah alone is troubled. God is in her thoughts, a rather Hebraic God, who rewards the deserving and punishes the undeserving—and the ungrateful. The abundance overflowing in her life and in the lives of her husband and children fills her with unaccountable fear, fear lest their good go beyond their deserts, and they lose all. And it's ridiculous, she says,

Childish, and I shouldn't be afraid.

Not even now when suddenly everything

Fills to overflowing in me

Brimming the fulness till I feel

My happiness impending like a danger.

But if ever anybody deserved it, you do.

J. B.:

That's not true, I don't deserve it.

It's not a question of deserving.

SARAH:

Oh, it is. That's all the question.

However could we sleep at night …

J. B.:

Nobody deserves it, Sarah:

Not the world that God has given us.

But I believe in it, Sal, I trust in it.

I trust my luck—my life—our life—

God's goodness to me.

J. B. is not a thinker. His thought is intuitive, not reasoned. God is sensed, not deduced. He is not so much a person, here or there, or anywhere, as He is a Presence, indwelling, everywhere. J. B. feels Him in the world as he feels the strength alive in his own veins and muscles. God is “sun on the floor, air in the curtains.” His justice is not in His moral judgments, but in His uniformity, His unchangeableness:

                                        A man can count on Him.
Look at the world, the order of it,
The certainty of day's return
And spring's and summer's: the leaves' green—
That never cheated expectation …
Eat your dinner, Sal my darling.
We love our life because it's good:
It isn't good because we love it—
Pay for it—in thanks or prayer. The thanks are
Part of love and paid like love:
Free gift or not worth having …
Eat your dinner, girl! There's not a
Harpy on the roof for miles.

“Well, that's our pigeon,” exclaims Mr. Zuss—his way of saying that J. B. is the Job of their play, the man who must pass through the fiery furnace of loss, sorrow, suffering. And how will he play the part? Will he curse God and die? Will he at the end say, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord”? Or will he say something not written in the book?

“And there came,” says the folk tale, “a messenger unto Job and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses were feeding beside them: And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Such a messenger came one night to the home of J. B. and Sarah, the harbinger of their first calamity. A world war had come and terminated. David had been in service overseas. He had written that he would soon be home. But there had been a stupid order by a stupid officer. David and his buddies had walked blindly into something and been blown to pieces. One only had escaped alone to tell them. Then there came another night and another messenger to J. B. and Sarah to tell them about Mary and Jonathan, to tell them what he alone had seen:

Four kids in a car. They're dead.
Two were yours. Your son. Your daughter.
Cops have them in a cab.
Any minute now they'll be here …
                                                                      He was there. He saw it
Route two. Under the viaduct.
Traveling seventy—seventy-five—
Kid was driving was drunk,
Had to be drunk, just drove into it.
He was walking home. He saw it.
Saw it start to, saw it had to
Saw it. J. B.'s son. His daughter.
Four in all and all just kids.
They shrieked like kids, he said …
                                                                                Then silent.
Blond in all that blood that daughter.

Still another night and another messenger. Little Rebecca had been missing since nightfall. Hours of search and frenzied anxiety. Then again the messenger:

                                                                                          Just past midnight
Pounding his beat by the back of the lumberyard,
Somebody runs and he yells and they stumble—
Big kid—nineteen maybe—
Hopped to the eyes and scared—scared
Bloodless—he could barely breathe.
Constable yanks him up by the britches:
“All right! Take me to it!” …
Well, he took him to it—back of the
Lumber trucks beside the track …
She had a toy umbrella,
That was all she had—but shoes,
Red shoes and toy umbrella
That was tight in her fist when
                                        he found her—still.

And then the finale, the triumph of the bomb. Blocks of the city levelled. All of J. B.'s banks and factories in rubble. And the messenger stumbling through the ruins of J. B.'s house with the unconscious Sarah in his arms. No trace of Ruth, the last of the children. Certainly somewhere dead under fallen stone.

And how through all of this does J. B. play the part of Job? At first pretty much as it is written in the Book of Job, with all of its ambiguities. Now he is the Job of the old folk tale, staunch in his trust and loyalty, patient in his acceptance: Should a man receive the good and not accept the bad? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Then he is the Job of the Symposium: questioning, protesting, pleading. “Show me my guilt, Oh God!” And then he hears the awful Voice in the wind and the thunder, in the presence of which he abhors himself and repents his presumption.

Climactic and memorable is the scene in which Sarah leaves him, leaves him alone in the rubble, with his rags and his sores, leaves him alone in the ruins of his moral world. The scene opens in profound silence, out of which comes a muffled sound of sobbing—Sarah sobbing for her babies. For her babies, not for her children. For Sarah is bewailing the slaughter of innocence of which the baby is the ultimate and most poignant symbol. In the name of her outraged motherhood she is asserting the injustice of God. J. B. pleads with her to find rest, to try to go to sleep:

                                                                                          Go! go where?
If there were darkness, I'd go there.
If there were night, I'd lay me down in it.
God has shut the night against me.
God has set the dark alight
With horror blazing blind as day
When I go toward it … close my eyes.

J. B. understands, yet doesn't understand:

                    I know those waking eyes.
His will is everywhere against us
Even in our sleep, our dreams. If I
Knew … If I knew why!
What I can't bear is the blindness—
Meaninglessness … the numb blow
Fallen in the stumbling night.

In the turnings, the revolving torments of his thought, J. B. always comes back to the question of guilt, his guilt. There must be guilt in him, guilt wherever there is suffering and death. Only that way can God be just. And God is just. But Sarah cries out in an agony of bitter protest:

If God is just, our slaughtered children
Stank with sin, were rotten with it.

But her memories and everything decent in her argue their innocence. To keep God good J. B. would falsify himself and his children, would make them all evil. Sarah will have no part in such a betrayal:

I will not stay here if you lie—
Connive in your destruction, cringe to it:
Not if you betray your children … They are
Dead and they were innocent: I will not
Let you sacrifice their deaths
To make injustice justice and God good …
If you buy quiet with their innocence—
Their or yours, I will not love you.

J. B. follows the logic of Sarah's thought, but he shrinks from the conclusion toward which it points. To grant that in the world innocent suffering and death exist would seem to banish God from it, or question His goodness. And that J. B. is not yet prepared to do. Without God in the world the life of man has no meaning:

God is God or we are nothing—
Mayflies that leave their husks behind—
Our tiny lives ridiculous—a suffering
Not even sad that Someone Somewhere
Laughs at as we laugh at apes.
We have no choice but to be guilty.
God is unthinkable if we are innocent.

But we do have one choice, cries Sarah. We can choose to live or to die—curse God and die. And Sarah chooses to die. Soundlessly she runs out to find waters under bridges, waters opening and closing, and reflecting afterwards the image of the stars.

J. B. is not long alone with his rags, his sores, his agitations. The Comforters appear, modern Comforters with various modern nostrums for the various troubles of the modern mind. Why, they ask, should J. B. call to God for explanation? Why cry out about guilt and innocence? Why should God reply to him

From the blue depths of His Eternity,
Blind depths of His Unconsciousness,
Blank depths of His Necessity?
God is far above in Mystery;
God is far below in Mindlessness;
God is far within in History.

Why should God have time for him? J. B. and his troubles, one says, do not register in the relentless, mechanical sweep of history. History is God. It has no time or concern for innocence. Classes, nations, perish in their innocence, and no reckoning made. Guilt is a psychophenomenal situation, an illusion, a disease, a sickness. Science has surmounted guilt:

Science knows now that the sentient spirit
Floats like the chambered nautilus on a sea
That drifts it, under skies that drive:
Beneath, the sea of the subconscious;
Above, the winds that wind the world.
Caught between that sky, that sea,
Self has no will, cannot be guilty.
The sea drifts. The sky drives.
The tiny, shining bladder of the soul
Washes with wind and wave or shudders
Shattered between them.

Nonsense! says another. Guilt is the only reality. All mankind are guilty. Their sin is simple: they were born men. By birth, by nature, their hearts are evil; their wills are evil. Adam and Eve are in their genes. Men, then, are evil not by what they do but by what they have always been, by what they incurably are.

But for J. B. there is no comfort in the Comforters, no healing in the philosophy that would ascribe to man the innocence of the automaton, the irresponsibility of the laws of gravity. I'd rather suffer, he cries,

Every unspeakable suffering God sends,
Knowing it was I that suffered,
I that earned the right to suffer,
I that acted, I that chose,
Than wash my hands with yours in that
Defiling innocence. Can we be men
And make an irresponsible ignorance
Responsible for everything?

Even less comfort, less healing, is there in the religious dogma of innate evil, of natural depravity:

That is the cruelest comfort of them all,
Making the Creator of the Universe
The miscreator of mankind—
A party to the crime He punishes,
Making my sin a horror, a deformity.

Nor is J. B.'s desperate need met by the Voice speaking to him in the wind and the thunder. J. B., crying in an agony of spirit for meaning, for understanding, cannot be appeased by a voice that merely belittles him, that asks him where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. True, J. B. replies in the words of a completely humbled Job—“I abhor myself and repent”—but I cannot escape the feeling that he is silenced not so much by the power of what is said to him as by his own utter weariness, his spiritual desolation, his appalling persuasion that he stands alone on a darkling plain where he can expect no light from the sky above. He would still the Voice in the wind and thunder not by arguing with it but by accepting without protest its rebuke. He is sick of mysteries, of comforters, of lights that fail. He would welcome the oblivion and utter darkness of death. He has moved toward a new insight, toward the recognition that man in supreme trouble must ultimately depend on an inner light, an inner strength. J. B. is ready for the final scene of the play and the illumination and resolution it brings.

Sarah had gone out to find water under bridges. She didn't find water under bridges. She found instead a bit of forsythia pushing its petals up through ashes. Looking for death she found in the bit of forsythia a symbol of universal life, a life that is persistent and unafraid. There is no devastation so complete, no rubble so sterile, but from it sometime somewhere, a blade, a leaf, a petal springs to proclaim the imperative of life, its unconquerable power of renewal. With the forsythia cradled in her arms Sarah returns to J. B. to tell him about it and the ashes:

All there is now of the town is ashes.

Mountains of ashes. Shattered glass.

Glittering cliffs of glass all shattered

Steeper than a cat could climb

If there were a cat still …

                                        And pigeons—

They wheel and settle and whirl off

Wheeling and almost settling—

                              And the silence—

There is no sound there now—no wind sound—

Nothing that could sound the wind—

Could make it sing—no doors—no doorway—

Only this, the forsythia, among the ashes!

Gold as though it did not know …

I broke the branch to strip the leaves off—

Petals again! But they so clung to it!

J. B.:

Curse God and die, you said to me.

SARAH:

Yes, you wanted justice, didn't you?

There isn't any. There's the world …

Cry for justice and the stars

Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep,

Enormous winds will thrash the water.

Cry in sleep for lost children,

Snow will fall, snow will fall.

J. B.:

Why did you leave me alone?

SARAH:

                                        I loved you.

I couldn't help you anymore.

You wanted justice and there was none—

Only love.

J. B.:

                                                                                He does not love. He

Is.

SARAH:

But we do. That's the wonder.

J. B.:

Yet you left me.

SARAH:

                                                                      Yes, I left you.

I thought there was a way away …

Water under bridges opens

Closing and the companion stars

Still float there afterwards. I thought the door

Opened into closing water.

J. B.:

Sarah!

SARAH:

                                        Oh, I never could!

I never could! Even the forsythia …

Even the forsythia beside the

Stair could stop me.

Stage directions tell us that here J. B. and Sarah cling to each other; that Sarah rises and draws him up; that he peers into the surrounding darkness:

J. B.:

                                        It's too dark to see.

SARAH:

Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.

J. B.:

The coal of the heart …

SARAH:

                                                            It's all the light now.

Blow on the coal of the heart.

The candles in churches are out.

The lights have gone out in the sky.

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we'll see by and by …

J. B. joins her in picking up chairs and putting things in order. She goes on,

                                                  We'll see where we are.
The wit won't burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart and we'll know …
We'll know. …

And so the play ends—and to my profound satisfaction. I am, as it were, shut up in measureless content. But, as we have seen, such content is not shared by some of the critics. The ending, they say, is tacked on. It is not organic, not a reasonable outcome of what has gone before. It is not an acceptable resolution of what seems to be (but may not be) the dominant issue of the play. It is palpably too sentimental, too lightly romantic, to be in dramatic rapport with the tragic sound and fury that precede it. Neither do the men of the church share my measureless content, nor do they see eye to eye with one another. The poet's intent is obscure, but what they see in the obscurity varies among them. What MacLeish seems to be doing is well, but not well enough. He probes deeply into the mystery of human suffering but not deeply enough—not deeply enough to plumb the depths of their thought, their ultimate concern. At its best, says Father Davis—who likes it least—J. B. is a “weak secular affirmation of human life and human love as the sole props and rationale of bewildered humanity.” At its worst it is a “shallow repudiation of religious faith.”

Most of the religious objections to J. B. lose, I believe, their validity and relevance in the light of the author's intention. One should not expect in J. B. a defense of dogma, a philosophy of religion, a commendatory footnote to the Book of Job. J. B., as I read it, was intended to be a tragedy, and tragedy, in life and literature, has always been a challenge to the claims of religion. “The Tragic Muse,” says F. L. Lucas, “was born of religion, but she has always remained something of an infidel.” “Scrutinize the motives of tragedy, ancient or modern,” says W. Macneile Dixon, “and you find embedded in them the fundamental problem of all religions, the problem of evil.” To me the ending of J. B., so objectionable to some critics, is not only organic to the play as a whole but also evidence conclusive that in writing his play MacLeish intended to write and did write a tragedy, faithful to the tragic experiences of life and true in spirit to the great tragedies of literature. In the language of the books, J. B. shows us how through terrible affliction a theist becomes a humanist, how a man loses his God in an inexplicable universe and in so doing finds himself.

In the beginning of the play J. B. is basking in a sun-lit, a God-centered world. He feels the divine presence everywhere about him: it is “sun on the floor, airs in the curtains.” He senses in all the happenings of his life the justice and goodness of God. In all the human relationships of his life, God has favored him, stood with him, near him. At the end of the play he stands alone on a darkling plain to which no light from church or heaven comes:

The candles in churches are out
The lights have gone out in the sky.

God is, J. B. says, but where or what He is, J. B. no longer pretends to know. He is not a God of love and justice as man knows love and justice. He is not an available and dependable source, sponsor, guardian, of the values most needful in the world of suffering men and women. Man on the darkling plain must look for light not in church and sky but within himself. He must blow on the coal of the heart, blow it into a glow, a flame. Only in love, and in compassion born of love can man find his way, secure the guidance, the courage, the strength he needs in a tragic world.

Great tragedy is always humanistic. In it, man is always dignified, never belittled, by the misfortunes that crush him. In it, man's cry is always a futile protest against injustice. In it, man is forced in the end to look within, to rely on his own spiritual resources. Broken and disillusioned he rises among the ruins of old faiths and reassurances to assert his eternal worth as a human being. At the end of our play that is what J. B. and Sarah are doing. And most of us are proud of them.

And the love that draws J. B. and Sarah together in another stand against a world that has crushed them is no light thing. It is as deep and profound as the reader has capacity to make it. In the contemplation of love only depth can respond to depth. To some, the love which to Sarah remains the “wonder” of their plight is only a biological imperative, the upward thrust of the forsythia through ashes and rubble. To others it means perhaps the instinctive, helpless, clinging of human being to human being when all other supports have been suddenly snatched away—it is the “Ah, love, let us be true to one another!” of “Dover Beach.” To still others love could mean what it sometimes means to Erich Fromm, “the only passion which satisfies man's need to unite himself with the world,” the only passion which can give fulfilment and sanity to human life in human society. Or what it means to Ashley Montague, “the touchstone and the compass by which man may guide his own most successful course through the shoals and reefs of this life, instead of being tossed about … in a rudderless boat upon a mysterious and uncompassionate sea.” To a few this love, this “wonder” of Sarah's thought, could suggest an aspect of Tillich's ontological love which strives to banish all estrangements in the world, strives to draw together in the universe all things that belong together—including God and man.

We'll see where we are (says Sarah).
The wit won't burn and the wet soul smoulders.
Blow on the coal of the heart, and we'll know …
We'll know. …

I like this ending—simple in diction, familiar and homely in imagery, organic with what has gone before, hopeful as to what the future may hold. I wouldn't change it in word, thought, or feeling. It reminds me of another ending by a poet who had brought a man and woman through trouble to the gates of Paradise, to the loss of Eden. Though the poet was a master of the full orchestra, he ushered man and woman into a bleak world on one of the simplest and purest strains in literature—bad modern drama, perhaps, but in effect marvelous poetry:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

Eleanor M. Sickels (essay date May 1963)

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SOURCE: Sickels, Eleanor M. “MacLeish and the Fortunate Fall.” American Literature 35, no. 2 (May 1963): 205-17.

[In the following essay, Sickels tracks MacLeish's use of the Christian theme of the Fortunate Fall in his poetry, especially in Songs for Eve and the verse play J. B.]

Archibald MacLeish first treated the myth of the lost Paradise in the verse play Nobodaddy, which appeared in 1926. Though the fact that it was never reprinted argues that he came to consider this play unsatisfactory either in idea or in technique, it is a revealing expression of his mood in the mid-twenties, serving in particular as a companion piece to The Pot of Earth, written in the same period, in which he uses the pagan myth of the dying and resurrected fertility god to question the meaning of a girl's life absorbed and snuffed out in service to survival of the race. In the Foreword to Nobodaddy MacLeish says that he is using the myth not as metaphor but solely as a dramatic presentation of the plight of human consciousness in an indifferent universe, without anthropological implications.¹ It is hard, however, to see how this use differs from metaphor, or from the reinterpretation of myth widely practiced from time immemorial. At all events, Nobodaddy, though not to be taken as identical with Yahweh, is here the nature god, aloof and incomprehensible, the Fall is alienation from him through aroused human self-consciousness (as in Songs for Eve twenty-eight years later, Eve is not Eve until she has eaten the apple), and the rebellion of Cain is the assertion of human integrity against the amoral nature worship of Abel.

Though these ideas are echoed in various guises throughout his career, MacLeish did not again use the myth of the lost Paradise until the fifties, when it became implicit in This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters (1953) and explicit in Songs for Eve (1954). In This Music the Earthly Paradise is an island in the Antilles, where the winds of time and change are stilled and the innocent moon is supernaturally haunting and beautiful. The primitive Indians could live here, with reefs and sharks as “angels at the gate,”² in a timeless innocence as in the primordial paradise of worldwide primitive ritual—in illo tempore, to use Mircea Eliade's felicitous phrase. But civilized men and women, represented by the visiting English and Americans of the play, must always find their fulfilment at some other time, some other place, never where they are, never just now—and not for long in the innocence and beauty of Paradise. By implication, they are creatures of the Fall.

All this, and much more, becomes comparatively explicit the following year in Songs for Eve. In the exquisite lyrics of the title sequence of this book, the tragic loneliness and rebellion of Nobodaddy and the muted acceptance of This Music give way to a mood close to exultation: we pass from timeless innocence through the Fall into space-time and on to contact with eternity: shall we recognize the ancient sequence of innocence, fall, and redemption? It is MacLeish's own version of the Fortunate Fall.

The symbols of this version of the paradise myth are, most of them, hoary with age and protean in meaning. There is the green tree, the tree of life which bears the apple of knowledge: one remembers not only the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, but Yggdrasil and all the sacred trees at the Center or Navel of the World ascending, which the shaman of archaic cultures may be translated in spirit to Paradise in illo tempore. In Songs for Eve the spirit of the green tree would seem to be the nature god of Nobodaddy, against which (or Whom) Eve-Adam rebels, asserting human individuality and reaching, as is said in Genesis 3:22 (“Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”), toward the condition of a god.

But to MacLeish's Eve there is no “sin” in the Fall:

The Fall! she said—
From earth to God!
Give thanks, said she, for branch, for bole,
For Eve who found the grace to fall
From Adam, browsing animal,
Into the soaring of the soul!(3)

For there is also the symbol of the dry tree. The dry tree, often in the form of a cross, is another ubiquitous and many-faceted symbol. The association of tree and cross seems, in fact, to be archetypal, as does the shift from nature's green to man's contrived, often ritualistic, dryness—substitution of a pole for a living tree to mark the sacred World Navel, the synonymous use of “tree” and “cross” in Christian hymnology, such modern instances as the associated imagery of tree and cross in Melville's heretical philosophy.⁴ In Songs for Eve the dry tree is surely, among other things, a Christ symbol; but it carries meanings beyond, if not contrary to, orthodox Christian doctrine. It recalls the widespread pre-Christian savior myths: the dying and resurrected fertility god, the divine god or goddess who in many archaic myths sacrifices himself or herself for man's sake, the king or king's son ritually killed that the people may thrive—the ordeal of Joseph Campbell's “hero with a thousand faces,” the most famous of which, aside from that of the Christ, is that of Prometheus. Thus the dry tree stands, on the one hand, for human accomplishment and aspiration: “All to this my sons are born: / To hew and shape and raise that tree …” (No. 25, p. 27); and on the other hand, as cross, for the terrible suffering and moral evil which are the inevitable consequences of the Fall, and for the redemptive quality of some of the achievement and some of the suffering. Insofar as there is reference to Jesus of Nazareth, he is the symbol of the best in mankind. It is interesting to note that the radio script on the Passion which MacLeish wrote in the forties is entitled not the Son of God but The Son of Man.⁵

But MacLeish's Fall, though fortunate and even triumphant, is not Milton's: it is fortunate because without it man is a mere animal, not because it made way through incalculable guilt and suffering for a Savior who died for the elect. MacLeish's redemption is in all human good achievement, and in the very yearning for the infinite which caused the Fall. For man's awakening to the consciousness of his freedom to choose between good and evil, while exiling him from Paradise, really does light in him a spark of the divine. Thus the dry tree seems to stand, finally, for escape from space-time, for the mysterious rapport with eternity felt by man. Eve feels it even on “that Eden night”—

I heard beyond that tree a tree
Stir in silence over me

(No. 1, p. 3)

—and heard space and time ring out and chime. Later she prophesies that when the “apple tree” has gone the dry tree will still “swing and sway” (No. 25, p. 27).

Green tree,
Time's tree,
Mystery.
.....Dry tree,
Man's tree,
Eternity.

(No. 27, p. 30)

Our journey is from “tree to tree,”

And what's between,
Eve said,
Our lives mean.

(No. 2, p. 4)

Thus, as in earlier poems since the war, notably Actfive, it is man alone, the human being of flesh and bone, who will construct the dry tree, “And on it bear eternity” (No. 25, p. 27). Eve lay, she asserts, with no swan or bull or shower of gold—with no “ghost”—but with a man (Nos. 12, 18, p. 14, 20):

Adam, Adam, there are none
Enter flesh but flesh and bone.

(No. 13, p. 15)

And yet, there is the mystery of an apparent third in generation, the something in flesh and bone which somehow reaches beyond the “greenwood tree” under which it is born. A whole sequence of poems (Nos. 11-19) explores this riddle. Possibly we can get no closer to MacLeish's tentative solution than these lines from another poem in the same volume:

Eternity is what our wanderers gather,
Image by image, out of time—the cut
Branch that flowers in the bowl. Our Father,
Thou who ever shalt be, the poor body
Dying in every ditch hath borne Thee, Father.(6)

“Out of time”: the symbol or motif of space-time pervades this whole volume. It is a concept MacLeish had been meditating on since the early twenties. Here it lies at the core of his thought and furnishes his most striking terms of expression.

One more interesting angle of the symbolism may be noted, especially as it is to a certain extent carried over to J. B. That is what might be called the androgynous element in this treatment of these myths. In some archaic mythologies the earlier gods are androgynous; Adam himself was at one time conceived as an androgynous being, and there are traces of androgyny in such deities as Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and Cybele—since “Every beginning is made in the wholeness of being.”⁷ Later there is wide belief in a divine marriage (hierogamy), as between Heaven and Earth, the Sky Father and the Earth Mother. In Western mythologies, including the Christian, the divine Earth Mother becomes a mortal woman, and only the male element is of the gods.⁸ But as early as The Pot of Earth (1925) MacLeish had put the question “What am I?” into the mouth of a woman, and his Eve, still perhaps the Earth Mother, takes the initiative in seeking awareness and finds Adam, aspiring as he is, no more divine than herself: it is a true hierogamy of our symbolical First Ancestors.

J. B. is the Man of the Fall. Since Sarah—in a notable departure from the original myth—partakes of the ordeal and the resolution, the play J. B., like Songs for Eve, has its androgynous aspect, so that in the end we can perhaps even speak of J. B.-Sarah as of Eve-Adam. But J. B., the modern Job, holds the center of the stage. He is, of course, the contemporary Man of the Fall, seen here as a successful and conventionally religious American. MacLeish wanted him played as an individual, not as Everyman,⁹ but nothing in the play or in anything the author has said about it would indicate that this method of presentation is more than an effort to make the symbolism more telling and immediate. The tragic hero is always both individual and symbol. And his ordeal and the way he meets it constitute one profound assertion of the Fortunate Fall.

Man falls up to God; he becomes “as one of us,” i.e., of the gods. He reaches for the infinite beyond space-time. This is the hubris of the Greeks, the spiritual pride of the Christians. It is man's glory and his doom. And in this tension, or dialectic, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine, tragedy is born. The true tragic hero is doomed by his very strength and aspiration, his reach for the apple of self-knowledge, his flaw of some forbidden excess; or he is a strong and noble victim of external consequences of the Fall, who, like the more active hero, asserts human dignity by his steadfast confrontation of his doom. Thus tragedy finds its symbol in the dry tree, both as achievement and as cross.

The Book of Job, long recognized as the only drama in the Bible, has been convincingly rearranged by Horace M. Kallen as a Greek tragedy.¹⁰ MacLeish and many of his critics have thought of the modern Job of J. B. as tragedy. Though Kallen deleted the so-called happy ending, generally admitted to be by a second (or third) hand, he need not have done so out of respect to Greek practice. MacLeish's special purpose was, as we shall see, served by his decision to keep a suggestion of this less lethal ending. Either way, we may present J. B. as a tragic hero in Aristotelian terms. He is thrown down from high estate to low. He learns through suffering. His flaw is a modern type of hubris rampant in the theoretically Christian West (especially, perhaps, in our own country): a smug and arrogant assumption that “the God of Galaxies” is a special friend and patron of his,¹¹ which involves the further assumption that he understands the Universe. His recognition—made more explicit at Kazan's suggestion in the play as produced than in the book—is his realization that he cannot depend on God or the Cosmos for justice, but must depend instead upon his human integrity to face whatever comes, and that he must find his values not in material prosperity but in love. His tragic strength is that he learns to accept an inscrutable destiny without despair, even as Sarah in the end cannot take her own advice to “curse God and die.” Thus they face life again, taking up the burden of the dry tree.

Of course J. B. comes to his resolution as to his ordeal not as an antique Greek—or Hebrew—but as a contemporary man of the West in our terrifying age. MacLeish tells us that the idea of the play came to him amid bomb-ruins during World War II and grew out of the whole burden of horror and guilt in our violent age: an age in which the image of a Father-God has faded for so many, as it has for MacLeish, into the abyss of sky with its unanswering stars above the circus tent of the world; an age in which men search, in literature and life, as J. B. searches, for their individual guilt—in Camus's The Fall, in Kafka's The Trial, in T. S. Eliot's retreat to the concept of Original Sin. So J. B.'s experience is not quite Job's experience, nor are his recognition and resolution quite Job's either, apt as is the essence of the metaphor to our predicament. What then is the metaphysical meaning of this play?

First, perhaps, it is a meaning akin to that of Melville's White Whale: at the core of life is ambiguity. Both the Godmask and the Satanmask are ambiguous. There are dignity and beauty in the Godmask and compassion in the Satanmask. If the Godmask stands for faith and order and the old and comfortable Father-image killed and grieved for in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), the Satanmask stands for the rebellion inherent in the Fortunate Fall, the humane rebellion of Prometheus and the proud rebellion of Milton's Satan at the beginning of Paradise Lost.¹² If the Satanmask stands for despair in the face of suffering, the Godmask stands for tyrannous authority and unearned disaster. Neither Mr. Zuss nor Nickles wins a complete victory. But Zuss is essentially affirmation of life and Nickles denial of life, and to that extent, with all his ambiguities, Mr. Zuss comes out better than Nickles. Of course the concept of Satan as the Spirit That Says No is centuries old. It is interesting to note, however, the contemporary twist MacLeish has given his Satan: originally both Zuss and Nickles were old men, but in the play as produced Nickles becomes a “mixed-up kid,” a beatnik, with an existentialist outlook close to the nihilism of Sartre. In his most lost and rebellious moods MacLeish has never been a nihilist.

But of course Zuss and Nickles are only actors, symbols of God and Satan as men have conceived them. They know they are puppets of the high gods (of “them” who want the Job-play played). Whenever Mr. Zuss and Nickles hesitate, the Distant Voice prompts them, commands them to go on. Once the circus tent opens upward, revealing the unanswering sky of “The End of the World” (1925), The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), and Actfive (1948), from which the great Voice issues—not with answers but with commands. And of course the Voice finally silences J. B.'s questions in the tremendous words of The Book of Job—ambiguous words: words of beauty and power, but scarcely of justice or love. This stupendous conception, as borrowed by MacLeish, is an overwhelming climax not only to the author's yearning questioning as in that recurrent figure of the unanswering night, but also to the symbol of the nature god in Nobodaddy and Songs for Eve: the Mystery beyond our knowing, the enormous Cosmic Ambiguity from which we are estranged by the Fall.

This is the terrifying experience of the Numinous, the Mysterium Tremendum, so marvelously analyzed by Rudolph Otto. J. B., like Job, is not answered by the Voice; he is only silenced. “He is brought,” MacLeish himself has told us, “not to know but to see.”¹³ To see: to be overwhelmed by the awful perception of the “Wholly Other,” the Cosmic Power and Mystery beyond reach of human thought.

Herbert Weiner, in the essay on the play previously referred to, asserts that J. B. does not have this experience. I believe that he does have it, or at least a large part of it. Otto discriminates five elements in the experience of the Numen: in the Tremendum awfulness, overpoweringness, and energy or urgency; in the Mysterium the “wholly other” and fascination. Surely J. B. feels the awfulness, the overwhelming power, and the urgent energy speaking in the Voice. His insistence on his own integrity implies the “wholly other,” reinforcing the author's sustained assertion of human personality in tragic or wistful alienation from the Mystery but somehow bearing it within:

Flesh and bone have wonder done
And wonder, bone and flesh are One.(14)

But the fifth element, fascination, is another matter. “The mystery,” Otto says, is, for him who has this experience, “not merely something to be wondered at but something that entrances him,” and to which he ascribes all human values, including “love, mercy, pity, comfort” in absoluteness and completeness.¹⁵ The result is worship, the worship of the All, either at the expense of human individuality and moral judgment, as in the East, or at the expense of ignoring the contradiction between the concept of an all-powerful, all-good Creator and the state of His creation, as in the West. MacLeish has always been an unreconstructed Westerner in his insistence on moral values and the integrity of the individual; and the comfort of the Western God has been denied him by the advance of science and the terrors of a violent age. Wherefore J. B. repents of expecting to know, of connecting guilt with cosmic justice; but he does not worship. He will accept the alienation, the expulsion from Eden and the mystery of the green tree, the terror and the glory of the Fall. He will believe, like Eve-Adam, in the dignity of “flesh and bone”; he will believe in man, as MacLeish once admonished a wartime audience to believe, “out of pride.”¹⁶

And out of love. Some critics have thought that the love with which J. B. and Sarah turn to each other at the end of the play is merely sentimental-romantic sexual love. But the marriage of J. B. and Sarah, like that of Adam and Eve, is surely symbolic—the hierogamy or sacred marriage in humanistic terms. In the play as first published, it is Sarah who first speaks of human love as comfort for lost faith:

Blow on the coal of the heart.
The candles in churches are out. …(17)

At Kazan's insistence the lines were transferred to J. B. in the acting version—a mistake, it seems to me, since it denies the feminine principle an active part in the solution of the common problem. At all events, MacLeish clearly meant “love” to embrace not only spouse and children but all suffering humanity—and perhaps God as well.

The chief defect of the play, in my judgment, is that the all-embracing quality of this love is not made unmistakable. The theme is suggested, to be sure, by the compassion of the Second Messenger (as well as of the Satanmask) and by the terrible, obviously contemporary, things which happen not only to J. B. and Sarah but to multitudes as human as they are, and in particular by the chorus of women in the bombed town. Two changes were made in the acting version which help to broaden the conception of love: much of the loving badinage between man and wife was deleted, and the women (in expanded scenes) try to comfort J. B., so that he tells the comfortless Comforters that they “gave their misery to keep me warm.”¹⁸ Yet one could wish that the symbolism had been made clearer. It is hard to understand how MacLeish of all people—with his long record of “public speech” and public service, and with his confession that the play originated in the indiscriminate horrors of World War II—could have failed to make love of fellow-man fully articulate in this play. For the theme is implicit throughout most of his work, in both prose and verse, and even occasionally explicit, as in the poem “Pole Star,” originally written for the depression “year 1933,” and in the ending of Actfive (1948), wherein man, “beneath the moon alone,” can

          know the void vast night above
And know the night below and dare
Endure and love.(19)

By the early fifties love has become integral in his poetic theory:

Know the world by heart
Or never know it!
Let the pedant stand apart—
Nothing he can name will show it:
Also him of intellectual art.
None know it
Till they know the world by heart.

Take heart then, poet!(20)

In J. B., then, the “coal of the heart” is lit by a love that is both eros and agape.

Agape is the untranslatable Greek word rendered in Corinthians as charity; it carries, we are told, some of the feeling of the Hebrew lovingkindness. It is an all-embracing love, from the self toward all other selves, and, in theological discussion, from the self toward God. I believe that, rightly understood, the love of J. B. is agape in the latter sense also. It is possible to love without understanding or moral approbation. And God the Cosmic Mystery is from an existential standpoint life itself—not mere biological survival, but beauty as well as ugliness, joy as well as pain, strength and wisdom gained through experience, perhaps most fully through the experience of suffering. Sarah cannot find a way out because of the beauty and promise of a branch of forsythia among the ruins. J. B. steadfastly refuses to curse God and die. For suicide is treason against life.²¹ And there is always hope, for others if not for the self—the boils will heal, the beloved will return—and life will go on. Wisdom in these matters may come with age:

Now at sixty what I see,
Although the world is worse by far,
Stops my heart in ecstasy.
God, the wonders that there are!(22)

Not only courage is needed, but love. “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it,” MacLeish quotes Yeats as saying. Because man can “live his truth” but not speak it, he goes on, “love becomes the ultimate human answer to the ultimate human question. Love, in reason's terms, answers nothing. … What love does is to affirm.”²³ In an article in the Christian Century, MacLeish goes further than he seems to go in the play, beyond humanism toward a more nearly traditional conception of God: “It is a poet's question which brings me to my text, the most difficult and the most urgent of all poet's questions in a time like this, the question of the belief in life—which is also and inevitably the question of the belief in the meaning, the justice, of the universe—which, in its ultimate terms, is the question of the belief in God.” “Love creates,” he says further on; “Love creates even God.” And again: “It is in man's love that God exists and triumphs: in man's love that life is beautiful: in man's love that the world's injustice is resolved. To hold together in one thought those terrible opposites of good and evil which struggle in the world is to be capable of life, and only love will hold them so.”²⁴

Yet MacLeish calls himself “a man committed to no creed,”²⁵ and it is not entirely clear why he should have felt called upon to defend his conception to ministers and rabbis and the readers of the Christian Century. It is possible to interpret J. B. in purely humanistic terms. Even in the exegesis we may perceive more metaphor than doctrine. Love, he says, creates God; compare the quotation above (from Songs for Eve) which ends “the poor body … hath borne Thee, Father.” “If we reject the absolutes of Newton as of Aquinas,” says Herbert J. Muller, “we perforce talk in metaphor.”²⁶ Surely this is true of poets. Even such neo-orthodox theologians as Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr sometimes write as though they conceived of God as metaphor of Reality.²⁷ Humanists, who eschew absolutes and respect the Cosmic Mystery, sometimes speak of God, Who, in Muller's words, “At the very least … remains the most immense and splendid of all metaphors.”²⁸ And if the metaphor stands for Reality, for Life in all its fullness, it can be loved.

In these poems of the Fortunate Fall the symbol at the core of the metaphor is first the green tree, then the Distant Voice. The Fall is alienation by assertion of human personality. The redemption is through the dry tree: through suffering and love.

“The metaphor still struggles in the stone,” MacLeish wrote in 1952, and exhorted the poets:

Turn round into the actual air:
Invent the age! Invent the metaphor!(29)

Throughout his career MacLeish has himself been seeking the metaphor by which to give meaning to the modern age. Of late, like so many contemporaries, he has sought the larger metaphor of myth. Nothing he has written has been more moving or more meaningful than the proud humanism of Songs for Eve and the tragic reconciliation of J. B.

Notes

Nobodaddy: A Play (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), Foreword, unpaged.
This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 7.
Songs for Eve (Boston, 1954), No. 8, “The Fall!,” p. 10.
See James Baird, Ishmael (Baltimore, 1956), pp. 299 ff.
Typed radio script in New York Public Library, dated “194—.” This was an experiment long antedating J. B. in using Biblical words as text.
“The Infinite Reason,” pp. 35-36.
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (London, [1960]), p. 175.
This sex discrimination, which contrasts with Oriental myth, is noted in W. B. Yeats's “Ribh Denounces Patrick”: “An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man— / Recall that masculine Trinity …” (Collected Poems, New York, 1955, p. 283). Jung concludes his book Answer to Job (trans. R. F. C. Hull, New York, 1960 [1952]) with a chapter defending on psychological grounds the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.
MacLeish to Elia Kazan, in “The Staging of a Play,” Esquire, LI, 144-58 (May, 1959), 156. Later references to Kazan's part in the revision are also from this source.
The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York, [1959]).
Herbert Weiner reports that, when MacLeish met questioners, mostly rabbis and ministers, after the New York opening of J. B., a woman surprised him by asking if he knew how “unlikable” J. B. is (“Job on Broadway: MacLeish's Man and the Bible's,” Commentary, XXVII, 153-158, Feb., 1959). The phrase “the God of Galaxies” is from Mark Van Doren's poem of this title, Selected Poems (New York, [1954]), pp. 213-214. The presumption of a Christian—J. B. considers himself a Christian—who expects special providences is denounced by Reinhold Niebuhr as undeserving of moral support (Beyond Tragedy, quoted in Major Voices in American Theology, ed. D. W. Soper, Philadelphia, [1953], p. 41).
Jung has called Satan “the godfather of man as a spiritual being” (Answer to Job, p. 51). So he is, in both Songs for Eve and J. B.: leading Eve-Adam to knowledge of good and evil, enforcing on J. B.-Sarah realization that this knowledge cannot be applied to the Numen.
“About a Trespass on a Monument,” New York Times, Dec. 7, 1958, Sec. II, Pt. 2, p. 7.
Songs for Eve, No. 13, p. 15.
The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York, [1917]), p. 31.
“Humanism and the Belief in Man,” Atlantic Monthly, CLXXIV, 76 (Nov., 1944).
J. B.: A Play in Verse (Boston, [1958]), p. 153.
Text of the final acting version, Theatre Arts, XLIV, 33-64 (Feb., 1960), 58.
Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston, [1952]), pp. 99-101, 369.
“Theory of Poetry,” Songs for Eve, p. 37 (quoted entire). This is an interesting shift of emphasis from “Ars Poetica” (“A poem should not mean / But be”), from Streets in the Moon, 1926 (Collected Poems, p. 41).
“The Treason Crime,” Collected Poems, p. 136 (from Actfive, 1948).
“With Age Wisdom,” Songs for Eve, p. 42.
“Trespass on a Monument,” p. 7.
“The Book of Job,” Christian Century, LXXVI 419, 422 (April 8, 1959).
“About a Trespass on a Monument,” p. 7.
Science and Criticism: The Humanistic Tradition in Contemporary Thought (New Haven, 1943), p. 242.
In The Courage to Be (New Haven, [1952]), p. 190, Tillich even writes of a “God above God” for those who cannot believe in the God of theism but who, taking “the anxiety of meaninglessness” upon themselves, still have the “courage to be.”
Muller, p. 269.
“Hypocrite Auteur,” Collected Poems, p. 175.

Harry R. Sullivan (essay date December 1967)

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SOURCE: Sullivan, Harry R. “MacLeish's ‘Ars Poetica’.” English Journal 56, no. 9 (December 1967): 1280-83.

[In the following essay, Sullivan explicates MacLeish's paradoxical poem “Ars Poetica,” viewing it as “a rarity among poems on the art of poetry.”]

Archibald MacLeish's “Ars Poetica” comes close to being the anthology piece of his poetry. It is also read aloud by the author in An Album of Modern Poetry as recorded for the Library of Congress. In 1946 Professor Donald A. Stauffer very excellently discussed this poem in The Nature of Poetry. Since it has become so familiar to students and since it does so remarkably image rather than define its author's conception of what a poem itself should be, a still closer examination into its specific symbolism and its tightly woven structure seems justifiable.

The poem is much more than an allusion-studded, cryptic collage or a painfully calculated, intellectual crossword puzzle. It is as cryptic as it needs must be, yet neither tortured nor willfully obscure. Its imagery is closely assimilated into the several related paradoxes of the poet's own conception of an organically unified poem. It is, in short, gratifyingly what it purports to be.

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem is necessarily an affair of words, yet it is “mute,” “dumb,” and “silent.” Its imagery should be palpable to the physical senses, but its total effect of organic unity, of that imaginative synthesis which Coleridge believed should order and unify the rich variety of human experience, escapes mere verbal explication. The language of direct statement cannot capture or encompass the rich yet subtle suggestiveness implicit in poetic imagery in the sense that old medallions and sleeve-worn casement ledges conceal from casual familiarity their long contact with the continuous flow of human experience. Yet it is this “thick and slab” accumulation of use and wont from the passage of time with which the genuine poem is full and ripe as a globed fruit. “Globed fruit” incorporates the sense of the roundness of matured development, of the circle of perfection, and of the intimate association of poetry with the vitality and organic significance of life. Like ripe fruit, the poem is the epitome, the ultimate physical, or verbal, form the poet's intense inward experience finally assumes.

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

This fourth and culminating simile, emphasizing silence to the point of wordlessness, associates the inspiration of the poet with that of the ancient augur, who was concerned with discovery of the divine truth of Jupiter in the phenomena of nature. The truth of poetry inheres within its deeply suggestive imagery, which otherwise appears inscrutable in terms of the specific and literal signification of language. The image of the flight of birds further suggests the soaring imaginative inspiration of the poet.

Now we come to what seems to be the crux paradox of the poem:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem is not only mute but also motionless in that it transcends time. Here is suggested the dominant image of the poem as Microcosm, incorporating, as does the Macrocosm itself, the fundamental duality of truth implicit in nature—the absolute and the relative, the eternal and the temporal, unity and diversity. This synthesis of polarities, of the two-fold nature of truth, of motion and the motionless, also finds expression in a poem. The Taoist sage Lao-Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, incorporated both the indeterminate aesthetic continuum and its determinate differentiations as essential and inseparable aspects of reality. Similarly, Henry Vaughan, in “The World,” had a vision of this dual, complementary nature of reality:

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved, …

As in the excerpt from Vaughan's poem the endless motion of the moon in time and space operates within the motionlessness of the absolute. The moon would seem to be a more appropriate image than the sun, representing a greater variety of change and a more intimate association with the mystery of life and nature. With her apparent rising and setting, her monthly cycles, and her waxing and waning, she was for the ancients a goddess of poetry and mythology; and, despite recent space exploration, she has remained for us a mysterious light in the vast profundity of night. She ceaselessly passes through the world of nature and the life of man, which, in a sense, is a growing composite of a succession of memories. Indeed, the Muses themselves were daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the personification of memory.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

Unlike an abstract statement of the truth, historical or philosophical, a poem is its own equivalent for the contrarieties of human experience, which is the basic stuff of poetry. In simple concrete images the poet may embody the antithetic universal human feelings of grief and joy. An empty doorway may epitomize the entire history of human grief; a maple leaf in autumn, the inevitable death of all organic life, vegetable as well as human. The antithesis of grief, or death, is naturally love, joy, vitality, and creativity, which, I suggest, may be imaged in “leaves of grass” as well as in the dominant celestial luminaries of the heavens—the sun and the moon, respectively, representing the masculine and feminine principles of nature—in their unending dance over the elemental sea.

MacLeish concludes his succession of images and similes with a simple abstract statement that “A poem should not mean / But be.” Aptly, he has conveyed this idea in the very texture of the poem itself by the indirect poetic language of suggestion. The poem is a vital experience, not a merely descriptive report of an experience. And this poem about the meaning of poetry does not simply tell us what it is; it succeeds in actually becoming what it purports to demonstrate. Importantly, the poem is not an isolated experience in itself; on the contrary, it images life in its ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies. The language of poetry, with its rich suggestibility of concrete imagery, endows human experience with its peculiar impact of immediacy. In short, the Macrocosm of life is mirrored in the Microcosm of the genuine poem. MacLeish's we feel, is such an accomplishment, a rarity among poems on the art of poetry.

Grover Smith (essay date 1975)

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SOURCE: Smith, Grover. “Archibald MacLeish.” In Seven American Poets from MacLeish to Nemerov: An Introduction, edited by Denis Donoghue, pp. 16-54. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975.

[In the following excerpt, Smith offers an in-depth survey of MacLeish's poetry from his earliest verse to 1968's The Wild Old Wicked Man, focusing principally on subject and theme.]

… When MacLeish assembled his Collected Poems 1917-1952, he conformed to usual practice in suppressing most of the early work; but as one examines the early poems they are seen to relate, in various and sometimes contradictory ways, to his mature verse. The first volumes, Songs for a Summer's Day (1915) and Tower of Ivory (1917), display a lively interest in verse forms as such. The former contains sonnets only; but the latter includes, as well, a number of stanzaic exercises and one precocious dramatic piece, “Our Lady of Troy” (which, despite a Swinburnean promise in its title, is akin rhetorically to Jonson's humor plays). The sonnets in Tower of Ivory show the inevitable debt to Shakespeare; some of them, the best indeed, could only have derived from the “soldier” sonnets of Rupert Brooke. What is more significant, they imply a taste and probably a need for strict formal boundaries within which to manipulate tone, music, imagery, and argument. A few Keatsian couplets (in “A Library of Law”), examples of ballad measure (notably in “A Sampler”), some regular quatrains (as in “Escape”), a ballade (so entitled), paired sonnets (“Certain Poets”), a Petrarchan sonnet but with two octaves (“Baccalaureate”), and miscellaneous lyrical stanzas fill out this group. The themes are amatory and visionary, mainly in the Aesthetic tradition: there is some superficial paganism, sometimes yoked with Christian symbols, and a great deal of hedonism and a rather Yeatsian preoccupation with an enchanted realm of dream. Antiscientific or at least antipragmatic sentiments, characteristically late Victorian, come out in the dream poems “Jason” and “Realities.” A time-worn motif of mutability, devouring Time, and Death the inexorable recurs abundantly. Yet, even with their intellectual representations, most of these poems seem to achieve more through music than through argument. Often the sound is more interesting than the sense. Imagery appears not to be handled deliberately or for the sake of symbolic possibilities, but to be mainly decorative. (At the same time a few emblematic images strike the attention, as in MacLeish's sonnet “The Altar,” which uses a metaphysical conceit. Here certain carved garlands, intended as symbols of beauty in general, are discovered to have accidentally shaped the letters spelling a particular woman's name. Various baroque analogues may have influenced the poem.)

In his Dialogues with Mark Van Doren (1962; published 1964), MacLeish remarked that when he began writing verse he “took off from Swinburne.” That, certainly, was Swinburne as musician only: Swinburne the sensualist was no model in any of MacLeish's early poetry. The decorous “Realities” is as Swinburnean as you please; in fact, it is quite good, though of low intensity—Swinburne sober. After a few years' fascination with such music, MacLeish reacted against it. It seems that his reaction was a vehement one: his later poetry has, if anything, avoided musicality and has often been downright unmusical. At any rate sense and argument reasserted themselves strongly; an intricate, even devious, rhetoric began to dominate. For a time the sonnet retained his favor, as in the title piece of the volume The Happy Marriage, and Other Poems (1924). That long poem (a sort of nontragical Modern Love) is made up partly of sonnets and partly of other regular forms, and the verbal effects produced with these are very skillful. Two sections of “The Happy Marriage” in rhyming couplets (beginning respectively “The humid air precipitates” and “Beside her in the dark the chime”) have survived into Collected Poems, where they may remind the reader that MacLeish's next important model, after Swinburne, was Eliot. The first of these lyrics was indebted to Eliot in his “Sweeney” period, the second to his “Portrait of a Lady.” Both employ symbolistic imagery in a quasi-dramatic context of emotional confrontation—as Eliot's poems had done.

Between 1917 and 1924 MacLeish's style acquired the features of its maturity—conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical strategies of argument; compressed and intense implications—all of these owing much, though quite certainly not everything, to Eliot's example. MacLeish was usually able to resist the Eliot rhythms. His cadences were to have great diversity and to echo many predecessors. His voice, moreover, did not have much in common with the self-conscious orotundity of Eliot's middle period (it had something in common with the Prufrockian tones), and he seldom undertook vocal productions such as dramatic monologues. Indeed, a lasting mark of MacLeish's work has been the weakness of the persona. At times the diction is remote from speech; at other times it may be close to speech but bare of individuality, diffuse, as though spoken by a chorus. For this reason, despite his partial debt to Eliot, MacLeish belongs not only outside of the Browning-Tennyson traditions of monologue but also outside of the American schools which have stemmed from those, the diverse movements represented by E. A. Robinson and Vachel Lindsay, by Frost and the early Pound. Like stream-of-consciousness fiction, which owes a great deal to it, the dramatic monologue indulges introspection in the safety of a disguise. (Perhaps in fiction, as in the poetry of Yeats, freedom rather than safety is in request—the complexification rather than the disengagement of the writer.) MacLeish's poetry, for the most part, is not introspective, and this is why indeed no persona is wanted. According to its own purposes, its diminution of the persona is a strength: by this means it turns the reader away from the endless labyrinths of subjective illusion and irony, the “echoing vault” of the poetic self, and invites him to contemplate the phenomenal world. It does not vocalize that self: it can and often does fabricate a kind of disembodied speech, or speech whose origin need not be known. It aspires to be, and sometimes becomes, a poetry of spectacle—not always, but especially when, as in the near masterpiece Einstein (1926), it is wholly under the control of an intellectual concept. Then the images arrange themselves as objective counterparts of the progress of an idea—Eliot's “objective correlative” intellectualized.

MacLeish in the 1920s increasingly took pains with the formal structure of his poetry. Only through form could the swelling rhetoric be channeled. After the 1924 volume, the sonnet was neglected for a while, but it was not discarded even in Streets in the Moon (1926), where free verse of a highly regulated type alternates with blank verse and stanzaic patterns. Blank verse, with a few rhyming lyric passages, was used also for his symbolistic poem The Pot of Earth (1925) and his closet drama Nobodaddy (1926).

The theme and scope of Nobodaddy, referred to by MacLeish as a “poem,” are indicated in his preface, which adds that the “emotional experiences” treated there are “not unlike” those dealt with in The Pot of Earth, written after it but published before. Nobodaddy takes its title from Blake's derisory name for the scriptural god of prohibitions. It adapts the Adam-and-Eve, Cain-and-Abel story to dramatize what MacLeish calls “the condition of self-consciousness in an indifferent universe”; it is a poetic essay, of course, not biblical commentary. In it, Adam has emerged into humanity, into consciousness of himself as a being distinct from the rest of creation. In this condition he has two choices, a fact which disquiets him and in itself presumably inclines him to the choice he makes. He can either stand in awe of nature (“the Gardener”), accepting the inferiority implicit in obedience to a system he does not understand, or else assert his will to become a god—that is, a rational being superior to nature. Urged by the Voice of his will (metaphorically the Serpent) and by Eve, who does not fear what she has never experienced, natural harshness, Adam eats the forbidden fruit and thus alienates himself by act as well as by will. The consequence is misery: his daring to break the bond of obedience brings down upon his head a flood of superstitious terrors. The Gardener, far from changing into an Avenger, seems to have vanished; but frantic with guilt Adam flees the garden, and he and Eve seek the desert. It remains for their sons, Abel and Cain, to complete the drama by, in effect, modernizing the situation. Abel, representative of Adam fallen and burdened with guilt, attempts a mystical reconciliation with the supposed Avenger. Longing to return to the garden, to ignorance and servitude, he invents a relationship with an invented god: religion is born. By blood sacrifice he strives to atone. His brother, Cain, realist and rationalist, and similar to Adam as he was when he heard the Voice of his humanity exhorting him to free himself, asserts human values and the will to power. Abel grovels before the voice of thunder and tries to pull Cain down to his knees in humility. Cain, already godlike in mind, kills him.

It is not clear why Adam is so constituted that he cannot profit from his fall, but because he cannot his son Abel cannot either. It is left for Cain to vindicate reason against superstition; that he has to do so by murder is ironic, to say the least. At any rate none of the four characters comprehends the meaning of these actions. It is for the reader to understand in terms, primarily, of acceptance and rejection. So long as man believed himself to be simply part of nature, he lived in a paradise. Death was there already, the biological cycle had begun, but man had not yet taken it personally—it was still objective. When man became self-conscious, his acceptance of nature changed into resistance, and with its normal machinery of death it seemed a threat to him. Not only was he utterly different from nature, but it was indifferent to him—though physically he remained within it. He had imagination; nature was all process. The “Gardener” of Nobodaddy is merely the principle of life viewed as sympathetic harmony. When this view disappears, and reason replaces it with the stark vision of process, the Gardener gives way to the enemy, the unsympathetic. Physical nature converted into the antagonist of man's will is a desert, a region which will not behave as man desires. The harmony of prelapsarian Eden was that of man's acquiescent ignorance; the disharmony of the natural world, to fallen man, is that of its uncontrollability. His selfhood defies nature and battles with it, but at the last must sink defeated. Abel's attempt to return symbolically to the unfallen state takes the form of a conscious imitation of nature's unconscious cruelty; he grafts human motives upon the indifferent. Abel's sacrifice of a ram is wrong because consciousness cannot atone with unconsciousness. Nature's own profuse bloodletting sets no store by covenants and bargaining; apart from man's imagination such “deals” are meaningless. If human ideals estrange man from nature, and if, nevertheless, with the justice of indifference, nature punishes every act not in harmony with its laws, then man is automatically unhappy.

The idea that human feelings meet nothing like themselves, no sympathetic responses, in nature, and that nature governs the life of the body as if the desires of the mind did not occur, is present in The Pot of Earth. But the theme of this poem is the bitterness and pity of those desires so subjected to the Gardener's indifference. Here is the case of the toad beneath the harrow. The poem was published three years after The Waste Land of Eliot. The two works are of roughly the same length. They have much similarity, in technique and symbolism alike. In certain notable ways they are dissimilar. The Waste Land is a first-person monologue to which are subordinated various genre adaptations. The Pot of Earth is mainly a third-person narrative, though with some first-person stream-of-consciousness effects. Stylistically The Waste Land is by far the more experimental and radical. Both poems, however, draw upon Sir James Frazer's work The Golden Bough for vegetation symbolism which, mythologically and ceremonially, represents the death and resurrection of a fertility god (e.g., Adonis) as a type of the seasonal decay and revival of nature. Both also, in applying this symbolism within a modern context of life, emphasize not the victory of life over death but the reverse of this. On the other hand, they again differ most significantly in what they apply such symbolism to. The Waste Land, exploring a gnostic and “spiritualized” sense of death and rebirth, uses a special myth (the Grail legend) concerning an arrest of fertility, whose equivalent in the poem is the male protagonist's state of emotional aridity and despair. The Pot of Earth applies the vegetation symbolism to its female protagonist's organic functions: the biological cycle takes place in her, as if in a plant springing up, flowering, being fertilized, bearing fruit, and dying. Or, more exactly, the girl or woman herself can be regarded as such a “pot of earth,” or Garden of Adonis described by Frazer in the passage which MacLeish prefixed to his poem as a general epigraph. For, like those shallow-rooted plants forced into brief and hectic life under the Syrian sun, only to wither and to be thrown into the sea as symbols of the god bewailed by his sectaries, she leads a transient existence, devoid of any lasting meaning except the biological one. The resurrection of the fertility god means new life for nature, not for the individual. At the conclusion of The Pot of Earth, the woman has borne a child and has died; a chestnut tree is in flower; but she rots in the earth. Here the Adonis myth becomes the vehicle for a realization of the inextricability of life and death. MacLeish's second epigraph to the poem (later transferred to part i) is the “god kissing carrion” passage from Hamlet; and part iii is called “The Carrion Spring.” In Hamlet “carrion” is the prince's coarse designation for Ophelia: evidently the woman in The Pot of Earth has a sacrificial role like that to which the Ophelia personage is doomed in The Waste Land. But she has been sacrificed by the indifference of nature, not the brutality of man.

The 1925 text of The Pot of Earth, several pages longer than the text printed in Poems, 1924-1933 (1933) and thereafter, adopts the Waste Land technique of making the past and present interpenetrate, so that the modern woman's life cycle is depicted in timeless fusion with that of a primitive world: its incidents are abruptly juxtaposed to details from the Adonis ritual. But the three principal passages in which this effect is created have been omitted from the later printings, leaving the poem free of the startling “intertemporal” counterpoint typical of Eliot, and with a contemporary texture purely. Yet, beneath this, continual allusions to the Adonis ritual remain to suggest a theme of unending recurrence. Perhaps recapitulation, rather than recurrence, is the universalizing motif in The Pot of Earth (as for example it is in Joyce's Finnegans Wake): this woman is eternal woman, and eternal woman typifies reproductive nature, whose dream is her life. She, like the Garden of Adonis in antiquity, blossoms as an emblem, a signature, of some omnipresent and all-involving archetype of cyclical life and death. Her anonymity is as profound as that of Tiresias, the Waste Land persona; but whereas he is obscured by Eliot's pretentious legerdemain with literary cross references, she has a constant, though shadowy, identity.

There seems to be a philosophical difference between The Pot of Earth and The Waste Land in the ways they pose their protagonists against the world. Eliot's poem is very much in a “psychological” tradition; that is, starting from an Idealist's assumption that the individual point of view is of paramount importance because it uniquely focuses knowledge of externals, The Waste Land attains form by offering a view from a single point, or through a single narrow peephole. It recalls Bergsonian and stream-of-consciousness fiction. MacLeish's poem seems to start from a Realist's assumption that there is nothing special in point of view as such; that the law of things is common to all. It depicts a typical relation of the natural to the human, indeed choosing to examine the fate of someone quite average. Whatever the resemblance of MacLeish's techniques to those of subjectivists and symbolists, his fond was otherwise. His poem, like Eliot's, uses Aesthetic and symbolist procedures to assist naturalistic statement, but his is closer to a philosophical naturalism which assumes the total subjection of man to time and chance.

There was much of the eighteenth-century rationalist in the MacLeish of the 1920s and in his political character later; much, also, of the scientific observer of life. He had made an almost complete break with his antiscientific and aesthetical beginnings as a poet. He now accepted the scientists' description of reality—only boggling at its falsification of experience. The external world he confronted was the one described by the astronomers, by the biologists, and above all by the mathematical physicists of his own day. Whereas Eliot and Pound and Yeats were ancients, MacLeish was a modern. One may believe that Einstein's space-time-energy continuum receives, in the work of MacLeish, its most important poetic treatment to date—a treatment not through casual allusion for contemporary color, but through exact intellectual integration with the subject matter of felt life. A thematic carry-over takes place from The Pot of Earth to later poems—the conflict between personal hopes and natural law, developed first, perhaps a little less pessimistically, in Nobodaddy.

The volume Streets in the Moon scrutinizes the state of man the conscious animal in the disheartening universe of curved space and irreversible entropy. In his “Prologue” to this collection, MacLeish salutes a hypothetical “crew of Columbus” who are westward bound but, as in nightmare, toward a “surf that breaks upon Nothing”; and he comments, concerning this apparent fate of the whole human race,

Oh, I have the sense of infinity—
But the world, sailors, is round.
They say there is no end to it.

The paradox of infinite aspirations confined in a world closed and therefore without “end” to aspire beyond is a leading theme of Streets in the Moon. The title of the book suggests the double vision: “streets” a symbol of the here and now of consciousness, the “moon” a symbol (defined partly by the counter-romantic use to which Jules Laforgue put it in his poetry) of a myth degraded by science. The volume concludes with the wry humor of “The End of the World,” in which a temporal “end” to the circus of life reveals the nothingness above man's head. The poems in between, several of them conspicuously indebted to Laforgue (“Nocturne,” “Selene Afterwards,” “Hearts' and Flowers'”), to Eliot, or to Pound, and one of them most notably (Einstein) written in a symbolistic manner recalling Mallarmé's “L'Après-midi d'un faune” (but in a rather Miltonic strain!), deal variously with the mystery of existence, with the problem of time (symbolized by the sun, among other things), with death, with love and other relations, and with human character. A few are imagistic; others are elegiac, anecdotal, or narrative and Browningesque. One of the finest poems in this fine collection is the three-part “Signature for Tempo,” a meditation on the relativity of time and movement:

Think that this world against the wind of time
Perpetually falls the way a hawk
Falls at the wind's edge but is motionless;

on fourth-dimensional extension:

How shall we bury all
These time-shaped people,
In graves that have no more
Than three dimensions?

(though why not, one could retort, since in fact the graves have the same number of dimensions as the people); and on death as the point in time where all are united:

Whom time goes over wave by wave, do I lie
Drowned in a crumble of surf at the sea's edge?—

And wonder now what ancient bones are these
That flake on sifting flake
Out of deep time have shelved this narrow ledge
Where the waves break.

“The Too-Late Born,” rhetorically very brilliant, is most meaningful in the context of the time poems (its later title, “The Silent Slain,” constricts its meaning); it, too, is about the community of the dead. The death of Roland at Roncesvalles has been made archetypal: the “silent slain” could belong to any army, and the fact that “we” survive them is an accident of time—an ironic one, for in due time we shall join them in the universal graveyard of the earth. Themes of mortality are further explored in “No Lamp Has Ever Shown Us Where to Look,” “Interrogate the Stones,” and “Le Secret humain,” in terms of speculations on the “answer” that death is supposed to have in reserve for man, an answer that may simply annihilate the questioner. “Raree Show” asks whether the question is within the mind, but ends with a new question, “Where?” “L'An trentiesme de mon Eage” (its title taken from a line by François Villon which was a favorite of Pound's, and which was used by Eliot in an epigraph and by Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) is somewhat in the mood of Eliot's “Gerontion.” Through a multiplicity of memories its speaker has arrived at his present place; he then asks, “And by what way shall I go back?” One could answer that there is no need of going back, for “place” is temporal as well as spatial, and what belongs to time contains its past. The poem, having reviewed the past, has already returned to it, through art. But this reply would be satisfactory only to a Bergsonian. In any realistic analysis the question is unanswerable, though MacLeish was to continue asking it in later poems.

One of the most often cited anthology pieces from Streets in the Moon is the paradoxical and enigmatic “Ars Poetica.” In spite of its Horatian title, which seems to imply simply a verse essay in legislative criticism, a poem about the art of poetry, its true workings are otherwise. It does not frame an address to poets generally, much less to their critics; it is no essay in criticism. Nor yet does it introspectively comment, like Eliot's poem “La Figlia che Piange,” on the poet's relation to his own creative process. Perhaps some readers, remembering chiefly the distichs “A poem should be equal to: / Not true” and “A poem should not mean / But be,” have interpreted what “Ars Poetica” says (that a poem should be like an object beheld in stasis, not like a message or a paradigm) as what it is for. If so, they have taken it for a critical essay and have violated its supposed counsel! The central paradox of “Ars Poetica” is that it makes sense only when the reader accepts its sense as a function of form. It then survives as the aesthetic object it approves—with the proviso that the approval must be held as an utterance in vacuo, a silence:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

The real subject of “Ars Poetica” is itself, by a sort of narcissism of the written word as “pure poetry”; this poem exhibits aestheticism circling round, as it were, and returning like the equator upon the round earth. The result contrives a stasis indeed, free or nearly free of time's rotation. The moon of the second part, MacLeish's recurrent symbol of the imaginative world ideally transcending the naturalist's inner and outer landscapes, drifts as poetic subjectivity defying its antithesis, the solar clock. “Ars Poetica,” somewhat Yeatsian like various other short poems in the volume, looks also Keatsian: the whole poem speaks with a voice which, like that of the Grecian urn when it equates beauty and truth, belongs to a realm of ideality and is relevant only to that. Such a realm, proper to poetry, conflicts with nature; MacLeish's long poem Einstein reviews the naturalistic conception that man, at least, cannot quite escape the prison of his time-bound flesh. That, too, is a Keatsian thought.

Einstein in theme recalls Nobodaddy; the resemblance proves useful in the unraveling of its complexities. Not only is the subject difficult (like most subjects) unless one already understands it, but the rhetoric lumbers in obscurity. Nevertheless the poem operates compellingly upon the emotions, and it ought to be one of the best known philosophical poems of the period. The Einstein of the title is modern intellectual man, scientist, represented microcosmically as a sort of Leopold Bloom, atomic and entire (ein Stein, perhaps—a stone, or at least a pebble!), who has inherited the problem and the mission of MacLeish's Cain, the mission of rationality. The Einsteinian universe is rationality triumphant, as indeed it is the triumph of the modern spirit. The poem (a narrative showing the process of “going back,” by reason, to a condition which seems to repeal Adam's alienation from nature and to reunite his posterity with the primal creator—i.e., in effect deifying man) reveals the way back by recapitulating the way forward, from any infancy to full consciousness. First there is Einstein, man secure in his body-sense and self-contained. Then, his awareness of sense impressions. Then, his mental abstraction of these into a coherent world—

A world in reason which is in himself
And has his own dimensions.

Then, his discovery of his ignorance and impotence in the world's vastness and mystery. Then, his attempt to gain mystical identification with this mystery by sensory and aesthetic contemplation, and most through music,

                                        When he a moment occupies
The hollow of himself and like an air
Pervades all other.

Then (in a passage to which Eliot, who seems to owe several points to this poem, suggests a reply in the closing lines of Burnt Norton), his realization that there is no longer a “word” which can translate beauty into thought and thus into himself (the word described as known to the Virgin of Chartres but as now become “three round letters” in a carving was presumably the “ave” which hailed, in effect, the Incarnation). Then, upon his rejection of mysterious access and Abel's quest, his intellectual formulation of Albert Einstein's theories. And finally, the godlike subduing of nature to himself, so that the physical universe is comprehended in his consciousness, which itself becomes all.

Only one stage remains, and this is denied him. His own flesh cannot melt into his thought: he keeps “Something inviolate. A living something.” These phrases return him to the state which was his at the beginning of the poem, where, at minimal definition, the “something inviolate” is the fact “that / His father was an ape.” The original Adam, sprung from nature and subject to it, by it condemned, to die, persists despite this victory. Those critics are surely wrong who see Einstein as antiscientific; rather, the poem, like Nobodaddy, affirms the necessary destiny of man to subdue everything to his knowledge—everything but the stubborn, atavistic ape within, which must refuse to yield. The anecdotal poem “The Tea Party” says all that need be said about man's sense of his primitivism; Einstein says something further, that the animal residuum is man's very life. The tragic fate awaiting this life has already been revealed in The Pot of Earth.Einstein is not tragic; it is not even precisely critical. It is an intellectual celebration of an intellectual triumph, attended by a voice bidding the triumphator remember that he is dust.

MacLeish's tragic sense of the buried life, exposed in the impersonal symbolism of The Pot of Earth, is deeply sounded in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). An observation by MacLeish more than a decade later, in his essay “Poetry and the Public World,” was made to introduce a kind of renunciation of this poem or at least of the attitudes it expresses: “The Hamlet of Shakespeare was the acceptance of a difficult age and the demonstration of the place, in that age, of poetry. The Hamlet of Laforgue, and after him of Eliot and after him of the contemporary generation, is the rejection of a difficult age and a contemptuous comment upon the hope of poetry to deal with it. … [N]ot until contemporary poetry writes the Hamlet of Laforgue and Eliot out of its veins, will poetry occupy, and reduce to the order of recognition, the public-private world in which we live.” The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is in the tradition of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and of Eliot's Prufrockian and wastelandish poems; and it focuses, certainly, upon the sufferings of the sensitive man, not upon the problems of the age in its “public” bearings. From the point of view of 1939, after a decade of experiment with “public” themes and at a moment of intense uneasiness about the future of civilization, MacLeish saw his Hamlet as too negative, as too much lacking in what the same essay called “acceptance” and “belief.” Yet it was probably just as well that he aimed his criticism expressly against Laforgue and Eliot and only lumped his Hamlet implicitly with theirs; for really there is a difference in kind between their pessimism and his own in that poem. Quite simply, their pessimism is social, whereas his is cosmic. What Laforgue and Eliot (in his early poetry) found fault with was the special uncongeniality of life for the special personae in their poetry. What MacLeish complains of in his Hamlet is the injustice of the universe. Surely a poem which says that life is a fraud is hardly to be criticized for not telling us how to live optimistically.

In Einstein there are marginal notes with the double purpose of punctuating the stages of consciousness and locating these in the mind of one individual. In The Hamlet such notes have a different purpose: they key the psychological action to Shakespeare's Hamlet, from which (being quotations, stage directions, or episode descriptions) they are taken. MacLeish's poem can be thought of as analogous to a transparent overlay which, when superimposed on the map or chart to whose details it is keyed, provides new information or modifies the old. In this case the so-called overlay is fully a map in its own right. It is divided into fourteen sections, corresponding to as many scenes of the Shakespeare play. What it maps with these is the world of consciousness belonging to its protagonist, the modern Hamlet; and this world, like that of the play, shows temporal movement or more properly historical movement, for it is a world common to mankind, whom this Hamlet represents. (As with The Pot of Earth, some resemblance to Finnegans Wake may be seen.) And if Hamlet is mankind, it would appear that the Ghost is the mysterious father-god of creation, the unknown Nobodaddy, maybe to be known in, or as, Death; Hamlet's mother is the Earth; and the Claudius figure, symbolized in the opening section as both Hyperion (the sun) and a satyr, is the tyrant enemy, Time. The characters in this cast do not emerge allegorically, as in a morality play, but symbolistically. That is, as addressed by Hamlet they are persons, but as described and further characterized they become actions, narratives, even landscapes; and the actions take the place of drama. The poem is not dramatic except in that sense in which a speaking voice implies a dramatic situation; nor is that implication a vivid one, Hamlet being mainly a stage-managing consciousness, like Tiresias in The Waste Land. The protagonist's mood and temper, conforming to the “nighted color/choler” of Shakespeare's Hamlet, do, however, determine the tone of anguish throughout the poem.

Two of the episodes or symbolic actions of MacLeish's Hamlet are particularly bold and memorable. Part iii, corresponding to Horatio's description of the Ghost (Hamlet, I, ii), is presented in terms of that portion of a Grail romance (the Bleheris version, freely adapted) which contains the adventure of the Chapel Perilous and the adventure of the Grail Castle, including the disclosure of the Grail talismans. The point of this (and of part iv, answering to the appearance of the Ghost to the prince) is the inscrutability of the death mystery from whose silence there can be no appeal and into whose secret there can be no initiation—such as the initiation supposed by Jessie L. Weston, in her book From Ritual to Romance, to have given rise to the Grail legends. A theme is here restated from Streets in the Moon. Part ix, corresponding to the play within the play, the play of the mousetrap, has a subject recalling St.-John Perse's “migration” poem Anabase, namely the movements of peoples and tribes into new lands, the rise and fall of cultures, the cycle of civilization. And the point of this, in relation to the Shakespearean scene, is that, as the memorial of human aspirations, the whole earth is a blood-stained chronicle of the guilt of nature and time. These episodes of the poem have the profoundest import because they establish the necessity of the cosmic pessimism which is the mainspring of its tragic movement. They furthermore universalize the rage and grief of the protagonist, inviting all mankind to take part in execrating the conditions of life.

The gloom pervading The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is left behind in the next collection, New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (1930). Here the over-all tone is one of acceptance—not the unreflecting acceptance urged but resisted in the closing part of the earlier poem, but something urbanely detached. There is a return to the meditativeness of an even earlier period, in poems about memory and time; along with this there is an advance toward a new theme of affirmation, for which a tone of optimism comes into being. Such poems as “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments,” “Return,” “Tourist Death,” and “You, Andrew Marvell” are retrospective in two senses: they look back to the years and places of MacLeish's sojourn abroad, and they recall his obsessive concern, in those circumstances, with the erosion of life by time. “You, Andrew Marvell” has been anthologized too often, but it is as nearly perfect a poem as MacLeish has ever written. Yet it is only one of a group (part iv of his Hamlet belongs with these) in which he again used the “cinema” technique of passing across the mind's eye a succession of places and faces, each an objective repository of some emotional association for him. The subject of “You, Andrew Marvell” is the poet's past as lodged in the places named, quite as much as it is the poet's present conceived as a moment in the light which is soon to be covered by the darkness inexorably rising in the east. The specific wit in his highly serious “metaphysical” handling of this subject depends not merely on a paradoxical view of diurnal motions (the night rises in the east) but on his present geographical position in relation to the regions reviewed in his mind. Being now presumably in the middle of the American continent, he, at noon, imagines the eastern world slipping into physical night just as, figuratively, it darkens by receding into his personal past.

The new, affirmative theme, though not fully realized in this poem or perhaps anywhere in the collection before the concluding piece, “American Letter,” seems to grow out of a personal sense of the east-west imagery. At least “American Letter” defines the line of separation between the past, Europe and Asia, old lands of darkness, and the future, America the “new found land,” by declaring that for the American born his life must unfold here: the Old World may enshrine a remembered joy, but the man of the New World is not fulfilled by it. And in “Salute” MacLeish hails the sun, dayspring and midday, as if to assert the preeminence of his symbol of the West. Indeed, he tends now to neglect the moon, which becomes a symbol no longer of that sought realm of myths and dreaming but of a world of stasis, sterility—something praised only in the almost hymnal “Immortal Autumn.” His style tends toward greater impersonality as, following Perse, he cultivates dissociated concrete images of immense but vague significance. One very successful instance of this practice occurs in “Epistle to Be Left in the Earth,” where its gnomic qualities suit the speaker's list of specific phenomena unreduced to abstract classification.

Conquistador (1932) is a long poem but not an epic, though of epic magnitude in theme, nor yet a chronicle, though based on an account of the Spanish rape of Mexico, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernál Díaz del Castillo. Its interest derives neither from the portrayal of heroic character nor from adventurous narrative, but from its rendering of discrete episodes as experiences recollected by its narrator. It can hardly be termed panoramic; it is kaleidoscopic, a fantasia of emotions. Though not primarily a narrative at all but a series of tableaux with subjective coloring, it would perhaps remind one of Dante's Divine Comedy even if, typographically, its verse did not resemble terza rima. Like the Divine Comedy it presents a psychological, if not quite a spiritual, quest. This quest, outlined in fifteen books, has the usual temporal and spatial dimensions—temporal into the past buried within the speaker's self, spatial into the Mexican interior and the death of the Aztec culture. The hallmark of the poem, unfortunately, is an unrelieved sense of enormous confusion. In the memory of the speaker, the successive episodes are crowded with detail; and an effect of “nonlinear” construction is heightened by the frequent use of parataxis. That is, the language depends a good deal on coordinated statements, whether or not with conjunctions. That this device was intentional is evident from the special use of the colon as a divider; it is made to separate phrases of all kinds. The elements which are thus compounded stand in any order: logic seems not to be in question, since free association controls largely.

If the influence of St.-John Perse dominates the larger framework of the poem, affecting the shape of its “grand sweep,” still another influence, that of the Ezra Pound of the Cantos, often prevails at close quarters. The arbitrary juxtaposition of “significant” details is Poundian. So, too, is one ingredient of MacLeish's subject matter, the use of Book XI of the Odyssey in the “Prologue,” where Bernál Díaz is given a role like that of the Homeric Tiresias, summoned from the dead along with fellow ghosts to speak to the living. MacLeish drops this mythological device after the “Prologue,” in favor of Díaz's book narrative; but the latter may be considered a realistic equivalent to ghostly speech. Though more in key with the biblical rhapsodies of Perse than with the social grumblings of Pound, Conquistador lacks optimism. For one thing it is based on one of the bloodiest and most barbarous exploits in history, one which destroys the empire it conquers and which ends in a retreat. Furthermore it is set forth by a spokesman for the dead and disillusioned, himself aware, in his very book, that death hangs over him. At the last he longs for the impossible resurrection of youthful hope:

O day that brings the earth back bring again

That well-swept town those towers and that island. …

In general this poem, far from acclaiming the origin of the New World as the harbinger of American civilization, is negative as well as confessional. Díaz, like MacLeish's Hamlet, is a wastelander, and what he longs for is a lost innocence that in fact was never real at all: certainly it did not dwell in the Aztec priestly slaughterhouse or in the hearts of the Spanish butchers either. In the poem it only tantalizes like a gilded dream of El Dorado.

Whatever its defects—and its failures, for if it succeeds it does so as a sequence of vibrant short poems, not as a big poem—Conquistador brings MacLeish back definitely to American scenes. Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933) restores the affirmative tone. What is affirmed now is the American dream—the wholesome one—not as an abstraction but in its embodiment by the American land and the pioneer past. The first of the six poems, “Landscape as a Nude,” revives an allegorical convention (like Finnegans Wake, by the way) to romanticize the land as a voluptuous woman. “Wildwest” and “Burying Ground by the Ties” pay tribute to defeated energies of a past era, to Crazy Horse and to the laborers dead after laying the tracks of the Union Pacific; and at the same time these poems satirize the millionaire railroaders, as does the opening section of the fifth poem, “Empire Builders.” The longer, second section of the latter invokes for its contrast the unviolated wilderness explored by Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the Northwest—the description being treated as an “underpainting” beneath a supposed series of panels beautifying the robber barons Harriman, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Mellon, and for anticlimactic good measure the advertising executive Bruce Barton. The fourth poem, “Oil Painting of the Artist as the Artist,” lampoons the anti-American expatriate snob—the T. S. Eliot type, who

… thinks of himself as an exile from all this,
As an émigré from his own time into history

(History being an empty house without owners
A practical man may get in by the privy stones …)

A final poem, “Background with Revolutionaries,” makes a point with regard to the controversy (current at the time MacLeish was writing but now almost forgotten) surrounding the Diego Rivera murals for Radio City in New York. Rivera had depicted Lenin among his inspirational figures; Nelson Rockefeller had demurred; and the painting was expunged, to the accompaniment of howls from the Left, amusingly reinforced with the aesthetical plea that art is sacred beyond politics. MacLeish's point in the concluding poem was that Lenin is irrelevant to the spirit of America, which lives in the communion of land with people; a further point, which involves one's reading the fifth poem, optionally, as a coda to the other four, can be that Lenin in his irrelevance is somehow analogous to J. P. Morgan.

There are not only ideological but functional problems in the Frescoes. Ideologically it is dubious whether MacLeish quite conveyed the absurdity of Leninism with his selected profiles of ignorant, neurotic, or simply enthusiastic believers in it; a suggestion emerges from “Background with Revolutionaries” that the fault with these communists may lie in their intellectual pretensions, which do not suit the nonintellectual mystique urged in the poem. And by the same token, earlier in the series, that mystique has been manipulated in order to pillory the railroad magnates, who were not “men of the people” and who ravaged the land for their money making. Crazy Horse was admirable, apparently, and the virgin wilderness was good and so were the track gangs; but beyond this mystique of the primitive and the peasant the Frescoes offered little to a people who owed their power to the railroads and who, in distinction of achievement, had long since outdone the spike-drivers. Obviously the Frescoes laud a homegrown radicalism; they reject Leninism as sophisticated (and foreign); but they ignore the complex life of a modern people. Calling themselves frescoes and claiming a pictorial function, they fail to cover, as it were, the wall. They say almost nothing about what Americans do, or why. Given pictorial form, they would pose as great an irrelevance—to Mr. Rockefeller's or anyone's city—as Diego Rivera with his intrusive Lenin.

MacLeish's next volume, Poems, 1924-1933, not only reprinted the best of his work up to 1933 but arranged it in nonchronological order. This order could form the subject of a separate study: it seems to indicate many of the relations which MacLeish intended to hold in balance between separate poems. The volume begins with the Hamlet and ends with Conquistador, the long poems most antithetical to each other as “private” and “public” documents. Scattered through it are previously uncollected pieces; at least six of these rank among the finest of his middle period, namely “The Night Dream,” “Broken Promise,” “Before March,” “Epistle to Léon-Paul Fargue,” “Invocation to the Social Muse,” and “Lines for an Interment.” A sardonic note recalling a few of the poems in Streets in the Moon comes up occasionally; of these six, “Invocation to the Social Muse” is the poem most ruled by it. In “Lines for an Interment” a similar note heard before in “Memorial Rain” is intensified into a savage agony. Elsewhere the tone is dispassionate, conveyed through imagery and syntax of a crystal precision reminiscent, almost, of Dryden's noble renderings of Horace and worthy of Landor or Housman at their most painstaking. Of this character are “Before March” and a slighter poem, “Voyage”:

Heap we these coppered hulls
With headed poppies
And garlic longed-for by the eager dead …

Such effects are concentrated in the poems having great intimacy of theme and voice.

The short volume Public Speech: Poems (1936) is strong in social implication, like MacLeish's plays in the same decade; but for part of its length it is different in manner from the usual “public” poetry. It ends with a series of ten poems in various lyric forms, assembled under the general title “The Woman on the Stair”; this, more than anything else in the volume, harks back to an earlier period. One thinks especially of “The Happy Marriage,” which also is a series of this type: “The Woman on the Stair,” too, is made up of meditative descriptions which chart an emotional relationship. Why should this sequence have been inserted in a book whose very title points to MacLeish's new preoccupation with what poetry can deliver to the public concerning themselves? The answer is that the adjective public is not synonymous with national or with political or with cultural in a social scientist's sense; it connotes all that is common, all that touches everyman. Those of MacLeish's poems that treat of the individual in society, or of society in history, do seem public in a more “communal” sense than is possible to a lyric commemoration of love; but this subject, too, can be so treated that its private values become general meanings. Moreover, the first poem in the volume, “Pole Star,” celebrates social love, the observance of charity for all, as a guiding principle in an age of misdirections; almost the whole collection is about human bonds of feeling. What public meant to MacLeish at this juncture seems to have been dual: in one aspect it came close to our recent slack sense of relevant; in another it rather implied impersonal in something like Eliot's sense, that is, marked by avoidance of self-absorption. In “The Woman on the Stair,” personal subject matter becomes archetypal.

“The Woman on the Stair” is really about the psychology of love. The Eros who rules here is the god of maturity; it would be instructive to set beside this another group of lyrics, also a sequence and also a chronicle of love's progress, but focusing on youthful love—Joyce's Chamber Music. There the intensities of feeling wear romantic disguises which in turn undergo transformations into fabrics of symbol. Here, viewed alike from the masculine and the feminine sides, are the great intensities—need, selfishness, shame, jealousy, fickleness, boredom—and time's deadly gift, detachment, all of them functions of a pragmatism that often governs human relations in the mask of the romantic spirit. This sobering vision culminates in the remarkable closing poem, “The Release,” a meditation on past time as stasis. What “The Woman on the Stair” projects as a “cinema” sequence, a passional affair involving two people only, becomes in projection a far-reaching commentary on behavior and motivation.

Not only “Pole Star,” concerning love, but several other poems at the beginning of Public Speech meditate contemporary bearings for traditional wisdom. “Speech to Those Who Say Comrade” defines true as against specious brotherhood. “Speech to the Detractors” rebukes debunkers and petty journalists and acclaims the love of excellence, arguing that a people unwilling to honor its outstanding men is a self-degrading people. “Speech to a Crowd” exhorts men to be self-reliant, not to wait on leadership, not to be a crowd. These poems, along with a few in the middle of the volume, may be too inspirational to appeal to readers who are moved by the psychological shrewdness of “The Woman on the Stair.” One poem, “The German Girls! The German Girls!” (its title to be understood as a sardonic toast?), takes the form of a quasi-choric exchange and is therefore dramatic in structure though not in form. It damns the militaristic spirit by cataloguing the coarse, brutal, and perverted types that abound among the Nazis. Propaganda though this is, the poem remains fresh because it is dramatic and also because it escapes “pulpit diction.”

Two separately published poems on social themes, Land of the Free—U.S.A. (1938) and America Was Promises (1939), both with topical bearing, relate to diverse areas of concern. The first is hard to judge as poetry because, as published, it was tied to a series of eighty-eight contemporary photographs in order that (according to a note by MacLeish) it might illustrate them. The photographs were already collected before the poem was written. The letterpress still makes a poem, but is at some disadvantage in proximity to the pictures. The two arts combine to tell a horrifying before-and-after story of the pioneer settlers in a rich land who, after many generations, have sunk into poverty and squalor through disease, overcrowding, economic exploitation, soil deterioration, industrialization, and all the rest. The horror is conveyed mainly by the impact of the photographs as a set, which embraces many contrasts; but the most distressing, i.e., pathetic, are far beyond the power of the poem to annotate. The pictures are violent, shocking; the poem is “cool,” relying on irony. Certainly the contrasts are intrinsic to the two modes: photography is presentational, ruminative poetry representational. The style is itself cool, in form a kind of collective monologue; but the pronoun we serves also to make the voice impersonal, as if the speaker were radiobroadcasting the report of a disaster. MacLeish's use of a “broadcast announcer” voice was frequent in the 1930s. Whether radio was responsible directly (other poets having experimented with the same device—Auden, for example, and Eliot in “Triumphal March”), the fact that MacLeish had written radio plays, in which such a voice was normally essential, suggests that the medium exerted some influence. One problem with having this voice accompany a photographic series is that, ex hypothesi, it belongs to a subject confronting human objects seen by the camera, yet it purports to speak in the character of those objects, and this without so much as adopting their dialect.

America Was Promises is indisputably the most eloquent of the “public” poems. It contrives an absolute alliance between theme and voice; actually the theme helps to flesh the voice so that it surmounts its usual anonymity and acquires the solidity of a persona. Who the persona is, is unclear, but what he is, is obvious, a prophet but contemporary, a liberator but traditionalist, a revolutionary but sage. The working question asked is “America was promises to whom?”—one answered in several ways, by Jefferson, by John Adams (philosopher of usury for Pound's Cantos), by Thomas Paine, and finally in the oracular formula “The promises are theirs who take them.” The rest of the poem beseeches the vast community of America to believe that unless they “take the promises” others will; but there is something inconclusive about this, for a rhetoric capable of sounding a call to arms seems to have been expended on a plea for faith. References to nations made captive by the Falange, the Germans, or the Japanese might imply something like a war message (the year being 1939); on the other hand, the historical material is of the sort that, unlike MacLeish, a Marxist would have exploited seditiously. In its intellectual ambiguity America Was Promises had much in common with the philosophy of the national administration at that period. So seen, of course, the poem is milder than the rhetoric of its conclusion: it is simply urging people to remain loyal to New Deal doctrines at home and American policy abroad. Really it is much better as a poem than as a message: for once, MacLeish's adaptation of St.-John Perse's geographic evocations seems precisely right.

The long lapse before the appearance of Actfive and Other Poems (1948) would itself suffice to set this volume apart. But the double circumstance of the war and MacLeish's public service, along with the new personal vitality he seems to have experienced at this time, may account for its energies. In spirit this book is fully postwar, and it contains the perceptions of a man who had worked within government and who now had a far more exact idea of the gulf between political dreams and reality. It is the book of his second renaissance. A number of the poems, quite apart from the title piece, are of immense interest technically. They range from “Excavation of Troy,” an amusing metaphysical exercise in the slow manipulation of imagery and simile (in the mind of a drowsing girl her lover of many nights gone is like Troy buried under many intervening “layers”), to “What Must,” a quick medley of narrative, dialogue, and meditation (telling virtually in a cataract of rhymes the events of a brief love idyl). Several of the poems are ideological: thus “Brave New World,” a ballad to Jefferson in his grave (in the tradition of Yeats's “To a Shade”) taunts postwar America for its indifference to the plight of nations still unliberated.

The title piece, “Actfive,” was the most significant poem by MacLeish since the publication of his Hamlet. It does what a major work by a developing poet has to do: it clarifies the meaning of his previous major works in relation to one another, and it subjects to new form the world which his art is trying now to deal with. This poem relates to The Pot of Earth, to Einstein and to The Hamlet of A. MacLeish; and though quite intelligible independently of those, it gains depth and complexity by the relation. The general title, with the ranting manner of part i (“The Stage All Blood …”), brings the Hamlet to mind; “Actfive” continues, in a manner of speaking, the actions of that nightmarish poem, advancing them beyond the circle of a single protagonist's mind and showing that they involve all men.

Part i proclaims the death of God, of Kingship, and of Man deified—the last murdered by tyrants; and it appeals for one who can become in their stead “the hero in the play,” a hero to restore not only peace but Eternity, the principle of very reason. Implicitly both The Pot of Earth and, at some distance, Nobodaddy are drawn upon here, the one for the indifference of the Absolute, the other for, as well, the human alienation from it. In turn both are implicitly criticized: they have too palely depicted the stark loathsomeness of the death which proud man has inherited. Part ii, “The Masque of Mummers,” parades before the reader an absurd train of expressionistic figures, nonheroes yet “each the Hero of the Age”; it is an age whose inhabitants, stripped of privacy and individuality, cling together as in a public amphitheater and witness a charade of social lies—those of the Science Hero, of the Boyo of Industry, of the Revolutionary Hero with the Book, of the Great Man, of the Victim Hero or “pimp of death,” of the Visitor or dreamer of millennium, of the State or utopia, of the I or egotist-introspectionist, of the lonely Crowd. Part iii, “The Shape of Flesh and Bone,” identifies the sought hero at last; it is flesh and bone, unidealized, existential man, instinctive, physical, able to define the meaning of his universe to himself—man the transitory but in spirit indomitable. Archetypes present themselves: “The blinded gunner at the ford,” an image borrowed presumably from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls; a profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The responsible man … / [who] dies in his chair … / The war won, the victory assured”; and other images, of an invalid and a hostage. These exemplify the unposturing, unselfish performance of duty,

Some duty to be beautiful and brave
Owed neither to the world nor to the grave
.....But only to the flesh the bone.

The closing lines reaffirm the unutterable loneliness of man in his universe of death, but, like Einstein leave him with his inviolate creaturehood. It is ironic that “Actfive” should so circuitously return to the point insisted upon in Einstein; for it steers by the opposite pole, assuming that man's lordly reason, far from having subdued nature to its understanding, has been dethroned utterly. Equally, the animal self here, which can still “endure and love,” is all that preserves man from destruction; whereas in Einstein it is the only thing that debars him from godhead.

Collected Poems 1917-1952 incorporates a section of “New Poems” which might have made a book by themselves. They protract the Actfive renaissance (indeed it has lasted MacLeish into old age). Some half-dozen of them are modern “emblem” poems, being dominated by single images (often elaborated) with connotative value. Blake's “Ah! Sun-flower” is analogous; in MacLeish's “Thunderhead” the physics of lightning symbolizes an aspect of conjugal behavior; in “Starved Lovers” chrysanthemums symbolize sensuality; in “The Linden Branch” a green bough is metaphorically a musical instrument playing silent music. The newness of this effect consists in the way whole poems are now built round it, as Emily Dickinson's or (using symbol rather than metaphor) Yeats's often are. Yeats, who was to become a major inspiration for MacLeish, must have influenced the style of the end poem of “New Poems,” the meditation on metaphor “Hypocrite Auteur,” which essentially offers a justification for the effect.

Songs for Eve (1954) really consists of two collections joined together: first the twenty-eight tight, riddling poems (corresponding to the days of the month?) called “Songs for Eve”; then “Twenty-One Poems” of miscellaneous kinds. Despite the general title of the initial set, some of its pieces are for Eve but others are for Adam, the Serpent, the Green Tree, Eve's children, and so on. Perhaps in some sense all indeed are “for” Eve, she being central in the mythic context. Like Yeats's Crazy Jane, Eve is carnal and vicariously creative—in short, Blakean. Through her, Adam is enabled to wake from animality into consciousness; with her, he falls upward “from earth to God,” his soul growing as the awareness within his body, his children succeeding him as rebels and creators destined to rear, in place of the Green Tree of consciousness, the Dry Tree (the Cross) of godlike knowledge. The theme is that of Nobodaddy enriched with that of Einstein. The twenty-eighth poem ends the sequence by lauding “man / That immortal order can”; and in like manner the last of the “Twenty-One Poems,” entitled “Reasons for Music” and dedicated to Wallace Stevens, defines the poet's task as the imposition of form upon the fluid world (a theme of Stevens's own; MacLeish would ordinarily refer to the discovery of natural, intrinsic order, except probably in the aesthetic or the moral sphere). The fine keynote poem “The Infinite Reason” paraphrases “Songs for Eve” in effect by speaking of the human mission to read meaning in external reality:

Our human part is to redeem the god
Drowned in this time of space, this space
That time encloses.

Clearly the leading theme of Songs for Eve, the whole book, is man's ordering function; the collection is closer to Einstein and the other space-time poems of Streets in the Moon than are the works in between. Here much is made of the origin of the human soul within space-time, particularly in “Reply to Mr. Wordsworth,” where the proposition that the soul “cometh from afar” is refuted by an appeal to Einsteinian physics and—paradoxically—to the felt life of the emotions. The poems “Infiltration of the Universe,” “The Wood Dove at Sandy Spring,” “The Wave,” “Captivity of the Fly,” and “The Genius” are emblematic, and they happen also to compose a miniature bestiary. The volume pays tribute impartially to matters of intellect and of feeling; these compressed parables divide between them.

The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968) explores the whole scale of MacLeish's concerns, still optimistically. Old age and youth, time, domesticity, contemporary manners, love, death—these predominate. Introspection is not overworked, but two of the most arresting poems in the volume are “Autobiography,” on childhood vision, and “Tyrant of Syracuse,” on the subliminal self. In a memorable group of elegies, MacLeish bids farewell to Sandburg, Cummings, Hemingway, and Edwin Muir. The Hemingway poem, only eleven lines long, is one of numerous tributes paid by MacLeish to that one-time friend; it adapts Yeats's concept of “the dreaming back” for a skillful and moving analysis of the unity of the man Hemingway in his life and death. The Muir poem quotes “The Linden Branch,” applying to a green memory the graceful conceit of the green bough as a musical staff with leaves for notes. Yeats furnished the title of the volume; and the title poem, placed at the end, closes on the theme of

… the old man's triumph, to pursue
impossibility—and take it, too,

which is a signature for MacLeish's poetry, restating the theme of Adam victorious, fallen upwards into a stasis of art and eternity. …

Hayden Carruth (review date winter 1977)

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SOURCE: Carruth, Hayden. Review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, by Archibald MacLeish. Virginia Quarterly Review 53, no. 1 (winter 1977): 146-54.

[In the following review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Carruth lauds MacLeish's overall work as a poet while devoting particular attention to his epic Conquistador.]

Almost 60 years of poetry in just under 500 pages, this new book by Mr. MacLeish [New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976]. Think of it. On this account alone, though many poems have been omitted, especially from the early years, it is a remarkable accomplishment, an honorable and exemplary accomplishment, as it is on other accounts as well. Mind, I write as a fellow poet, no pretence of a view sub specie aeternitatis, which would be impossible anyway in the world as it looks today. Or tomorrow. Yet I do lay claim to the degree of objectivity that professionalism—no, no, no, not those terms! All wrong, and they smack of a discredited philosophy. Let's say I lay claim only to the sympathetic but realistic understanding of problems, triumphs, and defeats that long practice confers. And then let's say I also am very pleased to belong (if I do) to the company that includes Archibald MacLeish, the ancient company of poets. By virtue of many presences, but not least by virtue of his, it is a company not only honorable but intelligent, gifted, perceptive, and humane.

A distinction must be drawn, however, which is valuable to poets and I think to readers also. What is it that makes poetic genius, a Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Browning, Ezra Pound? Poetic talent, of course; that comes first. But something more is needed, the capacity to push that talent, roughshod and in hell or high water, over everything, and this capacity is the more important ingredient. Genius is idiosyncrasy; often enough it is aberrance. Other poets, equally talented, who lack this capacity, who are too modest, too humane, too uncertain, or (if we must be psychoanalytical) too inhibited, fall short of genius. They take their verbal styles from more flamboyant or more persuasive poets, they work only gradually toward modes of personal expression, and they devote much of their artistic energy, not only outside their poems but inside them, to the needs of others, instead of pressing forward in the course of a relentless monomaniacal vision. They are, make no mistake, very good poets, yet they fall in the second rank, the journeymen who sustain and always have sustained civilization's artistic enterprise. I think of Gray and Crabbe and Dowson and many more. I think of Anonymous. In our time I think of Mark Van Doren, who was MacLeish's friend, and Edwin Muir, who was I believe his acquaintance, and of course of MacLeish himself. They are among my favorite poets.

(Yet, parenthetically, one must give precedence to the masters. A few years ago when I edited an anthology of American poetry, I allotted far fewer pages to MacLeish and Van Doren than to some others. Which is only one of the many distressing duties of the anthologist.)

At all events my rereading of MacLeish's poems in this new book has reaffirmed my admiration and has shown me excellences I had overlooked before. Above all I see a devotion to excellence in general, artistic excellence, which means not simply the excellence of craft but that of mind and heart, perhaps especially that of mind and heart. MacLeish began, like most other poets in the period of World War I, with more or less conventional, Georgian verses, but quickly fell under the influence of Eliot. Is that right? Was there a direct influence? (I am not a student of biographies.) Did Herrick write like Jonson because Jonson told him to or because that was the only way he could write—he and many others—with the example of Jonson before him? Certainly we know, with the example of “The Waste Land” (1923) before them, what American and British poets did, scores and hundreds of them who had no more acquaintance of His Grace than the look of his verses on the page (and who would have actively disliked him if they'd met). We know what MacLeish did:

That year they went to the shore early—
They went in March and at the full moon
The tide came over the dunes, the tide came
To the wall of the garden. She remembered standing,
A little girl in the cleft of the white oak tree—
The waves came in a slow curve, crumpling
Lengthwise, kindling against the mole and smoldering
Foot by foot across the beach until
The whole arc guttered and burned out. Her father
Rested his spade against the tree. He said,
The spring comes with the tide, the flood water.
Are you waiting for spring? Are you watching for the spring?

And so on. The echoes are unmistakable, cadences, modulations of sound, syntactical patterns; and elsewhere one can hear other echoes of Eliot's other, different modes, equally distinct. One is distracted by these echoes at first, even irritated by them, but as one reads further, with closer attention to what MacLeish himself was doing, one comes to see—at least I have—that although the whole impact is slighter—yes, still, 50 years later; one is bound to acknowledge it—nevertheless MacLeish's poems contain passages better than anything Eliot ever wrote, more lucid, better integrated, with a more sensitive judgment of the qualities of diction: in short, in the manner, unquestionably, but not as mannered. It is the achievement of a very intelligent craftsman, and not many were able to do it.

With Einstein (1929) and New Found Land (1930), MacLeish began to hear his own voice more surely, a discovery coinciding more or less with his return to the U.S. after the years of expatriation. It came to full flower with Conquistador (1933). We know its characteristics, the faint rhymes, the falling line-breaks and sudden enjambments, the heavy reliance on connectives, the mixture of rough pentameters and hexameters and sometimes shorter lines.

And they told us Tenochtitlán was a whitened filth and a
Great guilt in the air: and deception: and falseness:
And filled with the salt of the dead as a reed with pith:

And they themselves had beheld it—
                                                                                                                                  and we saw their
Eyes like sorcerers and the uncertain
Shadows behind them on the height of walls:

And they said to us—“Have you not known? Have you not heard?”
And they said—“Has it not been told you from the beginning?”
“Has it not been said from the founding of the earth?”

And they said we should enter and come and lie within
And dwell in trust and with faith sure—
                                                                                                                                                      and we knew the
Odor of death on their tongues as a thawing wind!

What to say of Conquistador, that splendid poem? One can hardly imagine a more compelling theme for our time, the conquest of Mexico, the confrontation between Cortés and Montezuma, those great men, incorporating everything we have come to feel about the European take-over of America, our pride and its voidance, our helplessness and self-reproach in the face of historical process. And the writing fits the theme; they are welded, they cling together. Still the poem is flawed. One can see how (again speaking as a poet) MacLeish was tempted by the chronicle of Bernal Díaz, the only account of the Spanish expedition possessing contemporary authenticity: there it was, all laid out, the plan and plot of the poem. But in the end MacLeish was hampered by Bernal, who became in the poem only a testy old warrior recalling the exploits of his youth, a tedious narrator. There is too much description in the poem, not enough drama. I remember reading once a far inferior poem on the same topic in which the poet had chosen Maria for narrator, the remarkable young Indian woman whom Cortés picked up on the coast to serve him as bedmate, guide, and interpreter during the march inland to Tenochtitlán. In her splendid and terrible whoredom—imagine it, her treachery in bed with god—she assumed all our predicaments, moral and psychological, and gave the poem, potentially at least, a genuine dramatic structure. So I wish MacLeish, in some similar fashion, had been more willing to fictionalize, to mythologize; for isn't that what epic is all about—myth? And do not doubt me, MacLeish was writing the American epic. That is what he had in mind. Epic needs fiction, however, needs myth, and usually a good dose of it, not just history. Does anyone, for example, believe the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon was really that important in the siege of Troy? (And incidentally, what would Hart Crane have done with the long poem he was projecting on Montezuma, during those same years when MacLeish was writing Conquistador, if he had been able to carry it through?) Still and all, Conquistador is what we have, it is our best epic (and I do not except The Bridge), it is coherent, complete, and strongly conceived, and it contains many, many magnificent passages. It merits a good deal more attention than it has been given lately.

.....

[The next day.] Already I have written more, I see, than book reviewers are normally permitted. Well, I ask the editor's and the reader's indulgence: my topic is important, a man's lifework, and I have a little more to say. Last night, when guests came to our house, one of them told of having seen the interview with MacLeish which appeared on public television a few months ago, I think conducted by Bill Moyers, and of how youthful MacLeish was there—appearance, voice, and attitude those of a far younger man. It is what I would have expected, though I've never met him. Poetry, if it doesn't kill you, will keep you young, and MacLeish's poetry is distinctly the kind that sustains, not the kind that destroys (of which latter species we have seen so much in recent years).

After Conquistador, as we know, MacLeish moved further into poetry of political and social feeling, and we may as well say bluntly that these poems don't stand up. Plenty of strong feeling, no doubt, and sound reasoning too; ringing declarations, prophetic ironies, angers and maledictions; but in effect they were versified editorials, not poems. MacLeish committed the same error made by many young radical poets of the 1960s and early 1970s, namely, the failure to transmute feeling and ideology into dramatic or lyrical structures through the intercession of the artistic imagination. Asseveration does not make art; the Declaration of Independence is a political, not a poetic, document. That this failure of transmutation is not a necessary consequence of political objectives in poetry, as many critics have argued, is proven easily in the works of the few recent poets who have avoided it—Levertov, Rich, Duncan, Lowell, and others—and by the considerably more numerous examples in French and Spanish poetry; yet the problem does seem to be acute among poets writing in English. I don't know why. (It would make a valuable topic for somebody's doctoral dissertation.) I think the main point to be made about MacLeish's politically inspired poems, once we acknowledge their artistic defect, is that they were definitely of the sustaining, not the destroying order, as I have used these terms above. During those years of the Depression and the War, MacLeish wrote not as a personal crusader, never as a political crank or lonely visionary, but instead as the spokesman of the people, and like all such spokesmen, if they are true to their roles, he wrote with humility, while his “ideology,” if you can call it that, was humanitarian common sense and liberalism, as these could then still be understood without the taint of bourgeois insincerity they have acquired more recently. His poems were outgoing, in other words, products of basic poetic and human loving kindness, and whether or not they succeeded as poems they were works of humane purity and valor.

Without abandoning his political predilections, during the 1950s and 1960s MacLeish moved back again toward the homage by emphasizing one aspect of it, the aspect of salutation. For your lyrics, for Conquistador, for works I have not mentioned (including the plays, the essays not in your new book), and for your long devotion, a salute to you, friend MacLeish!—and more years yet, I hope, of such productiveness.

Robert Siegel (review date May 1977)

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SOURCE: Siegel, Robert. Review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, by Archibald MacLeish. Poetry 130, no. 2 (May 1977): 102-14.

[In the following excerpted review of New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, Siegel forms a list of MacLeish's most enduring works of poetry.]

The New and Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish contains 493 pages of poetry chosen from eighteen volumes (not including the dramas) and covering fifty-nine years of a career practically coeval with the modern period. MacLeish has been involved with nearly every phase of American poetic and political life of that period. Every high school junior (at least before the scores declined) puzzled over “Ars Poetica” and the meaning of the famous lines, “A poem should not mean / But be.” What is a reviewer to do besides celebrate such an event?

To begin, he may remind the reader of the obvious: MacLeish is often, if not consistently, the most brilliant of craftsmen, the most musical of lyrists, the most protean of voices, even to the self-confessedly imitative. The Collected Poems are well-chosen to represent a poet by turns lyrical, dramatic, elegiac, hortatory, satirical, philosophical romantic, classical, colloquial, elegant, vague, and painstakingly lucid. It is in hope of identifying what is most permanent here that I invoked Emerson and the loosely defined “tradition” that is more a company of the spirit. Throughout the Collected Poems transcendental notes are sounded, some almost as consciously Emersonian as the recent “Two Women Talking,” where one declares, “Men usually find / what's waiting for them in the mind”, and concludes, “It's what they dream of picking that they pluck.” In the early Einstein, wherever the sage moves “the bubble of the world / Takes center and there circle round his head / Like golden flies in summer the gold stars.” No matter that Einstein rejects subjective reality or that, for MacLeish, consciousness does not endure: while it lasts its fragile bubble contains the stars and such meanings as man makes of them. For him as for Jonathan Edwards, nature is full of human significance; whether read as moral or amoral, it is the soul writ large:

The fly against the window pane
That flings itself in flightless flight,
So it loves light,
Will die of love and die in vain.

The lines about the fly and its foiled access to the light suggest that MacLeish is a visitor of the dark side of the New England consciousness, in company with figures such as Robinson and Frost. If Robinson may be characterized as an inverted transcendentalist (who said that the world is a Hell of a place and therefore must mean something), and Frost as a cryptic with a finger to his lips (“We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”), then MacLeish may be viewed as a listener on the edge of the Void, evoking a presence through an acute sense of its absence. “It is always the same,” his Hamlet complains. “It is always as though some / Smell of leaves had made me not quite remember; / As though I had turned to look and there were no one” (italics mine). Here are fallings from us, vanishings: “Things he had loved because he knew them lost, / Things he had loved and never yet had found”. As in the well-known “End of the World,” the poet stands at some cosmic vantage point, focussing at one moment on “The armless ambidextrian … lighting / A match between his great and second toe” and the next on “the black pall / Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.” Nothing, the Void, is the screen that outlines the image in sharp relief before swallowing it. The flare of an intensely clear image on the one hand and the subsequent “crumpling … dark” on the other are the poles of his best poetry.

Ironically, it is in this position that MacLeish has been least comfortable. He has described the subjective poet as “a candle consuming its own fat” and regarded most nineteenth-century poets as hemophiliacs of self-pity. The attitude of cosmic despair (frustration is a better word, for there is light, even if the fly cannot get to it) is one he disowns in his essay Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry, but he disowns it by reference to a beautiful metaphor that betrays his disclaimer. He writes here that the poet “need not affect a strangeness from his time, need not go mooning through an endless attic with the starlight clicking on the roof.” This image evokes for me the best of MacLeish's poems. The clicking starlight suggests those laser-sharp images that cut against, but are inevitably lost in, darkness, whose source the poet does “not quite remember.” Does the disclaimer here suggest that the poet is eschewing an attitude only too natural to him, one which might have violated his strong public conscience and caused him to “affect a strangeness from his time”?

It is this tension between image and Void that creates the great poems, usually those more formal lyrics where the balance between them is maintained. Any brief list of the author's most-celebrated poems will suggest the truth of this contention: “You, Andrew Marvell,” “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments,” “The End of the World,” “Calypso's Island.” Odysseus in this last one yearns for Ithaca, “Where the grass dies and the seasons alter: // Where that one wears the sunlight for a while.” Process, change, decay are likewise balanced in “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments” by the isolated, vivid image:

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlet:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.

Each image is silhouetted against the void before the poem releases it, “as the moon releases / Twig by twig the night-entangled trees”. This is the voice of the “Greek Anthology,” marvelously anonymous, conscious as the shade of Achilles of what it means to wear the sunlight for a while. I think that this is MacLeish's best voice, elegiac and lyrical, however irrelevant to the demands of the time—of any time. Unlike T. S. Eliot's, his pessimism is not cultural, but cosmic, though his intense evocation of loss fills the void with mysterious presences not accounted for. “It is very cold,” finishes the bemused author of the “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” “There are strange stars near Arcturus, // Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.”

Even when the meaning of a poem is the supposed failure of meanings, the images remain to console us. The attitude toward them reflects the nether side of the transcendental impulse, a lean and jealous positivism often noted in the New England character (like Frost's, MacLeish's by adoption): “Good fleece on that flock over there, Jethro,” the Vermont joke goes. “Yep, leastways on this side!” is the careful reply. Everywhere here is a fierce love of the particular, of “real things”, as listed in “Land's End”: “Riders, running of dogs, deer-fall”; the weight of a bird, of a woman's breast, in the hand, “and love, the weed smell of it: / Front against front”. But these particulars are charged by anticipation of the Void, which, like an Aeschylean chorus at the poet's back, soughs of an unknown transcendence. Such is the case in “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” where the few valued facts, “The earth is round, / there are springs under the orchards” and “The loam cuts with a blunt knife”, are lovingly hoarded against the encroaching cold, strange stars, and voices “crying an unknown name in the sky”. Rarely is there an experience of joy that transcends things, though in “What Must” the lover feels a love “That has no season in the earth”, one “That cannot flower like a tree / Or like one die / but only be.”

In Poetry and Experience MacLeish holds up for emulation an ancient Chinese general by the name of Lu Chi, who between battles found time to write poetry: “Far more than either Aristotle or Horace, Lu Chi speaks to our condition as contemporary man”, bringing us “timely bits of intelligence from beyond the mountains which the pursuit of poetry must cross.” With admiration for MacLeish's continuing career of service to the Republic, and the admission that he does bring us “timely bits of intelligence”, one can praise his public voice while preferring the private, more timeless one. Nevertheless, he has often caught the temper of the time and the appropriate emblem of it. In his poem “Long Hot Summer” the Dutch elm disease becomes the symbol of our dying cities, as “The beetle of God … under the bark” exposes us to “the heat and the hate and the naked sun.” “Never again”, he laments, “when the hate overwhelms us / cool elms.”

The two dozen or so new poems partake of that high, almost whimsical wisdom we associate with Frost's and Yeats's last poems: the great plain lucidities. Consider “The Old Gray Couple”:

Everything they know they know together—
everything, that is, but one:
their lives they've learned like secrets from each other;
their deaths they think of in the nights alone.

There is explicit homage to Frost and Mark Van Doren as well as fun at the expense of critics who have tried to pin down the poet's “catbird” voice (“Critics on the Lawn”). There are abundant old medallions for the thumb. In “Pablo Casals”: “no / winter leaf against the winter snow / was ever veined and fragile as his hand”. Another image, with its reserve of power, reminds us just where most recent anti-war poetry fell short. Locked “in the house of state” are “three names” “not to be spoken”:

The first is old,
black and gold,
cool as lacquer
smelling of plums.
This name is Cambodia.

The poems before Conquistador I would include in that inevitable list one makes reading through a Collected Poems are “The Silent Slain,” “L'an trentiesme de mon eage,” “Immortal Helix,” “Eleven,” “Signature for Tempo,” “Memorial Rain,” The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, section 9, and, of course, those mentioned above. Conquistador, now approaching its first half century, holds up very well. This epic-lyric of the conquest of Mexico, based on the recollections of the foot soldier Bernál Díaz, barrages the reader with colors, smells, sounds, tastes until he reels like one of the conquerors from the sun and from the gold. But the images do what they are meant to—hide the narrator from the void underlying this elegy for a beautiful but hapless civilization. The overall strategy of Cortez—even the geography—remains appropriately vague as the images cover our senses thick as gold-dust Montezuma. What Díaz and the author finally lament is the loss of the friends and intensity of youth. Compared to this lament, political and moral soundings are faint indeed. “The sad thing is not death”, the old soldier confesses, but “the life's loss out of earth”, including “All that was good in the throat: the hard going: / … The quick loves: the sleep: the waking”.

MacLeish's two other ambitious long poems, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) and Actfive (1948), if comparatively disembodied, remain memorable for their wrestling with cosmic and social issues. The post-Relativity Hamlet observes, “We have learned the answers, all the answers: / It is the question that we do not know.” Actfive opens to Man as an ideal “murdered”. After some epigrammatic examination of bogus substitutes, the poet finds existential, lower-case man standing “Where once the dreams stood guardian in its place”, feeling “Some resolution to be dutiful and good / Owed by the lost child to the dreadful wood.” As at the end of J. B., man is at his best amid ruins, with no comfort but his will to love.

After 1950, perhaps feeling less pressure to make public statements in poetry, MacLeish relaxes into shorter poems that often realize the clarity of focus, the perfection of form of his very best. My lengthening list includes “The Learned Men,” “Epitaph for John McCutcheon,” “The Steamboat Whistle,” “The Signal,” “Poet,” and “You Also, Gaius Valerius Catullus” (a note too seldom struck). In this last he mildly upbraids the “Fat-kneed god” for bringing him “into that one's bed / Whose breath is sweeter than a grass-fed heifer”, and implores him, “Dump me where you please, but not hereafter / Where the dawn has that particular laughter.” Songs for Eve—Blakean, Emersonian—are all interesting. I favor 1, 9, 10, and 15. Emerson, from not too different a perspective, might have riddled about a creature who “couples astraddle / But thinks it is moth / That on heavenly wing / Can fly and can fling.” From The Wild Old Wicked Man I cherish “Spring in These Hills,” “La Foce,” “November,” “Arrival and Departure,” and “Late Abed,” where the poet celebrates lying in the warm sheets “(warm where she was) with your life / suspended like a music in the head, / hearing her foot in the house.”

In recent years it seems that the poet has largely accepted his observation in “Invocation to the Social Muse”: “He that goes naked goes further at last than another.” There is a greater sense that “The things of the poet are done to a man alone / As the things of love are done”, while “his knee's in the soft of the bed where his love lies.” That quick, particular image, like some fragment of living sculpture, seems more alive than a man dressed in the clothes of his age, however eloquent the Hamlet, Einstein, or existentialist Everyman.

“But the Secret sits in the middle and knows”, Frost wrote, perhaps thinking of that smile of Emerson's no one has explained. On the dust jacket of his Collected Poems Archibald MacLeish shows a light about the mouth equally enigmatic, reminding me of a sentence of Chesterton's: “We sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.” Whatever the meaning, in his best poems the naked knee, lips, or leaf placed against the eternal sky are the more present, the more real for their fragility, as if lit by a strange transcendence. Surely, whatever else is true of these poems, Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken, Look! They are there!

Michael Cavanagh (essay date summer 1981)

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SOURCE: Cavanagh, Michael. “The Problems of Modern Epic: MacLeish's Conquistador.” Papers on Language & Literature 17, no. 3 (summer 1981): 292-306.

[In the following essay, Cavanagh analyzes MacLeish's effort to compose a Modernist epic poem in Conquistador.]

Since its publication and Pulitzer award in 1932, MacLeish's Conquistador has been neglected by critics, a neglect that seems increasingly unreasonable as commentary on a few other long poems grows almost daily. The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Bridge, The Cantos, Paterson, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction: apparently there exists something resembling a canon of modern long poems, which in a way is a sad and premature phenomenon. In attending to these poems, we have slighted other equally ambitious and interesting long poems from which we still have something to learn. Conquistador has been neglected for a number of reasons. From the beginning, the poem's critics have misconstrued it a Poundian or Eliotic poem—in other words, as a rather derivative 1920s poem that happens to appear in 1932. Some critics, moreover, have found the poem difficult to understand. For example, Grover Smith finds that the poem offers its readers only “an unrelieved sense of total confusion.”¹ Allen Tate praises the poem's technical accomplishments, but finds it likewise “void” of meaning.² Above all, no critic of the poem has seemed quite comfortable with MacLeish's subject, the Spanish conquest of Mexico. For instance, it seems odd that someone like MacLeish with strongly liberal sympathies should apparently aggrandize imperialistic causes; it is moreover frustratingly unclear why he chose to write this story, instead of one closer to the American experience. The poem seems to be wanting in a moral as well as cultural foundation.

Surely, however, Conquistador is worth our trouble. MacLeish wrote it at the height of his powers and it contains some of his finest poetry, as Tate observed when he praised the poem for revealing “the most significant metrical innovation of its generation with the exception of Hart Crane's blank verse.” But the poem is thematically significant too; it should not be viewed as another echo of The Waste Land, but as a poem that, like The Bridge, attempts to answer Eliot's poem and combat its influence. It is now clear, as it was perhaps not clear a half century ago, that MacLeish intended Conquistador to be the signal of a new post-Eliotic era in poetry, an era that he thought would be characterized by communal heroism rather than by nostalgia and despair. With this in mind, he turned his attention to the ethos of epic poetry. What should engage our general interest in the poem is MacLeish's attempt to restore some prominent values of traditional epic poetry in the service of a cause that he regarded as very “modern.”

To understand what MacLeish means by “modern,” the prose he wrote during and after the period of Conquistador should be examined. The prose makes it clear that this poem is a far more polemical one than it appears to be. The poets of the 1920s, MacLeish charges, were fundamentally nostalgic.³ They modernized poetry or at least changed poetry's appearance, but they could not face the modern world—in particular, industrialism and democracy. Like their nineteenth century predecessors, they turned inward and they worshipped the hierarchical past. Eliot and Pound fostered innovation but they did not direct it toward the communal realities of the new age. Their poetry, MacLeish asserts, was “formed … by the literary necessities of the world before the war,” chief of which was the necessity of the artist to resist modern social and cultural change.⁴ MacLeish's assessment of The Waste Land helps us understand what he thought was “new” and “old” in poetry:

As the greatest of their (the modernists') poems prove, The Waste Land is a poem which sees the contemporary world as the wreckage and scattered ruin of many great and fallen cities, and Eliot's masterpiece, though its influence fell forward into the years which followed its publication, was actually a termination: a lament and a prayer. Nothing could follow it but darkness and a prayer. Or a new beginning.

It is this new beginning which constitutes the great poetic labor of our day—a labor which involves the acceptance of change, not as the disastrous end of one mentality, but as the possible commencement of another. Unless poetry can not only perceive, but also feel, the race of men to be more important than any one man, we are merely fighting back against the water.⁵

One need not accept this view of the 1920s, of course, in order to see how it casts some light on MacLeish's intentions in Conquistador. It suggests that MacLeish was not downcast at the beginning of the 1930s; like other optimists of the time, he may have seen even the American financial crisis as a necessary and desirable failure—a failure of wealthy “individualists” that would facilitate a transfer of power to the “people.” At any rate, for him, the “new world” needed a poetry that would be sympathetic to average humanity and to the common values of industrial democracy. The voice of this poetry had to be centered in down-to-earth experience, what MacLeish refers to as the “common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon.”⁶ The new poetry should not be too “fine” for the world; it should be neither nostalgic, nor melancholy, nor private. The appearance of Conquistador at this time leads one to see that, for MacLeish, these new necessities pointed to epic poetry as the “great poetic labor” of the new age.

MacLeish's emphasis on communal values calls to mind E. M. W. Tillyard's observation that epic poetry is typically “choric.” Epic speaks for the accepted patriotic ideals or for the accepted metaphysic of the times. The epic poet is “centred in the normal, he must measure the crooked by the straight.” He must speak for, as well as to, his people, and his sentiments must not seem capricious or private. Tillyard insists that subjectivism and the cultivation of the abnormal and perverse have made genuine epic disappear in our time.⁷ Roy Harvey Pearce seems to agree with this view, maintaining that Whitman, Pound, Williams, and Crane failed to create “true” epics (though they wrote great poems in the process) because as Americans and as moderns they could not believe in communal heroes and consequently had to fall back on themselves as heroes.⁸ To put it another way, they had to define themselves before they could define their communities. In Conquistador, as if in fulfillment of his own literary strictures, MacLeish works in the opposite direction: to define the community in the belief that it is fruitless and reactionary to worry about the individual; in defining the community MacLeish also defines his individual.

Conquistador sets out to designate l'homme moyen sensuel as the proper voice of the community. This intention is apparent if one examines MacLeish's use of his primary source, Bernál Díaz del Castillo's The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico. Originally an officer under Cortés in the Conquest, Díaz decided to write his own history after reading another, “official” account of the Conquest by Francisco Cópez de Gómara, Cortés' former chaplain. What disturbed Díaz was Gómara's exclusive attention to the leaders and the important events, and his ignorance of the average soldier. In his preface, Díaz observes that, although his own account of the Conquest is not an authoritative history, it will have a value of its own: it will offer another perspective on contemporary history.⁹ MacLeish's Díaz, who tells the story of Conquistador, is not nearly so modest. MacLeish's character asserts that his own history is the history, and he accuses Gómara of total negligence for giving little or no regard to the way in which the average man experienced the Conquest. This boast, of course, is an imperial one; it is the kind of boast that one sees at the beginning of the traditional epic, in which the poet argues for the new and all-surpassing importance of his interpretation of great events. To appreciate MacLeish's account of the Conquest through the eyes of Díaz, however, the reader should try to imagine The Aeneid as written by, for example, Palinurus, one of Aeneas' followers. The Díaz of Conquistador provides few names and dates, no detailed analyses of battles, no discussions of military strategy, and no real insights into the various purposes of the expedition. The poem offers no overview; in its place one gains the day-to-day impressions of soldiers in a strange land. Even so, Allen Tate accused the poem of being subjective; after all, the reader does see everything from Díaz's perspective. But Tate is misleading. One does not have to attend to Díaz as a particular person. His character is not remarkable; his psyche does not sustain our attention; his personal history is not given. The reader is not invited to see him as very much different from any other soldier in Cortés' army. The predominant pronoun of the poem, in fact, is not “I” but “we.” Díaz is not the subjective modern that Tate so much feared but a communal narrator. The average conquistador has much in common with Yeats' “Primary Man” (and Yeats' influence on MacLeish at this time and later in MacLeish's career cannot be exaggerated): he is strong, rude, and free from spiritual malaise. He is whole in himself because he is totally obedient to fate, totally dominated by the physical world, and totally at home in its mystery. He is not bothered by a sense of ideal beauty or abstract truth. He sees history, MacLeish would seem to imply, as primitive man saw it and as all men should see it. He is one of the “people.”

For MacLeish, Conquistador is a “modern” as well as a “choric” poem because it takes one back to a simpler—yet more mysterious—and radical existence, one which all men under their veneer of civilized mores strongly desire to reassume. It is the task of the truly “modern” poet to elicit this primitive sympathy which binds us together, and therefore “real” modern poetry is both very old and very new. MacLeish insists on having it both ways: St.-John Perse, MacLeish argues, writes profoundly about his own world when he writes in Anabase about primitive people in Central Asia.¹⁰ The reader can reconcile MacLeish's communal primitivism with his celebration of the “new age” by recognizing, apparently, that the democratic society as MacLeish envisions it (more like a communistic society in some ways) is the society where human history began and where it will end. What characterizes this society is the sense of communal adventure—the thrill of living dangerously in unknown places. For MacLeish, all men are equal in the presence of the unknown. Such thinking is totally foreign to the orthodox-thinking historian Díaz, a Catholic, who believes in hierarchy, and who, to judge from The Discovery and Conquest, joined the expedition not so much to gain adventure as to make money. MacLeish is indebted to the historian Díaz for his straightforward account of the Conquest, but the Díaz of Conquistador is a character with entirely different values.

Conquistador does not celebrate the Spanish cause in the Conquest. This fact is discernible in the text of the poem, but it becomes obvious if one studies the ways in which MacLeish uses Díaz's history. Three quarters of The Discovery and Conquest is given over to an account of the Spanish march across Mexico towards Tenochtitlán. Not long after the Spanish arrive at the city, they become suspicious of the Indians and kidnap Montezúma to insure their safety. The Indians are displeased and open hostilities follow. The two sides battle for the city and the Indians are overwhelmingly victorious; they drive Cortés and his men from the city. It takes a year for the Spanish to regroup, plan a strategy, and, in a brutal campaign, to recapture the city—this is the “Conquest.” Fully one quarter of Díaz's Discovery and Conquest describes these hostilities between the Spanish and the Indians. MacLeish's Díaz, on the other hand, treats them very briefly; indeed, only the slender last book of the poem provides an account of the year's siege of the city, and the “Conquest” itself is related with weary irony:

And we marched against them there in the next spring:

And we did the thing that time by the books and the science:
And we burned the back towns and we cut the mulberries:
And their dykes were down and the pipes of their fountains dry:

And we laid them a Christian siege with the sun and the vultures:
And they kept us ninety and three days till they died of it:
And the whole action well conceived and conducted …

And the whole thing was a very beautiful victory:
And we squared the streets like a city in old Spain.
And we built barracks and shops: and the church conspicuous:(11)

Díaz's history is about soldiers who happen also to be explorers. Conquistador is about explorers who are soldiers when they have to be. The poem is not really about military conflict; it is about the malaise and insecurity that attend exploration. At one point in The Discovery and Conquest Díaz tells of a minor rebellion: seven soldiers approach Cortés after the journey west is underway and ask for a ship so that they might return to their homes in Cuba. Cortés initially grants them their wish. Later, however, after conferring with advisors who warn him against setting a bad example, he rescinds his permission. There is no choice involved; they may not go.¹² In Conquistador there is no mention of Cortés' change of mind; anyone is free to go back if he wants. Cortés even offers the men food to take with them. Of course, no one will leave without shame:

Take what you will of the store: a keel's burden:
Spain is east of the seas and the peaceful countries:
The old tongues: the ancient towns: return to them!

Why should you waste your souls in the west! You are young:
Tell them you left us here by the last water
Going up through the pass of the hills with the sun:

Tell them that in the tight towns when you talk of us!
The west is dangerous for thoughtful men:
Eastward is all sure: all as it ought to be:

A man may know the will of God by the fences:
Get yourselves to the ship and the stale shore
And the smell of your father's dung in the earth: at the end of it

There where the hills look over and before us
Lies in the west that city that new world
We that are left will envy your good fortune!

[CP, (The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish) 303-4]

If Cortés' irony calls to mind the irony of the Homeric chieftain in The Iliad, one must also observe that Cortés is not a traditional epic hero in Conquistador but a primus inter pares who speaks to his men not as soldiers, as in The Discovery and Conquest, but as fellow explorers and adventurers. In Díaz's work Cortés enforces duty to God and to the Emperor; in Conquistador he persuades his men by invoking the mysterious ambience of the “western lands.” MacLeish's explorers gain a measure of heroism because they seem to have a choice.

There are other telling liberties taken with The Discovery and Conquest. The historian Díaz offers very little comment about the propriety of kidnapping Montezúma, nor does he question the morality of the subsequent siege and capture of the city. He seems not to regret the actions of his compatriots except insofar as they did not on any particular occasion attain their practical goals. MacLeish's Díaz, on the other hand, bitterly regrets the initial Spanish decision to stay in Tenochtitlán, the decision that made the kidnapping necessary which in turn brought about the war. This is more than regret for a tactical blunder. The war against Tenochtitlán results in a conquest and Spanish enrichment, but colonization brings an end to exploration. In seeking security, the Spanish abandon their own values. The journey should have gone on; the way was not to the city but through the city to the west. Explorers do not have homes; this is the inescapable lesson of Conquistador. “Real men” as Cortés puts it, are nomads who do not “take the God among them,” who willingly live in poverty and fear, and who resist civilizing influences. They must perpetually search for something that can never be attained; the excitement of insecurity is their only reward. In these conquistadors, then, we recognize the new / old man of MacLeish's essays:

The common, simple, earth-riding ways of hands and feet and flesh against the enormous mysteries of sun and moon, of time, of disappearance-and-their-place-knowing-them-no-more. The salt-sweating, robust, passionate, and at the last death-devoured lives of all men always.¹³

The Spanish conquest of Mexico was a convenient vehicle for MacLeish's thoughts about history. In his poetry and prose during the period of Conquistador and later, one observes MacLeish referring very frequently to history in geographical terms. The east is usually equated with the secure past, whereas the west suggests the life of exploration, the world of the unknown future. The east is the narrow land that constricts; the west, the “nude” land that promises. History is a journey westward, or at least should be. For MacLeish, America was the quintessential western land; it always promised something that eluded its explorers. It was a land for adventurous and rugged believers, not for prudent and efficient investors. America was, as he tells us in America Was Promises (1939), a land of the “People” and “History was voyages toward the People” (CP, 364). The “People” discovered America, but they eventually allowed the prudent to rule it and ruin its beauty and promise. America Was Promises ends by exhorting the people of present-day America to learn from those people in the past who lost their freedom. What they must learn is that history is a continuing journey toward what is rightfully theirs.

Listen! Brothers! Generations!
Companions of leaves: of the sun: of the slow evenings:
Companions of the many days: of all of them:
Listen! Believe the speaking dead! Believe
The journey is our journey. Oh believe
The signals were to us: the signs: the birds by
Night: the breaking surf.

America is promises to
Take!

[CP, 367; my italics]

The western land, however, is also more than America; the experience of America is a microcosm of all human history, as the poem makes clear. Mexico was also once a land of the “people”:

And they waved us west from the dunes: they cried out
Colua! Colua!
Mexico! Mexico! … Colua!

[CP, 362]

Conquistador is about a conflict in history. From the very beginning of the poem, Spain and all lands to the east are regarded as “wastelands,” a word that is highly noticeable in any poem of the 1930s, given the fame of Eliot's poem (the word does not appear in The Discovery and Conquest). The “Prologue” to Conquistador presents the voice of the modern poet as an Odysseus seeking direction from the “speaking dead”; the reader is invited to see the rest of the poem as Bernal Díaz's ancestral advice and counsel. The “Prologue” is designed to echo an episode in both The Odyssey and the Cantos in which Odysseus, seeking advice from the dead, is told that he is destined to be a traveller again after he returns to Ithaca. But the “Prologue” should also call Eliot to mind insofar as it involves a Tiresias figure. Indeed, it is hard to read Conquistador without noticing how much Díaz is patterned after the characters of Eliot's early poetry—Tiresias, of course, but also Prufrock and Gerontion. Eliot's characters are all weary people who have, so to speak, “come back from the dead” to “tell us all.”

Díaz is temperamentally very different, of course; in fact, it is questionable whether he is really like Tiresias at all, despite the obvious parallel. If one examines the entire underworld scene in The Odyssey, he is arrested not so much by the speech of Tiresias as by that of Achilles. Upon meeting the warrior, Odysseus expresses great envy of Achilles' royal power among the dead. Achilles' answer is swift and scornful: don't be a fool—there is nothing in death, no real power, and no wisdom from accumulated experience that can compensate for the loss of life, even the most wretched life. It is tempting to regard Díaz's entire narrative as simply a longer version of Achilles' speech. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that MacLeish could have been unaware of this parallel. Like Achilles, Díaz values experience alone; throughout his story, he reiterates how he was once a lord of the earth for simply being alive and in touch with the physical world. Having lost his life, that is, his youth, Díaz has lost everything.

As O. B. Hardison has observed, the notion that epic literature must show a positive attitude toward the world and human endeavor was quite general among Renaissance critics; and subsequent critics of epic, such as George Steiner, E. M. W. Tillyard, and Maurice Bowra, emphatically agree.¹⁴ “Positive” does not mean “optimistic,” but, rather, disposed to revere man simply because he is alive, as well as to revere the things in which man interests himself. One recalls Mark Van Doren's remark about the Tolstoy of War and Peace: “I think he can be said to have hated nothing that ever happened.”¹⁵Conquistador is a poem that very conspicuously praises living man and his interests and the palpable world around him. If there is what Tate called a “void” in the poem, it is a “void” of traditional doctrine that Díaz hurries to fill with pleasurable sensations. Like Gerontion, Díaz is a broken man. But unlike Eliot's little old man, he celebrates man lost in nature, living in harmony with its unknowable order, and “faring forward” into uncertainty. Reading the poem as an answer to Eliot's negativism about the world, one recalls the line of MacLeish's modern master, St.-John Perse: “C'est là le train du monde et je n'ai que du bien à en dire.”¹⁶ Eliot's characters want to die; Díaz wants to live.

Only Díaz's conclusion to the poem sounds like a confession of defeat; he is old, after all, and has nowhere to go. Díaz, however, is not really defeated. The cause of exploration in his lifetime is defeated, but history will proceed eventually toward the west and the “people.” Díaz's world resembles the world imagined by Yeats in “Lapis Lazuli” where “all things fall and are built again / And those that build them again are gay.”¹⁷ That the adventure of the conquistadors came to nothing in coming to something (the building of a Spanish civilization) is not irredeemably tragic if a people in future ages can learn something from the experience. Díaz's narrative is exhortative: like the traditional epic, it may remind the reader of human vulnerability but, more importantly, it wants to remind him of human potential. If one is not excessively literal-minded, he will understand that the way of the “people” can be essentially the same in every age, despite superficial differences of locality and historical circumstance. Only the “speaking dead,” MacLeish implies, can make us see this truth; it is then up to us to find in our own time our own mode of journeying westward. One should gain from the poem what MacLeish calls, in a letter to me (dated 29 November 1975), “the American metaphor in which the journey is always west and in which the victory sometimes (often) seems to defeat itself.”

Nor should this manner of reading an epic poem seem strange. It is the way a Roman of Virgil's time would have read The Aeneid; it is the way a Christian reads Paradise Lost. An epic is usually written in the understanding that what happens in it cannot literally happen again. The Roman of Virgil's day realized that he could not be expected to do what Aeneas did, but he should have inferred that his task was to imitate the virtues of Aeneas in a way appropriate to his age. A look at MacLeish's entire career as an essayist and poet indicates that he did not cease to regard the ability to live with rapid modern social change as a kind of journey into the unknown. His most recent book of essays, A Continuing Journey (1967), is about a geography of the mind. In this sense the world of Conquistador, though very “old,” is also very “new.”

MacLeish, then, wanted to establish a scheme of history that was both progressive and regressive. One can argue that he wanted to establish a myth, but his myth is essentially antimythological. He wanted to argue the existence of a real historical process in which the human race is driven by some unknowable powers, known in the poem simply as “Fates,” periodically to renounce the mythologies of the immediate past in order to better realize the “otherness” of the world. The “otherness” of the world, as previously pointed out, is emblematized by the “west” and the journey toward it is also a journey backward into time, toward a kind of prelapsarian Eden of effort, adventure, and danger that bears no relation to the traditional Eden as conceptualized, for example, in Paradise Lost. If this idea of the “west” in our lives is a myth, MacLeish would presumably argue that it is the most valid, because the most enduring, of all our myths, and valid likewise because it is the myth we all have in common.

Given these intentions, why did MacLeish choose the story of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico? The answer to this question will help us to understand the ambivalence, hesitation, and downright confusion with which the poem has been received since its publication. One apparent reason that MacLeish chose to write about the Spanish Conquest is that the story, or at least what was for him the essential story (exploration and ultimately the “tragic” settlement of Tenochtitlán), was far more unified and capable of poetic treatment than the story of the American Westward Expansion. MacLeish wanted epic unity; what he considered the tragedy of the American experience was far too diffuse for direct treatment in a narrative poem, and narrative was important to him because he regarded its imitation of action as a crucial contribution to the exhortative tone of a work that emphasizes the action of exploration as an end in itself. Another reason that MacLeish chose this story is, clearly, that Díaz's account of it is an anomaly among great accounts of military exploration and conquest in that it is written from the point of view of a participant who regarded himself as an average soldier with the average man's interests in mind. MacLeish wanted to authenticate his “choric” interests and what he perceived to be those of his age by reference to historical precedent.

What might have influenced MacLeish the most, however, was the condition of the Mexican landscape itself at the time of the inception of the poem. The locus of Conquistador was, as MacLeish knew, relatively untouched by civilization when he began to think of the poem; it was still more than reminiscent of the landscape that Cortés encountered centuries earlier. One would think that such considerations would hardly have mattered to a poet with a universal and timeless theme, a poet who regarded exploration as a metaphor for a state of mind, but it seems that, metaphor or no metaphor, MacLeish could not envision, much less write, the poem without feeling that the exploration of a strange, uncivilized land was still a literal possibility—indeed, something that he could experience himself, even though he may not initially have intended to explore the route of the conquistadors. The history of the writing of the poem seems to testify to the importance of the specific place in the poem. MacLeish began the poem in Paris in 1928, but the writing went badly because, as he has acknowledged in a letter to Drewey Wayne Gunn, he felt himself too distant from the landscape.¹⁸ He subsequently went to Mexico and traveled the route of the conquistadors. Apparently, his actual experience of the landscape made all the difference, for he finished the poem only a few months after he returned to the United States. In the letter to Gunn, MacLeish recalls that the Valley of Mexico “even at that late date was heartbreakingly beautiful.”

One could argue that MacLeish had the Spanish Conquest in mind initially, that the landscape was incidental, and that a visit to the landscape only provided an inexplicable impetus for him to start work on a poem whose theme he had worked out long before. If, after all, Conquistador is a metaphorical poem that asks the reader to act out the past in the present, specific time and place cannot be important. Moreover, as MacLeish has insisted in a letter to me, it is not a nostalgic poem, by which I assume he means a poem simply about the past. Nevertheless, Conquistador is in some degree a nostalgic poem simply because in fact it celebrates its particular landscape and because it gives one the impression that he will never know its like again. Embedded in the poem is the assertion that one must be willing to live in change, yet practically every line of the poem asks the reader to mourn for a landscape and a way of life that will never be recovered. Repeatedly in his narrative Díaz praises the virgin quality of the country:

the shine of the

Sun in that time: the wind then: the step
Of the moon over those leaf-fallen nights: the sleet in the
Dry grass: the small of the dust where we slept—
These things were real: these suns had heat in them.

[CP, 266]

Conquistador finally presents a sharp dichotomy between the primitive landscape as an end in itself, and as paysage moralisé. It is this dichotomy that has made the poem's critics uneasy, though none of them mention it. This dichotomy is present in MacLeish's essays, but, again, is never made explicit; MacLeish seems unaware that his sentiments diverge in opposite directions. For instance, in his essay, “The Unimagined American” (1943), MacLeish urges that Americans forsake their past for a newer, imagined America. Here, as elsewhere, he stresses the idea of “faring forward.” “Faring forward” involves a casting away of the image of America's agricultural past which, with its untouched beauty, its clear air and pleasant barns and villages, is purely “nostalgic”:

No one has dreamed a new American dream of the new America—the industrial nation of the huge machines, the limitless earth, the vast and skillful population, the mountain of copper and iron, the mile-long plants, the delicate laboratories, the tremendous dams. No one has imagined this America—what its life should be. …¹⁹

This statement is not inconsistent with the MacLeish of the Conquistador period, despite the new emphasis on industrialization: such is the new age toward which Americans, as historical explorers, must “travel.” Here, however, the dichotomy in MacLeish's thinking strikes forcefully. It is “right” for the conquistadors to travel on because, if they do, they will only be moving back to an element, nature, in which they will be, paradoxically, at home if not comfortable. Americans must move, however, into an industrialized and hardly natural, or pastoral, future full of “huge machines, the limitless earth, the vast and skillful population, the mountains of copper and iron, the mile-long plants, … the tremendous dams.” It is easy to see that MacLeish attempts here to endow this “new world” with the sublimity of traditional epic, but is his imagery convincing? If machines are huge, if the population is vast, if there are mountains of copper and mile-long plants, how can there also be limitless earth? In fact, for all of his praise of the new industrial world, MacLeish never embraces it concretely in his poetry; he is never an “industrial poet,” but he is very frequently, especially in Conquistador, a pastoral poet. In short, the rapture that accompanies MacLeish's description of the nearly primitive landscape of Mexico begs the reader to ask if he was himself entirely at peace with this “new” America or indeed with any kind of imaginable future. His description of the Mexican landscape as “heartbreakingly beautiful” suggests to us that he thought that he was seeing it for the last time and that nothing would quite compensate for its loss. One is forced to admit that Conquistador, in its unmistakable praise for a primitive world that is nearly lost to this time, is in one way a nostalgic poem, and that MacLeish's view of history is riven by a conflict of mind and heart.

If one judges Conquistador by the standards of traditional epic, he must confess that it does not very strictly measure up, but he need make no such judgment. MacLeish has very conscious affinities with the moderns, chief among which is an instinct for lyric poetry and a tendency to regard experience as an end in itself. Clearly this work is in a class apart from poems such as Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Keats' Hyperion; it is not a pastiche. MacLeish was not hounded by the ghosts of Homer or Milton and in writing his poem he was not attempting entirely to defy the poetic “tradition” of his own time in favor of an outdated genre. He set himself against some of the attitudes and practices of his contemporaries, including their “subjectivism” and “negativism,” but he was not unappreciative of what Pound, Eliot and the others had up to that time done. He was particularly sensitive to Pound's innovations. The poets of the 1920s, MacLeish observes, hoped to compose a poetry

… based upon the phrases of living speech, alive still with the emphasis of breathing mouths. They failed, however, to understand that it was insufficient merely to release the good cloth of poetry from the silly starch of nineteenth-century etiquette … and bad taste. They did not understand that it was necessary also to find for that released language a new form capable of fixing and accentuating its living rhythms, and that Pound had found that form.²⁰

MacLeish wrote Conquistador in the belief that he was going even further than Pound in finding that “new form” which would “fix” the “released language” of modernism. In so doing, he seems to have wanted to liberate modernism itself from what he thought was its simple posture of reaction to the past. He wanted to give modernism a purpose and he apparently felt that he had to give it an age-old context to do so, which is what epic poetry nearly always attempts to do. His poem is an attempt to make an amalgam of the old and the new, and in this respect he seems to have been influenced by Eliot's idea of the value of tradition in poetry. Epic was important to him because he saw it as a vehicle for urging a reluctant generation to travel into the “new age.” In writing his poem, however, he also, perhaps sometimes unintentionally, gave modern nostalgia a dimension of heroism.

Notes

Archibald MacLeish (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 28.
New Republic, 1 June 1932, pp. 77-78.
A Time to Speak (Cambridge, 1940), p. 56 passim. A Time to Speak is a collection of essays from the previous decade. See especially “Nevertheless One Debt,” “Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry,” and “Poetry and the Public World.”
Ibid., p. 92.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid.
The English Epic and its Background (London, 1954), pp. 7-8.
The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), pp. 133-34.
Bernál Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York, 1970), p. xxxiii.
MacLeish, p. 53.
The Collected Poems of Archibald MacLeish (Boston, 1962), p. 350. All subsequent quotations are cited by page as CP.
The Discovery and Conquest p. 99.
A Time to Speak, p. 57.
Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, 1962), p. 71. George Steiner, “Introduction: Homer and the Scholars” in Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. George Steiner and Robert Fagles (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962). Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London, 1957). Tillyard, The English Epic and its Background.
Quoted by Clifton Fadiman in his foreword to Tolstoy's War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York, 1942), p. xxvi.
Collected Poems (Princeton, 1971), p. 110.
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1956), p. 292. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition.
American and British Writers in Mexico: 1556-1973 (Austin, 1974), p. 150.
A Continuing Journey (Boston, 1967), p. 90.
A Time to Speak, p. 59 (my italics).

Thomas N. Walters (essay date 1982)

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SOURCE: Walters, Thomas N. “A Look at Selected New Lyric Poems by Archibald MacLeish.” In The Proceedings of the Archibald MacLeish Symposium, May 7-8 1982, edited by Bernard A. Drabeck, Helen E. Ellis, and Seymour Rudin, pp. 28-35. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in 1982, Walters praises MacLeish's mastery of the impassioned and human lyric.]

What I mean by love is … the kind of relationship which gives itself in praise and wonder and awe … something that is beyond the reach of the imagination to understand, and … worth believing in.

The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren

In his Poetry and Experience MacLeish quoted from Lu Chi's “Fu” concerning the poet's art, citing these words: “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being; / We knock upon silence for an answering music. / We enclose boundless space in a square foot of paper; / We pour out deluge from the inch space of the heart.”

Those words impress with their eloquent power. And the quotation serves well as an adopted credo remarkably significant for the influence it had upon MacLeish's achievement as poet. Well known is how MacLeish met the often harsh demands of his roles as man, husband, father, lawyer, professor, as maker of deep and lasting friendships, as adviser to politicians and national leaders, as champion of democracy and individual man, as librarian, scholar, journalist, editor, essayist, as penetrative commentator on his nation's heritage, change, growth, and purpose, and as thought-provoking playwright for radio and stage.

Undergirding all these roles has been the continuing one, the major, the most profoundly heartfelt one: MacLeish as poet—as private, American poet.

In addition to the foundation which his epic, public poetic concerns have provided all his other activities, he has been able always to pull back inside himself and write the personal lyric. And there seem to be two levels of these personal poems. There are the poems, for instance, about his love and admiration for friends and individuals caught in their times, in their lives. Then, at base, there are the intensely personal poems and expressions of his love of family—especially of his love for Ada.

It might seem easier to grasp and treat objectively those sweeping cultural or political concepts in a poetic mode than to discover and depict the complexities of even one individual. Love and caring make objectivity difficult. It is easier generally to judge ideas and emotions in relation to groups than in relation to one person. MacLeish always did both. There is, for instance, his recent expression of the horrific facelessness of blind politics in his sad and angry poem, “National Security,” in which the “three names” (of Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam) are “not to be spoken.” And there is—in his “Night Watch in the City of Boston”—that startling picture of our Time: “The darkness deepens. Shrieking like a whirling paper in a street / tears at itself where shame and hatred meet.” These subjects—war, perversion of democracy, national subterfuge, cultural alienation—are enormous and difficult ones. But complementing them, balancing these larger, more general canvases, are the intimate cameo portraits of such difficult-to-render individuals of concern to him as Hemingway, Brooks Atkinson, Mark Van Doren, Pablo Casals, Carl Sandburg, E. E. Cummings, and Edwin Muir. How did MacLeish, then, go about retaining power of vision and expression when viewing the exact, magnified heartbeats and heartbreaks of a personal friendship, of a love? MacLeish—in his exact and specific capsule statements of understanding, of gratitude, of love, of delight in such persons, celebrated them as exempla of the human mystery. In these lyric poems he persisted in being candid, affirmative, graceful, and—typical of his “cranky-yankee,” against-the-grain classicism—he remained unfashionably, penetratingly and compassionately wise. And loving.

Of MacLeish's considerable array of strengths, of his mastery of stylistic methods, his mature accomplishments through poetic arrangement, selection, diction, emphasis, a selection of only four discernibly recurrent devices may be useful here to suggest how the poet grappled with experience which touched him not just philosophically, but personally, vitally. Even such a stringent selection will show how he heightened, through calculated poetic restructuring, that experience above any prose form its account could have taken.

These arbitrarily selected poetic devices include (1) his acutely rendered, though sometimes deceptively low key and straightforward use of the exact image. (2) He employed, too, a keen sense of how the rhythms of human speech—whether the voice is being witty, pensive, or angry—can be intensified through subtle syntactical re-ordering, through repetitions, hesitations, so as finally to make both common and uncommon sense of speech. (3) He consistently used, too, the telling juxtaposition—of image, of idea, of word—exploring the startling opposites of light and dark, sleep and wakefulness, quiet and sound, quickness and death. And (4) he employed an intentional ambiguity, a balance of possibilities, achieved through calculated wordplays or, as often as not, through elliptical constructions. Usually found at the end of his poems, this “mystery” is provocative, tantalizes the reader toward translations, and often provides a redefinition—making possible, finally, a fuller understanding, even an acceptance—of the experience being explored.

Having coped epically over a long career with the deaths of thousands of cared-for but faceless warriors in far too many wars, MacLeish wrote, on the smaller, more difficult scale, several obviously personal and pain-filled lyrics about the death of his beloved brother, Kenneth, in the first world war. Each of these poems reapproached, rearranged—added possibilities of impact to—the flat words: “Kenneth MacLeish, a Navy Flier, was shot down over Belgium.” MacLeish's most recent attempt to re-order this experience poetically is the poem “Family Group.” In terms of MacLeish's continuing style, consider the electrifying effect of the last five lines in that work: “The faceless figure on its back, the helmet buckled, / wears what look like Navy wings. A lengthened shadow / falls across the muck about its feet. / Me? I'm back in Cambridge in dry clothes, / a bed to sleep in, my small son, my wife.” The humanly natural, and yet elevating, emotional rhythm of the earlier, questioning line, “Someone's lengthened shadow—the photographer's?— / falls across the road, across our feet,” becomes more than rhythmically effective when it is echoed by the image—this time unidentified, unquestioned, and with that anguished change of pronoun—in the second stanza concerning the second photograph in this “family group”: “A lengthened shadow falls across the muck about its feet.” Still apparent in this poem, half a century after the fact, are the pain, guilt, and poetic bravery of facing fully two ironically different kinds of reclining—different beds—different kinds of sleep: one buckled, alone, in muck; the other in dry clothes, surrounded by ongoing lives. Thus the poem redirects our attention to its title, and becomes a provocative redefinition of “family group.”

His early friendship with—and subsequent estrangement from—Ernest Hemingway, too, presented ongoing emotional difficulties for MacLeish. Again, a prose statement of the situation would have been “easier”: “The laughing, handsome man, who was loved by my child Mary Hillard, eventually was changed by too much war, by artistic paranoia, by disappointments in love.” But consider the exact imagery of MacLeish's evocation of Hemingway's fear in the line “He knuckled his hard, small hands,” from the poem, “Whitehaired Girl.” And consider, too, the mysterious and possibly ironic last two words of that poem: “You see!” There is also the contrast between the black beard Ernest has grown in Switzerland and the white-haired, exquisite girl. There is, as well, the remarkable staccato beat, the rhythms of the lines evocative of a child's frenzied feeling of betrayal: “She ran to him, stopped, looked, screamed. It wasn't Ernest! / Wasn't Ernest! / Wasn't … / She raced up the stair.”

In the poem “A Good Man in a Bad Time,” MacLeish celebrated the impassioned rhythm and dignity of intelligent, reasoned utterance. In one stanza he illuminated the horrific juxtaposition of Jerome Wiesner's sanity and wisdom regarding the proper uses of science—and the belligerent ignoring of such sane counsel by governmental powers out of control. The lines read: “He addresses presidents. He says: / ‘Even now a government still has to govern: / no one is going to invent a self-governing holocaust!’ / The Pentagon receives his views: ‘Science,’ he says, ‘is not a substitute for thought. / Miracle drugs perhaps: not miracle wars.’” This poem ends with an image significantly set in italics like a dream sequence. It is an image of cleansing, of renewal, of communion; possibly only ironic and defiant, for ours is a time crazed with its potentials for self-destruction; it is a time when, as the poem states: “Nobody speaks of a good man, now: / only the knave in office, public liar, / pardoned president, and all the rest. / Even the word is out of fashion: ‘Good!’” In that sort of hideous ambience, our world's waters grow increasingly wasted and tainted with mercury, with strontium-90, with acids and PCB's—rather than with the poet's avowed tasting of “… mint, of spring water.” The image and the idea of renewal are brave ones, sad ones, relying for their power not so much upon reality as defined by bureaucracies, but upon reality as defined by the tendoned mystery of the human heart, its power to renew, despite all.

The themes of these three poems: death, change, the horror of arrogant ignorance, are harrowing ones. Yet in each of these closely personal explorations, MacLeish artistically transcended any sentimentality, or private fear, or the flatness of such mere statements as we hear all the time: “My brother died. Nothing stays the same. We continue to know more and to understand it less all the time.”

Until April 20, 1982, nearing ninety years of age, with his wife of some sixty-seven years at his side, MacLeish continued to confront the closest of personal experiences—his own mortality, his own love. He continued to employ and refine his hard-earned poetic strengths to create lasting art out of the very passage of his own lifetime, as well as making art out of the mysteriously renewing relationship of love between himself and his treasured Ada.

In the very recent poem “Definitions of Old Age,” for instance, MacLeish first created a simile of age in “old-fashioned” agrarian terms: “When apple trees are old as you are, / over-aged and crooked grown, something / happens to their occupation.” Then he makes the image contemporary: “… the time when men resign from their committees / … [yet] still get up at seven every morning / right on time for nothing left to do but / sit and age / and look up ‘dying’ in the yellow pages.” Attend, still, to the suggestive resonance, the rhythm of these two lines: “What's the use, this late, of bearing apples? / Let the apples find a father of their own.” Note also the ponderable, the translatable impact of that last line. Are those apples poems? Are they others' lives? And the poem ends with a sweetly masculine, reasoned acceptance, a resolving re-definition of old age: “… level light / evening in the afternoon / love without the bitterness and so / goodnight.” A similar recognition of advancing age is in his poem “Dozing on the Lawn.” Who but MacLeish would have given us that poem's surprising image and dictional choice of “… warm sun by the humming trees”? Or given us such rhythmic, naturally human repetitions as its lines: “… but I wake too soon: / wake too soon and wake afraid / of the blinding sun, of the blazing sky.” Or, who else would have given us its calmly accepting resolution, its powerful contrasts of sunlight with darkness—deceptively straightforward and even neutrally stated—in these last two lines: “It was dark in the dream where I was laid: / It is dark in the earth where I will lie.” Here was the man, the poet considering, clear-eyed, through a faith so calm as to seem laconic, his own death. Yet the confrontation became art through MacLeish's stringent exercise of control, vision, through his reliance upon trained human intellect and God-given spirit.

Refined to its sharpest focus, this suggested difficulty of viewing and treating the intensely personal may be examined in some of MacLeish's observations about his wife. Not always poetic in form, a record of gestures and prose statements, when accompanied by the poems, reveals an impressive pattern of a relationship nurtured and made beautiful by two gifted, thoughtful and committed individuals. Like any marital relationship, the MacLeish marriage did not know unrelieved bliss. It required hard work, compromise, giving. Nearly sixty years ago, as early as 1924 in The Happy Marriage, MacLeish was interested in analyzing the dynamics, the ingredients of love, interested in describing “the subtle relationship between a man and wife, the separateness in intimacy, the play of desire and surfeit, the intuitive understanding and the doubt, satisfaction and discontent, the dream and the awareness of time, beauty and death” (Falk, Archibald MacLeish). Through the inevitable trials, MacLeish remained loving, admiring, grateful to his Ada for her belief in him. Fifty-four years after The Happy Marriage, for instance, in his essay “Autobiographical Information,” MacLeish wrote this moving testimonial to his girl-wife, with whom he could “… laugh about [pressures and problems] but not laughing.” He shows them having a vermouth cassis in Paris: “She rises, runs in dance-step down the street. I follow, catch her … clinging hands …” (Riders on the Earth). Of her tangible support during those risk-taking years of seeking, of her maintenance of their stable attitude in the face of disapproving inquiries from their staid families back home—families who expected results, he wrote: “And then the letters home. She wrote, I couldn't. They were charming letters. Paris days and not a word about the nights between them, nights above our little courtyard side by side, keeping our common secret from each other. When would those twenty lines be written—ten lines, even—five—those five lines that would justify … ?”

Coming some sixty demanding, experience-filled years after that long-ago “happy marriage” (the event, not the poem), MacLeish's most recent collection, New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, has, as its simple dedication, “for Ada.” How fortunate MacLeish knew himself to be. How felicitous his phrasings of gratitude, respect, love.

In the 1968 poem “Late Abed,” there are strong autobiographical elements in the imagery of its opening lines: “Ah, but a good wife! / To lie late in a warm bed / (warm where she was) with your life / suspended like music in the head.” Ada's internationally recognized singing voice hangs in the air of that lyric. There is in this poem, too, MacLeish's rare ability to suggest the duality of effect of an event or action through his exact, momentarily mystifying word-choice. Hear the rhythms, the repetitions of beat as well in these two lines: “and she moves here, she moves there, / and your mouth hurts still where last she kissed you.” Finally there is the provocative ending of that poem, suggesting that dreams of the peaceful sanctuary of a woman's love transcend art or work: “You lie there listening and she moves— / prepares her house to hold another morning, / prepares another day to hold her loves … / You lie there thinking of nothing / watching the sky. …”

In the poems “The Old Gray Couple (1)” and “The Old Gray Couple (2),” MacLeish masterfully fused his intensely personal subjects of age and love. Again, too, he triumphed artistically over the inescapable difficulty of looking closely at one's own predicament.

Printed back to back in this collection, these two poems reflect light on each other, though they differ markedly in form. “The Old Gray Couple (1)” is a tightly structured, more formal, three-stanza, twelve-line poem with some near, and some full, rhymes. “The Old Gray Couple (2)” is couched as a dialogue, a brief play, between a he and she who sound remarkably like an Archibald and an Ada. It is significant of MacLeish's ongoing restlessness about achieving the best possible means to effect an observation that he wrote two versions of this poem. Each of these poems is a graceful, witty, wise exploration of and declaration about the communicative ability, the mature, worked-at, grateful relationship which a man and his wife have developed. The problems faced by the young couple in The Happy Marriage have not gone away; the strengths by which the couple face those problems, however, have grown with the passage of time. They are at ease, at one with each other, form an entity together. The poem's middle stanza reads: “They go off at an evening's end to talk / but they don't, or to sleep but they lie awake— / hardly a word, just a touch, just near, / just listening but not to hear.” And in the final stanza, the rhythms of repetition, the very cyclical, cadenced quality of the structured language is part of the stated, stately acceptance of their final, essential separateness: “Everything they know they know together— / everything, that is, but one: / their lives they've learned like secrets from each other; / their deaths they think of in the nights alone.”

In the dialogue of “The Old Gray Couple (2),” MacLeish brings in yet another element: that of the effect of poetic artifice on their relationship. The couple discuss the sustaining quality for men of the “unreal,” of the “beautiful, supportive lie,” which is its own kind of truth. The woman speaks first: “She: Love, says the poet, has no reasons. / He: Not even after fifty years? / She: Particularly after fifty years. He: What was it, then, that lured us, that still teases? / She: You used to say my plaited hair / He: And then you'd laugh. / She: Because it wasn't plaited. …” Midway in the poem, the man says, “Love has no reasons but old lovers do.” The woman quickly adds, “And they can't tell.” To which, the man, more remindful than reproving, professing an old, old love still, says: “I can and so can you. / Fifty years ago we drew each other, / magnetized needle toward the longing north. / It was your naked presence that so moved me. / It was your absolute presence that was love.” Still, however, the woman persists by teasing him about his use of the past tense, saying, “Ah, was!” Not to be deterred, seeking to express for them both finally the essence of what they are together, the man continues, his passion is tempered, his words sure and dignified by love. He says: “And now, years older, we begin to see / absence not presence: what the world would be / without your footsteps in the world—the garden / empty of the radiance where you are.” Then using once more his sad juxtaposition of light and dark, in a stately speech of calm acceptance, MacLeish's man's voice closes the poem: “Ours is the late, last wisdom of the afternoon. / We know that love, like light, grows dearer toward the / dark.”

So, there it throbs again: that virile, thoughtful man's voice speaking to his attentive love about the dearness of love, the dearness of light when both are fading. There, still, is Lu Chi's poet struggling against Non-being—knocking upon silence for an answering music; there again is the lover pouring out deluge from the inch space of his heart. How marvelously well, how lovingly, MacLeish did it all.

Helen E. Ellis (essay date 1982)

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SOURCE: Ellis, Helen E. “MacLeish and the Nature of Woman.” In The Proceedings of the Archibald MacLeish Symposium, May 7-8 1982, edited by Bernard A. Drabeck, Helen E. Ellis, and Seymour Rudin, pp. 88-95. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1988.

[In the following essay, originally presented as a lecture in 1982, Ellis discusses MacLeish's poetic rendering of the nature of women as closer to the “truly true” than the nature of man.]

Edward Mullaly points out in his introduction to Six Plays that at the center of MacLeish's work is “an exploration of the nature of man.” Mr. Mullaly, of course, means to include women in that word “man” and thus to say that Mr. MacLeish's work explores the nature of the human. Mr. MacLeish himself frequently uses the word in the same sense, implying that men and women share certain traits that are uniquely human. His exploration of human nature seems to me to concentrate particularly on what are perhaps the quintessential experiences shared by all human beings: awareness of life and death, symbolized in Songs for Eve by the green and dry trees; awareness of self and the other, recognized in the same work by Adam, who “sees / His own two hands … / His flesh, his bone and … / Knows himself, and is”; and, third, awareness of love.

Since these three experiences are shared by both men and women, they raise several questions. For example, do men and women, for MacLeish, respond to these experiences in the same ways? If they do not, do those differing responses define a nature of woman that is distinct from that more general “nature of man” Mr. Mullaly referred to? Proof can be found everywhere in MacLeish's work that the answer to those questions is YES. Before I explore the works themselves, however, I'd like to quote statements made in conversation and recorded not on printed pages but on tape.

A year or so ago in an interview with Mr. MacLeish, I asked him: “Do you use your wife as an audience on whom to test your poems?” His answer was an emphatic NO, and he went on to explain: “She has a wonderful, literal-minded, womanly approach to the experience of life … literal-mindedness is very, very close to literality, to what is truly true. And women,” he went on, “are really close to what is truly true most of the time.” Several years earlier, Mr. MacLeish discussed J. B. with a group of college students who were preparing a production of the play. Commenting on the differences between the reading and acting versions of J. B., he said, “In the book it doesn't so much matter that the end of the play is Sarah's because in life … the end of the play is usually the woman's.”

Both of these statements suggest that MacLeish recognized qualities in women that he considered characteristic of all women, thus as “woman's nature.” The words, actions and descriptions of women in his poems and plays suggest that also. Although awareness of life and death, the self and the other, and love are all commingled, it is through the response to those experiences that the nature of woman is both explored and defined in MacLeish's work.

In Songs for Eve both Adam and Eve become aware of physical existence, both their own and one another's. Both of them discover the beauty of the world, of themselves, of each other; and both of them feel love. As Adam recognizes love, he regards it as “infinite.” Yet at the same time he fears the “dry tree,” which he equates with death—to him the end of self-awareness as well as the incomprehensible. As a result, when Eve gives birth to their first child, Adam urges her to “Cover that infant's mouth and eyes, / … softly where it lies: / The soul that lurks, the soul that flies, / Will enter where it clucks and cries. … I fear the souls … most.” Conception is a mystery to him; he sees the child as the creation of some “third” being beyond himself and Eve, who “Mingles to meddle / Beneath the green tree”—something separate but paradoxically inseparable from the green tree (life's tree), that threatens life itself and causes him to fear the “glimmering sky … vast overhead.” Unable to either understand or prevent that power, he can only fear it.

Adam's response suggests something in man's nature which needs to comprehend intellectually the mysteries of life, that searches for answers that can be understood by the reasoning capacities. Unlike Adam, Eve seems not only to accept the inevitable relationship between the green and dry trees (birth into life and death) but even to see their relationship as making the fall from Eden and all that Eden represents fortunate. She sings of how, in reaching out to take the apple from the green tree, she “heard beyond that tree a tree stir”—“heard the whole of time / and all of space give ringing rhyme,” and so she “reached out to touch and climb / In spite of space, in spite of time.” Thus in taking the apple, she knew she also took the dry tree.

She makes that statement clearly in her final song:

On first tree grew
Whereby I knew, …
Apple eaten of that tree
Animal I ceased to be.
On the last tree,
The dry tree,
Eternity
My fruit shall be.

And she goes on, being even more explicit in stating her perception of the meanings of the green and dry trees.

Green tree,
Time's tree,
Mystery
.....Apple eaten of that tree
Eve I was—and Eve might be.
Dry tree
Man's tree,
Eternity.
.....Apple eaten of that tree
Eve … shall cease—and be.

Here Eve herself uses the term “man” to include all humans, saying that the dry tree, for humans, is not simply the death of the mortal being but the means to immortal life. She does not reason it; she feels it.

This difference between woman's and man's awareness of life and death is stated much earlier in MacLeish's works, in “The Happy Marriage.” There the reader finds the following passage:

Man is immortal, for his flesh is earth,
And save he lives forever—why, he dies:
Woman is mortal, for her flesh will rise
In each new generation of her birth.
She is the tree: we [I assume he means men] are the feverish
Vain leaves that gild her summer with our own,
And fall and rot when summer's overblown,
And wish eternity and have—our wish.

And man, immortal, marries his own dreams
Of immortality in flesh and blood,
And mortal woman, wiser than she seems,
Marries her man for evil or for good,—
Wherein perception sees what reason blurs:
She was not his, but he was only hers.

It seems to me that what is being said here is that woman, whether because of some inner sensitivity—which Eve's experience on reaching out for the apple might suggest—or because of her function as childbearer and nourisher, accepts both mortality and immortality as facts, one as real as the other. Therefore the metaphor of the tree is appropriate in its imaging of woman since it is through the woman that both the green and the dry trees are realized. Man, on the other hand, while he accepts his own existence and thus his mortality, is less certain about his immortality. He is “immortal” precisely because immortality is what he least believes in but most wants. Since all he can know is the body, he “marries his own dreams of immortality”—he proves his existence to himself through the emotion and the act of love. By asserting his own reality, he denies death and the incomprehensible.

In another section of “The Happy Marriage,” the speaker, expressing the male protagonist's thinking, declares:

A woman was no lawyer's brief
Compounded to persuade the sense
Of things beyond experience
No woman's body could fulfill,
But Holy Writ that can distil
The very peace it promises.

What that seems to say is: a woman gives proof not of what is beyond life, but of life itself, of existence. Thus she brings peace by affirming to man his existence. If woman, then, represents proof of life to various characters and personae in MacLeish's works, and if life is imaged in the poet's works primarily by the green tree, then the question is: “Does woman represent life to MacLeish?” Is the woman's acceptance of the green and dry trees what constitutes her “womanly” nature, her “literality”? We would expect that if that is so, we would find that image of the green, or apple, tree a consistent image in the more personal poems. And in fact we do.

In “Poem in Prose,” a poem to his wife, MacLeish writes: “Where-ever she is it is now. / It is here where the apples are.”

In “Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments,” the poet concludes:

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I'll say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair—
I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.

Again in the poem titled “What Must” the leaf image is linked to life and love: It begins:

We lay beneath the alder tree
Her breast she leaned upon my hand
The alder leaf moved over me
The sun moved over on the land
Her mouth she pressed upon my mouth
I felt the leaf beat in her breast …

In this poem the link between awareness of life and death and of love is clearly stated; the difference between a woman's view of that link and a man's view are clear in these lines spoken by the male lover:

I felt the love go deep in me
That has no season in the earth
That has no time of spring or birth
That cannot flower like a tree
Or like one die
                                        but only be.

Love exists, he says; it has no beginning nor end; unlike the green tree which becomes the dry tree, love cannot die. He tells the woman:

Love has life not of love
But of us …

The woman, however, turns his words around, saying,

Love has life not of us
But of love …

The difference between their two statements is the key, I believe, to what MacLeish sees as the essential difference between man's and woman's natures: to man, existence is all that can be known with certainty and thus love is given its existence through human existence. To the woman, life includes both mortal existence and immortality, both what is known through experience and through reason and what is understood intuitively. She therefore recognizes something—some power—call it love—that is beyond the “us”. Her statement in this poem seems to me to be a restatement of Eve's song in which she says she heard “beyond that tree a tree.” Is that perception what MacLeish meant when he said “women are close to what is truly true”?

Again, in “What Must,” the lovers express their love for one another through the act of love. The poem, written in the mid-forties when MacLeish was in his mid-fifties, concludes with the lovers walking toward the future years and toward death hand in hand. There is no image of the dry tree in that poem. As they “walk together toward the trees / Where the road runs out of sight,” they see ahead only “the green beyond the leaves—the green cove below the light.” The act of love affirms life; love itself gives life meaning, and here the man, as in “The Happy Marriage” feels himself immortal as he “gilds her summer” with his own.

Twenty years later, in the late 1960s, MacLeish wrote a poem titled “April in November.” Here there are no signs of green: the ability to have the wish—the wish for immortality he states in “The Happy Marriage”—is not possible. The lines read:

Now, this later season of the year
There is no healing green, the bare
Bole stands broken for the world to see.
Unseasonable tempest: naked tree.

The experience that enables the man to assert his own existence, his own unending reality—the experience that in his “summer” years makes his wish for immortality come true—is in the past. This is the “later season,” the November of life, and only the “broken” “Bare bole”—the “naked tree”—is certain.

The need in man to affirm himself, his need to create love out of himself and his wish for immortality cause him to live his life differently from women, MacLeish seems to say in numerous poems and plays. Men, he says again and again, cannot live in the present. Women, on the other hand, can only live in the present. In Air Raid the girls' voices say, “Men never take the clock for now— / For this—for here. They never take the / Wish that this was why they waited. / … women … always do. Life's more itself for us than / them. They're always meddling with it— / Always making life come true …”

The women in the same play state the reason: “Death's the one thing every creature does / … [yet] Only boys and men like boys believe in it.” The old woman calls men “fools” because, she says, “they have no trust in the world,” adding that “there's no sin but not to trust the world.” Women, she seems to imply, do trust the world—life—they live in the now of the present.

This same idea is one underlying the experience of Elizabeth and Peter in the verse play This Music Crept by Me upon the Waters. Discussing the play in an interview, Mr. MacLeish said: The play deals with the confrontation of the affluent with the now. People of today, especially business people, live always “looking forward to the end of the month; looking toward the future.” But that is true, he added, of men much more than women, for women, he went on, “can live now, naturally do; and they have to, in many ways. But men are incapable of it.” He pointed out that in the play Peter “was living either in the immediate past … or the immediate future.” Elizabeth, though, can accept the present. In the play, she points out that the natives “have no word for time. They live NOW.” The man to whom she speaks comments, “Only the trees have found that fabulous country.” To which she responds, “The trees and I. … On this island here and now have met each other.” Notice that here too there is that same link of woman with the image of the dual trees.

MacLeish seems to say that it is the nature of woman to live in the present, to accept death as both a part of life and a promise of life. Because, in reaching out to take life's tree, woman also knew and took the promise of the dry tree, she is aware of herself and of the other in a way different from man. She is “not his”—not defined by him—but he is “only here” because through her, he affirms himself as existing. The ability of woman to hear behind the one tree that other tree as well reveals an intuitive sense that is not in man. In The Trojan Horse, the “woman who is most woman”—Helen—listens to what is inside the horse and the Blind man says, “Women hear heartbeats / Even behind the holiest appearances. / Treason betrays itself with women.” Other women in the play—Cassandra, the old woman, the young girl—all hear too. The men, however, cannot hear; they allow the horse to enter the city and the city falls.

In his introduction to Air Raid in Six Plays, MacLeish points out another kind of sensitivity possessed by women. He comments on Picasso's “Guernica,” saying, “There can be few living men or women—particularly women—who cannot bring its images to mind—the dead child and the shrieking woman.”

It seems that MacLeish, in his exploration of the nature of man, also explored and defined the natures of men and women and perceived in the sexes traits unique to each, traits related to their responses to awareness of life and death, self and other, and love. It is woman's nature, his works and his words say again and again, to live in the present, to accept what the mind cannot know, to see, hear and feel what is “truly true.” She is not the vessel of sin who, through Eve, brought upon mankind suffering, death and loss of innocence; she is the vessel through whom all humans are awakened to life, to spirituality and to immortality. For MacLeish, woman is close to the “truly true”—the green leaf lies in her hair, for she gives man affirmation of himself and fulfills his wish for immortality. That seems to be his definition of the nature of woman.

William H. Pritchard (essay date February 1983)

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SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “MacLeish Revisited.” Poetry 141, no. 5 (February 1983): 291-301.

[In the following essay, Pritchard illuminates the qualities of MacLeish's character that inform his poetry.]

Archibald MacLeish died last April just as he was about to be honored on his ninetieth birthday by a large gathering at Greenfield Community College (near the MacLeish home in Conway, Massachusetts) to which he had given his papers. His death prompted few attempts on anyone's part at revaluating his achievement as a poet, or even at thinking twice about his career as, preeminently, America's elder statesman of poetry. Increasingly since the death of Frost in 1963 he had played the role of America's poet laureate without portfolio. If Richard M. Nixon requested a poem from him on the occasion of the moon landing of 1969, MacLeish, a lifelong Democrat, courteously obliged; after all, the President in his inaugural address a few months previously had already quoted from his poem about the Apollo Eight mission. He was equally ready to celebrate the city of Boston (with “Night Watch in the City of Boston”) at the behest of a Bicentennial committee in 1976. There has scarcely been a poet of this century more ready to write poems employing public speech in the services of saluting heroism, political commitment, sacrifice in the service of some high ideal. And MacLeish's just published Letters reveal the kind of distinguished person he was in the habit of communicating with: Henry Luce, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Felix Frankfurter, McGeorge Bundy, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson—in addition to various distinguished poets and novelists headed by Pound and Hemingway.

This willingness to consort with the high and mighty, along with the penchant for noble, large-sounding affirmations of the deathless spirit of man, or poetry, or America, caused many students of modern poetry to treat MacLeish's own work with condescension at best. Here I must account myself one of those students. It was amusing on occasion to see the poet—acting as suave public moderator of a symposium on verse drama at the Harvard Summer School—slightly discomfited, when after he thought to conclude the discussion by artfully suggesting that perhaps all the participants would write their next play in verse, Lillian Hellmann shot back, “Well, I damn well won't!” But it was not only aspiring critics like myself (who loved John Ransom's poems, so how could I love MacLeish's?) who judged his poetry or his rhetoric less than matchless, as we note from the responses of distinguished literary contemporaries. Pound, to whom MacLeish confessed his deep indebtedness and to whom he sent his long poem Conquistador after its completion in 1932, thought the poem was (in MacLeish's words) “damn bad” and told him so. MacLeish wrote back, thanking Pound “quite honestly” for the criticisms, saying that he had been asked to write something about the Cantos but that “You would probably prefer the praise of someone whose work you respected.” Courteous as always, the reply is nonetheless painful. Hemingway, for whose work he had the most profound respect (“The world of this book [he said of A Farewell to Arms when it appeared] is a complete world … to subject the whole experience of a man's soul to the pure & perfect art of your prose is a great, a very great, achievement. I send you my complete praise & profound respect. You become in one book the great novelist of our time”) paid him in return with the following observation to Malcolm Cowley in 1945: “Does Archie still write anything except Patriotic? I read some awfully lifeless lines to a Dead Soldier by him in the Free World anthology. I thought good old Allen Tate could write the lifeless-est lines to Dead Soldiers ever read but Archie is going good. You know his bro. Kenny was killed in last war flying and I always felt Archie felt that sort of gave him a controlling interest in all deads.” Very funny, and more than a touch cruel, it is I'm afraid accurate as a response to MacLeish's poem “The Young Dead Soldiers.” Robert Frost, who had a few years previously amused or annoyed a Bread Loaf audience by setting afire some paper while MacLeish was giving a poetry reading, was moved during a conversation with some Harvard students about J. B., to name the following list of related phenomena: “Sociology, and the New Deal, and the New Testament, and Archie, and so on …” I think it fair to say that as more public distinction accrued to MacLeish, the more he became available for satiric and condescending treatment by fellow artists like those just mentioned, or in clever parodies and withering reviews by Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, and others.

As is evident from the letters, early on in his career he was haunted by a sense of having come too late, and though a modern theorist like Harold Bloom would find such fears entirely natural and unavoidable, they seem to have been especially sharp in MacLeish's case, as when he wrote Amy Lowell in 1924 about how it was impossible for him to write Imagist poetry and how his own words “were all ships which have carried ivory & peacocks between England & the Levant for two hundred years.” What can replace them, he asks? Not “Eliot's multisyllables” and not the “commercial-jargon impersonalities of Miss Moore.” He says he has decided to stop writing, and will learn Italian, read Dante, Laforgue, de Gourmont, and other English poets: “But I am more than haunted with the fear that it is too late. That this rhythm & vocabulary which my intelligence knows for second rate are me, my ‘style,’ all that I have.” A later letter to Amy Lowell mentions his “basic problem of verbiage,” and in the same year he wrote John Peale Bishop about the problem of coming after Eliot. Eliot had opened a world to him from which he couldn't “retire”—but what then was he to do?: “Recognize the great man's prior claims and shut up? And what if we can't shut up? Talk about the tragedy of the man who is ahead of his age: it is nothing to the tragedy of the man who comes after the man who is.”

This was a wise formulation. MacLeish did not “shut up,” of course, but nothing he wrote in the 1930s and the war years which followed showed a resolution of the problem of “verbiage” or of coming after Pound and Eliot. Perhaps there was no possibility for a resolution in the terms he set it, or perhaps he had already resolved it by writing a poem which couldn't be confused with either of those intimidating modernists, nor with Yeats. I have in mind the poem “Eleven,” from Streets of the Moon (1926) in which the young child

                                                            … would leave
On tiptoe the three chairs on the verandah
And crossing tree by tree the empty lawn
Push back the shed door and upon the sill
Stand pressing out the sunlight from his eyes
And enter and with outstretched fingers feel
The grindstone and behind it the bare wall
And turn and in the corner on the cool
Hard earth sit listening. And one by one,
Out of the dazzled shadow in the room,
The shapes would gather, the brown plowshare, spades,
Mattocks, the polished helves of picks, a scythe
Hung from the rafters, shovels, slender tines
Glinting across the curve of sickles—shapes
Older than men were, the wise tools, the iron
Friendly with earth. …

Here he made use of the same “ships” which had carried all that English poetical freight so well for so many years, and there is no way that the poem could be saluted as a new development in American writing (as, say, Edmund Wilson had just saluted Hemingway's In Our Time). As with all MacLeish's poems—early or late—there is a principled avoidance of what, in a letter to Allen Tate in 1932, he called “the personality of the poet” in its more dramatic form—the anguished “I” making dramatic capital out of its difficulties. “Indeed,” wrote MacLeish, “it seems to me that the personality of the poet is merely the instrument, the voice, and that its qualities will enough color his poetry without a conscious and introspective labor of self-exploration and self-definition.” In “Eleven” this coloring is attractively evident, even as the words and rhythms are those familiar to traffickers in English poetical freight. That the poet who wrote “Ars Poetica,” with its fancy talk about how a poem should be “palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” should have written “Eleven” at about the same time, goes to show how much more interesting MacLeish's poetical practice could be on occasion than was the presumed “pure” program he laid down for it in “Ars Poetica.” It is unfortunately the latter poem rather than “Eleven” by which the anthology reader will encounter MacLeish.

“Eleven” was not an isolated piece of good work. Unless one is enslaved to modernist ideas of what a poem must or must not do, the rhythmic impulse of these opening lines from “Cook County” (published in Poems 1924-1933) can be admired:

The northeast wind was the wind off the lake
Blowing the oak-leaves pale side out like
Aspen: blowing the sound of the surf far
Inland over the fences: blowing for
Miles over smell of the earth the lake smell in.

The southwest wind was thunder in afternoon.
You saw the wind first in the trumpet vine
And the green went white with the sky and the weather-vane
Whirled on the barn and the doors slammed all together.
After the rain in the grass we used to gather
Wind-fallen cold white apples.

As with “Eleven,” there is little interesting to note about the poem's form. Its power is a matter of sensations presented, Hemingwayesque—if perhaps ennobled by the long sonorous verse lines—and as with “Eleven” quite untouched by ironical contemplation whether Poundian or Eliotic, of the materials it presents. Surely they are remembered materials (MacLeish grew up in Glencoe, Illinois) which are celebrated lyrically without a trace of criticism or ambivalence (“Pony Hill” is another possible example of this celebration). These poems seem to me immensely preferable to the anthologized early MacLeish we have been given for years—“Ars Poetica,” the over-praised “You, Andrew Marvell” with its reference to Ecbatan (which annoyed Pound, who felt MacLeish was poaching on his sacred places!) but also “The End of the World” (“Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot / the armless ambidextrian … etc.” or “Immortal Helix” (“Hereunder Jacob Schmid, who man and bones …”) or the portentous “Immortal Autumn,” which a contemporary called the most moving poem written by anyone in MacLeish's generation. MacLeish had no gift for the satiric in his poems (though the letters show an occasional good hit) and unlike the remembered particularity of “Eleven” and “Cook County,” “Immortal Autumn” strikes the vatic note which would too often become his key signature:

I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far horn-winding fall.

I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.

I praise the fall: it is the human season.

Those last words—the perfect title for an inspiring book of verse by some humanist or other, perhaps by MacLeish himself.

His longer poems from the 1930s had an uneven reception. Conquistador was praised by Tate for its “flawless craftsmanship” and excellent management of terza rima, but Tate also judged it sentimental and as hovering over nothing of substance. Previous to that, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) had been devastated by R. P. Blackmur in Hound and Horn, judged by him to be fraudulent and “personal” in the most vain, self-posturing sense. Finally, in the New Yorker in 1939 (could such a thing happen today in that well-mannered magazine?), Edmund Wilson, who had given measured praise to MacLeish twelve years previously, wrote his amusing and quite scornful parody, “The Omelet of A. MacLeish,” some lines of which will give its flavor:

Anabase and The Waste Land:

These and the Cantos of Pound: O how they came pat!
Nimble at other men's arts how I picked up the trick of it:
Rode it reposed on it drifted away on it: passing

Shores that lay dim in clear air: and the cries of affliction
Suave in somniferous rhythms: there was rain there and moons:
Leaves falling: and all of a flawless and hollow felicity …

In the margin, Wilson supplied glosses à la Coleridge: “MacLeish breaks an egg for his omelet”; “He puts plovers' eggs and truffles into his omelet”; “He slips in a few prizes for philosophers”; “The omelet becomes a national institution and gets into Fanny Farmer.” Wilson's poem caught well the portentous self-questioning toward which his subject was inclined:

And the questions and questions
                                                                      questioning
                                                                                          What am I? O

What shall I remember?
                                                  O my people
                                                                      a pensive dismay

What have I left unsaid?
                                                  Till the hearer cried:

“If only MacLeish could remember if only could say it!”

Wilson's conclusion was that MacLeish's career demonstrated “That the poet need not be a madman or even a bounder” and that all in all he was

A clean and clever lad
                    who is doing
                    his best
                              to get on. …

In response, MacLeish wrote to Hemingway a satirical poem about Wilson, speaking “As one on whom / The Triple Stinker publicly hath stunk,” but otherwise refrained from comment. Yet though Wilson was wholly sarcastic in hanging the clean-living award around MacLeish's neck, there was an engaging side to MacLeish's civility, as when—a year or so before the Wilson parody—he wrote, a propos an exhibition of his own works at Yale, that “There is a point beyond which mediocrity cannot be inflated to look like the real thing, and I think that point has been well reached at Yale in the Rare Book Room.” Here was a fully engaging and humorous modesty, well-bred in the best sense.

These traits of character, this liberal and modest decency of response were born out in a confidence he dropped to Paul Engle when MacLeish was working at the Library of Congress in Washington during the Second World War, having resigned from something called the OFF (Office of Facts and Figures—“one of the deepest satisfactions of my life,” he wrote McGeorge Bundy). Engle had enclosed a poem of his own and made some remark about Frost, and MacLeish attempted, candidly, to say why Frost's poetry had not meant all that much to him: “I don't, as I think you know, share the more enthusiastic view about his poetry. In fact, his poetry has meant little or nothing to me since North of Boston and even North of Boston didn't really get under my hide.” And he went on to speak about the “mysterious thing”—how much “Robert desired fame.” In his public statements about Frost and in his exemplary encouragement of him to help in the freeing of Pound from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, MacLeish came to some kind of terms with him; yet that poet's example of the speaking voice, the “sound of sense,” had indeed not gotten under MacLeish's hide, as had not the witty-cruel way of saying, or re-saying, things Frost had made himself a master of. (When in conversation somebody mentioned to Frost MacLeish's famous ending to “Ars Poetica”—“A poem should not mean / But be”—Frost suggested, as a rewrite, that “A poem should be mean”). That was a way of behaving, or writing, not to MacLeish's taste.

So it is odd and moving to encounter something like a Frostian poem in MacLeish's late and probably best book of poems, The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968). The Yeatsian title acknowledged the poet whom MacLeish most admired during his late years, and Yeats's presence was pervasive, indeed oppressive, in a collection of short lyrics he published during the 1950s called Songs for Eve. In “The Wild Old Wicked Man,” MacLeish curbed his desire to speak largely and grandly about men and women, love, death, mankind; to my tastes at least, the best poem in the book is a wholly modest, subtle, heartfelt one which goes as follows:

Mark's sheep, I said, but they were only
stones, boulders in the uncropped grass,
granite shoulders weathered to the bone
and old as that first morning where God was.

And yet they looked like sheep—so like
you half expected them to startle,
bolt in a leap because some tyke
had barked, because a bluejay darted—

dart of shadow under blue of jay—
or someone shouted by the water trough,
slammed a car-door, drove away,
or squirrels quarreled, or a gun went off,

or just because they must: that terrified
impulse to be somewhere else
browsers and ruminators seem to share
as though they knew, they only, the sky falls

and here is dangerous (as of course it is).
But Mark's sheep never startled from the grass.
They knew their place, their boulder's business:
to let the nights go over, the days pass,

let years go, summer, autumn, winter,
each by itself, each motionless, alone,
praising the world by being in it,
praising the world by being stone.

“mark's sheep”

Here, to one reader's ear and eye, MacLeish's best poetic self was expressed, and it had little to do with modernism, nothing at all with Conquistador. There is no reason to tie it to Frost's insistence on the sound of sense (and I suspect the plangent repetition in the final lines would have bothered Frost, as it does me slightly); but surely this is a poem which shares qualities with the man who wrote the complicated, thoughtful, sometimes ironic, sometimes troubled letters MacLeish wrote. If it is, as I assume it to be, “about” Mark Van Doren among other things, it is a wholly appropriate tribute to that uneroded face and intelligence, and to the impressive calmness one suspects to have been Van Doren's. But it is beautiful—and surprising too—for its fine poise between public and private, and for the way, within its stanzas and rhymes and nicely managed syntax, that a quality of life is made memorable through a small and witty fable. The personal reference is unmistakeable, and “Mark's sheep I said,” is in some ways the most telling thing any “I” of MacLeish's ever said.

“Mark's Sheep” is a poem of his old age, and there would be ones to come, like “Crossing” and “Hotel Breakfast,” which caught poignant moments of mixed memory and desire in the private life. The public or official life in the 1950s was high-minded: a letter to an editor begins, “What I wanted, as of course you understood, was a clarification of our conversation at the Century” (this about a prospective volume of poems, discussed at The Club); while talk about the Function of Poetry, or of Harvard, is equally lofty, as most strikingly demonstrated in these sentences concluding a letter to Bundy, written in a spirit of optimism just after Nathan Pusey was installed as President of Harvard (with Bundy as Dean of the Graduate School):

I feel in my bones a new age—a new era. Not only the vitality you both have and the complementary intelligence which so patently create a new kind of thinking. … It is the fact that this Harvard cares about values. … Keats is right in the great Ode—the human equation combines with the order imposed by nature, the order imposed by the imagination. When one can say, understanding what he is saying, that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beaty, one has spoken like a man.

As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1950s, I must confess to having missed out on that new era, as well as all that institutional caring about values, Keats, beauty, and truth. Perhaps it was going on in Eliot House, to which in the following fall MacLeish was inviting J. Robert Oppenheimer to dinner with an “agreeable party,” then for talk with “some twenty boys” afterwards, a conversation which would carry on from dinner “in the hope that some of the lads might eventually join us but with no insistence that they do unless so moved. It would all, in other words, be as easy and civilized as we could make it …” Not “palpable and mute / As a globed fruit,” those occasions! Somehow one hopes that a few of the equivalent of Mark Van Doren's sheep were there to keep things a bit stony, to not let Beauty become Truth, Truth Beauty, without some recalcitrance.

MacLeish was most admirable when, in his art or his life, he resisted the temptation to unionize Beauty and Truth, or their siblings. In his later years, as earlier, this did not often happen; but when it did, the effect is more startling and enlivening than one could have imagined, given the “official” ring of so many letters and the noble, often monotonous tone of so many poems. So in a late poem called “Family Group” he managed to write about his brother dead in World War One in a way that is freshly affecting:

That's my younger brother with his Navy wings.
He's twenty-three or should have been that April:
winters aged you, flying the Dutch coast.
I'm beside him with my brand-new Sam Brown belt.
The town behind us is Dunkirk. We met there
quite by accident, sheer luck.
Someone's lengthened shadow—the photographer's?—
falls across the road, across our feet.

The other's afterward—
after the Armistice, I mean, the floods,
the week without a word. That foundered
farmyard is in Belgium somewhere.
The faceless figure on its back, the helmet buckled,
wears what look like Navy wings. A lengthened shadow
falls across the muck about its feet.

Me? I'm back in Cambridge in dry clothes,
a bed to sleep in, my small son, my wife.

The fine thing about this poem, and what makes it so different from anything MacLeish would have written in his earlier days, at least about his brother's death, is of course its final two lines where there is presented—with whatever implications of dumb luck one can invoke—the sadness and the undeserved good fortune of life.

A final moment, not surely to be reckoned with by biographers of MacLeish (R. H. Winnick, editor of the letters, is preparing an authorized one) but good for showing the distinguished man and poet in a little-known and for that reason attractive light. Two graduate students in English at Harvard have encountered one another in the stacks of Widener Library, have realized that they were undergraduates together at another Eastern university, and begin, rather loudly, to trade stories and memories from the good old days. The problem is that their loud conversation is taking place virtually on the doorstep of Professor MacLeish's Widener study. He, perhaps composing a sequel to J. B., or some poem or speech or other—perhaps just plain reading Dante or Yeats or Li Po—has at all events suddenly had enough. The door opens, revealing to the surprised, voluble graduate students, Harvard University's Boylston Professor of Rhetoric (angry), who glares at them solidly, then booms out with unconcealed irritation, “Will you two please shut the hell up?” Along with the things for which Archibald MacLeish will be remembered, I would hope this moment of rash, unsympathetic, undemocratic temper may be granted a minor place.

Lauriat Lane, Jr. (essay date spring 1983)

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SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “‘Intimate Immensity’: On the Poetics of Space in MacLeish's Einstein.” Canadian Review of American Studies 14, no. 1 (spring 1983): 19-29.

[In the following essay, Lane analyzes the spatial imagery and dialectic pattern of MacLeish's long poem Einstein.]

In 1926 Archibald MacLeish included in part two, “Several Shadows of a Skull,” of Streets in the Moon, one longer poem, Einstein.¹ Published separately three years later,²Einstein has been included in every collection of MacLeish's poetry since.³ Twice it was gathered with other longer poems in a separate section; in the latest edition it is placed chronologically with the other poems of the 1920s. It has been anthologized in a few collections of American poetry.⁴ But it has not, to my knowledge, received extended critical attention. Nor has it been fully appreciated for what it is: both one of MacLeish's most distinguished longer poems and one of the most distinguished longer American poems of this century.

.....

The title and part of the approach of this paper come from Gaston Bachelard, who discusses “intimate immensity” in the eighth chapter of The Poetics of Space in terms strikingly close to the procedures of MacLeish's poem.⁵ For Bachelard, “immensity is a philosophical category of daydream” (p. 183); “a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness” (p. 184). Thus “it is through their ‘immensity’ that these two kinds of space—the space of intimacy and world space—blend” (p. 203), in images such as Baudelaire's “vastness” or Rilke's trees or, in a brief allusion, Thoreau's Walden Pond (p. 210). Bachelard ends this chapter: “But poems are human realities; it is not enough to resort to ‘impressions’ in order to explain them. They must be lived in their poetic immensity” (p. 210). As must MacLeish's Einstein.

MacLeish's protagonist is professionally a mathematical physicist; in this poem he is much closer to Bachelard's “daydreamer” or Emerson's “Man Thinking.” Yet late in his life Albert Einstein replied to a psychological survey of the mental processes of mathematicians in terms that do suggest the procedures of Einstein. He stated that for him “the psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined,” and that “it is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements.” However, he went on, “the above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”⁶ To which might be added the final sentence of Einstein's “Notes on the Origin of the General Theory of Relativity”: “But the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light—only those who have experienced it can understand that.”⁷ MacLeish's poem presents its protagonist at those stages in his “associative play” that a poet's words could best describe: stages shortly before Einstein's space hardens into the “words or other signs” that would be “conventional” to the mathematical physicist and his audience but beyond or at least alien to the imagining poet and his audience.

Of course MacLeish's Einstein does not chart any close correspondence to the actual psychological, epistemological or spiritual conditions under which Albert Einstein achieved his Special Theory of Relativity as he walked through the streets of Bern from 1902 to 1905.⁸ Rather, MacLeish has chosen one of the representatives heroes of our century to dramatize in a poetic meditation one more of those moving encounters of the individual soul with the not-Me comparable to Emerson's Nature, Thoreau's Walden, Whitman's “Song of Myself,” The Education of Henry Adams—even Whitehead's Science and the Modern World. Such works are as important to an appreciation of Einstein as the facts of its hero's actual life or the complexities of the theories of relativity. Had MacLeish written Einstein in the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact, rather than at the end of the first quarter of the twentieth, its hero and its title might well have been: Emerson.⁹

Bachelard's ninth chapter is “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,” one way of describing the encounter of the self with the not-Me. For Bachelard as for MacLeish and his hero, “simple geometrical opposition” is a “false light,” a “cancerization of the linguistic tissue,” in place of which “it is preferable to follow all the ontological deviations of the various experiences of being” (pp. 211-13). And how better achieve this than through the poet's “exaggerating” imagination: “The phenomenological gain appears right away: in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction” (p. 219). In Einstein and through Einstein, who is both Carlylean hero and Emersonian representative man, MacLeish conveys his drama of the intellect and the soul amid outer and inner space. He conducts protagonist and reader outward and inward, literally and metaphorically, through a series of imagined “ontological deviations” complex and convincing enough to do full poetic justice to MacLeish's physical and metaphysical narrative of “a day in the life of.”

The poetics of space in Einstein could be categorized in more detail and then discussed by category. The overall dialectic of inner and outer space could be extended along a range of categories: soul, mind, body, sensation, intention, cityscape, landscape, “skyscape,” and a universal, conceptual space which might circle back to our initial innermost space. Each of these categories of space could in turn be approached—in a scheme roughly charting the course of European scientific thought and the progress of Einstein—as being literally and symbolically, static or mechanic, then organic, and finally atomic. Categorical discussion, however, would do little to convey the intricate, interwoven quality of MacLeish's exploration of inner and outer space through the length of Einstein. Better, then, to consider the text of the poem as it presents itself to us, but beginning—perhaps surprisingly—with its gloss.

The gloss to Einstein, its most obvious formal characteristic and its most eccentric in several senses, offers commentary a convenient way into the poem. The gloss may seem almost incidental to a first reading of the poem and secondary to later ones. Yet it is a witty, epigrammatic prose poem in its own right and is significantly counterpointed against the expansive, meditating blank verse of the main text. Moreover, it contains the main text in a number of interesting ways, from topographical annotation to allegorical or direct commentary. Recast into a single paragraph, as a separate prose poem, it reads as follows:

Einstein upon a public bench Wednesday the ninth contemplates finity. Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse. Einstein provisionally before a mirror accepts the hypothesis of subjective reality … rejects it. Einstein unsuccessfully after lunch attempts to enter, essaying synthesis with what's not he, the Bernese Oberland. Einstein dissolved in violins invades the molecular structure of F. P. Paepke's Sommergarten. Is repulsed. To Einstein asking at the gate of stone none opens. Einstein hearing behind the wall of the Grand Hôtel du Nord the stars discovers the Back Stair. Einstein on the terrasse of The Acacias forces the secret door. Einstein enters.¹⁰

Unlike the poem the gloss is full of names and, again unlike the poem, names of presences rather than of absences. In addition to the redundant, obsessive, mock-heroic citation of the name of the hero beyond all syntactic need, there are the various place names. Such names ground Einstein's meditations on an implied Bern cityscape that, if MacLeish had so intended, could try for the Joycean realistic particularity of Leopold Bloom's Dublin.¹¹ At the same time some of the names suggest witty aptnesses that border on the allegorical. In “essaying synthesis with … the Bernese Oberland” Einstein, like many previous pilgrims of thought, looks unto the hills. How archetypal a garden is “F. P. Paepke's Sommergarten” despite its literal artificiality? Or the near-Eastern “Acacias”? Should the “Grand Hôtel du Nord” imply the fixed pole star MacLeish writes of in other poems and by extension the starry heavens (here explicitly cited) whose order Einstein radically unfixed? Even more conjecturally, when “Einstein descends the Hartmannsweilerstrasse,” may we entertain and be entertained by appropriate thoughts of Eduard von Hartman's Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869)?

Other spatial details in the gloss carry significant overtones. The everyday “public bench” is also ambiguously meditational, even devotional. Einstein's domestic mirror is by tradition magical and symbolic. “The gate of stone,” “The Back Stair,” and “the secret door” all can have the same immediate symbolic force as the spatial details of Eliot's Ash-Wednesday. Neither the ivory gate of false dreams nor Sweeney's “hornéd gate” of true dreams,¹² but a more elemental and unyielding portal. “The Back Stair” adds a surreptitious, humorously subversive note to the obvious Dantean and Eliotic echoes. “The secret door” of traditional symbolic and sacred space can be “forced” only by the twentieth-century Einstein.¹³ Thus the gloss both grounds and extends the meditative burdens of the main poem, even to the point of such explicit explanations as “accepts the hypothesis of subjective reality,”¹⁴ “essaying synthesis,” and “invades the molecular structure.” Moreover, returned to their original place beside specific lines of verse, the various elements of the gloss add tangentially to the detailed, line-by-line Bachelardian phenomenology of Einstein's spatial imagery, to which I now turn.

.....

Einstein's initial stance “between the sun and moon” is in many ways premodern, pre-scientific, and almost pre-adult, pre-thought. This poem indeed begins at the beginning. For our first awareness of these two features of our own skyscape comes very early in life and may be instinctive, even tidal. And the earliest astronomical “scientists” observed and responded to the orderly daily and monthly movements of sun and moon.¹⁵ At the same point in history and possibly long before these two heavenly bodies held the elaborate mythological identities still well-known to readers of literature and mythology and still, according to Jungian theory, alive and potent in our collective unconscious.¹⁶ Sun and moon are also, of course, recurrent through MacLeish's other poetry, with similar identities. Einstein's initial stance, then, is on the one hand stark and absolute and on the other familiar, even familial. This spatial stance, these spatial companions, locate physically and phenomenologically the “secrecy,” the identity, from which Einstein begins his daily journey of thought, his encounter with the not-Me of external, extended space. They might also suggest the starting-point of the poem's linear chronology: the moment between moonlight and sunlight, dream and thought, night and day, rest and quest. This initial spatio-temporal identity is reinforced half-facetiously by Einstein's evolutionary status: “if only that / His father was an ape” (ll. 3-4).

MacLeish then develops Einstein's “something inviolable” with a cluster of spatial images that mix Shakespearean, subjective suggestiveness with objective, Laforgean wit, that modulate from “sweet music” to shoes and, later, coat and trousers. On the one hand music makes Einstein's inner space “sound hollow” and somehow inhabited behind the Shakespearean “seamless arras,” with its possible echo of Hamlet's “I know not ‘seems’” (I.ii.76), by “a living something.” All this is appropriately conveyed in a passage, too long to quote in its entirety, of richly musical blank verse. But this first, apparently subjective identity is nevertheless unreceptive (“no doors … no windows”) to such outer forces as sunlight and “the mirror moon.” And so Einstein's self remains, at this early point, “small and tight,” objectively “contracted into space / Opaque and perpendicular” (ll. 13-14), projecting outward only to cast a shadow, and with shoes—in a strikingly modern defamiliarization of ordinary space—“bearing up against the sphere” (l. 16).

Next MacLeish affirms tentatively, by a kind of dialectic denial, some of the immensities of outer space-time: “for he ends / If there why then no farther” (ll. 17-18). “Ends” in the poem puns wittily against “finity” in the gloss, undercutting the literal authority of both. “Contemplates” in the gloss prepares for Einstein's inner meditative progress beyond mere finity, as do the eloquence and thematic authority of the poem's images of that outer reality conditionally denied him: universe, time, Jehovah, stars, sun, and “the middle serpent” (ll. 18-28). These images, many of them spatial, negate the negation of “his boundaries” and set up a dramatic irony between the crabbed positives of his limitations and the expansive negatives of his prospects. This irony is at once matched by the tonal irony of the reaffirmation of “his detachment,” by which his shoes and coat and trousers fit and orbit mock-heroically against “the orbit of the earth,” “the surrounding cosmos,” and “the revolutions of the stars” (ll. 32, 37, 39). Thus are we brought to the first crisis of the poem.

For how can Einstein, as he must, be made to move forward out of this apparent personal and philosophical impasse? How can he, and through him the reader, bring his inner intimate space into significant dialectic with the surrounding outer immensities now so ironically distanced from him and from us? We must reduce the ironic distance between us and Einstein that MacLeish has maintained so far. We must combine esthetic appreciation of Einstein's almost comical subjective-objective impasse with emotional and intellectual empathy for his encounters with the not-Me. In short, we must join him. Only thus can we experience fully Einstein's quest and MacLeish's poem.

MacLeish had also suggested by a kind of homespun topology a literal, physical interface for Einstein's inner and outer realities (ll. 33-39). He now identifies just as literally—“his hands and face go naked” (ll. 39-40)—a window in this interface through which these inner and outer realities could “converse.” This naively empirical, humorous conceit—for it is little more—does nudge the poem onward. For it admits another cluster of metaphorical spatial images to convey intimately if unanalytically the shape of Einstein's next speculations, his “hypothesis of subjective reality.” As he walks he takes “within his skull” the “shadows” of

          what encloses him, as rough and smooth
And sound and silence and the intervals
Of rippling ether and the swarming motes
Clouding a privy:

(ll. 41-44)

The final, human detail hints as did the gloss an everyday life, even for Einstein, behind the inner life of the poem.

Making these shadows as much his own as he can, by geometric forms (ll. 46-47) as well as metaphorical images (ll. 48-49), Einstein tries to force his subjectivity back upon the objective world, to make it his, in a passage whose language, imagery, sound and rhythm rise to an eloquent Wallace Stevens-like celebration of naturalistic rapture:

Here do trees
Adorn the hillside and hillsides enrich
The hazy marches of the sky and skies
Kindle and char to ashes in the wind
And winds blow toward him from the verge, and suns
Rise on his dawn and on his dusk go down
And moons prolong his shadow. And he moves
Here as within a garden in a close
And where he moves the bubble of the world
Takes center and there circle round his head
Like golden flies in summer the gold Stars.

(ll. 56-64)

But the moment, charged though it is with symbolic mythic detail, “disintegrates,” like the ashes and bubble it also contains, at the same moment as Einstein, in the gloss, rejects the hypothesis that lay behind this ecstatic vision. For another space surrounds him, of darkness, shadows, moon and night that plunge, fall, loom and sink. Under its baleful influence Einstein realizes the failure of his first spiral of thought, the first stage of his journey:

So he knows
Less than a world and must communicate
Beyond his knowledge.

(ll. 72-74)

The ambiguous ellipses and paradoxes of this passage convey the uncertainties and contradictions of Einstein's own intellectual stance at this point.

“After lunch” Einstein begins his second raid on the not-Me. The poem's strong syntax with its many spatial indicators grows even stronger. From the opening MacLeish had maintained careful yet complex syntactical and frequently spatial links between one thought and the next, one image and the next. These links provide four of Donald Davie's five pleasures of syntax in poetry: subjective, dramatic, objective, musical and mathematical.¹⁷ As detailed analysis would show, the syntax of the poem articulates, variously, the dramatic accents of Einstein's intellectual agon, the contours of his engagements with external reality, the modulations of his feelings, and the verbal patterns that give us esthetic satisfaction like that Davie finds given by mathematical propositions.

This time Einstein, like some Old World Thoreau or Whitman, “attempts to enter … what's not he”:

          Outstretched on the earth
He plunges both his arms into the swirl
Of what surrounds him

(ll. 74-76)

and again we have the vivid, self-affirming spatial negations (grass, soil, air, light) whose “denial” dialectically moves the poem forward (ll. 76-83). It does this, in part, by counterpointing against the historical present of the poem's traditional meditative indicatives a more insistent, more ambiguous, more Whitmanesque spatially-directed syntax:

          Put out leaves
And let the old remembering wind think through
A green intelligence or under sea
Float out long filaments of amber in
The numb and wordless revery of tides.

(ll. 83-87)

These new syntactical forms of the verb, both imperative and, in the context of the previous indicatives, elliptically subjunctive, convey by their syntactical ambiguity Einstein's own mixture of uncertainty and commitment, of energy and frustration. The faintly doubled syntax of “leaves,” “wind” and “filaments” adds to the ambiguity of subject and object.

In preparation for this more radical gesture and metamorphosis, Einstein has abandoned his erect stance for a prostrate penitential and erotic one. Literally Ovidian and metaphorically Thoreauvian, he becomes, like the speaker in James Dickey's “In the Mountain Tent,” for a time one with organic, inanimate nature. Yet embracing the not-Me cannot provide him with “meaning” or “utterance” to satisfy his quest for a “name,” a frame of intellectual acceptance. Even a second commitment of this subjective energy and its special syntax to images of memory and presumed autobiography (ll. 96-99) cannot prevail.¹⁸ The poem returns to the characteristically negative indicatives (ll. 100-03) of its recurring dialectical dilemma.

Einstein's violin is a familiar icon in formal biography as well as twentieth-century folk mythology:

He had his music. But this, as he would explain on occasions, was in some ways an extension of his thinking processes, a method of allowing the subconscious to solve particularly tricky problems. “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work,” his eldest son has said, “he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties.” Einstein himself once remarked that: “Music has no effect on research work, but both are born of the same source and complement each other through the satisfaction they bestow.”¹⁹

MacLeish uses the violin to complete Einstein's second Romantic try to commune with objective reality, to make it somehow his own. The violin, explicit in the gloss and foreshadowed in the poem by “sweet music” (l. 4), “intervals” (l. 42), and “three notes” (l. 99), becomes Orphean and Aeolian, acting on nature and acted upon by nature, artificially constructed out of natural materials.

Yet MacLeish avoids any over-obvious mythological heroics or a pat biographical truth of correspondence. This time Einstein does not play but listens as “she plays.” The situation, with its similarities to Stevens' later singer at Key West, emphasizes Einstein's passive receptive role over his active projective one. Thereby it leads through the recurring impermanence and inadequacy of these experiences and on to Einstein's third and final attempt. The powers of music like those of physical nature and memory can bring him momentary communion, expressed spatially:

          When he a moment occupies
The hollow of himself and like an air
Pervades all other.

(ll. 115-17)

But the objective actuality of the violin's music shivers the subjective “reverberations” of Einstein's “air” (musical and elemental) “Back to a rhythm that becomes again music and vaguely ravels into sound” (ll. 120-21).

As if to mark this latest impasse, gloss and poem, prose and verse, exchange roles: the gloss's symbolic “gate of stone” is explicated by the poem's “So then there is no speech that can resolve / Their texture to clear thought and enter them” (ll. 122-23). Once again unable to “enter” literal and conceptual space, despite the powers of music, the meditating MacLeish/Einstein pauses to lament—as did James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams and other American writers before MacLeish and since—the loss of “words” once known at Chartres, Rome and Eleusis. The poem reiterates its burden in the by-now-familiar dialectic negatives:

          Now there are no words
Nor names to name them and they will not speak
But grope against his groping touch and throw
The long unmeaning shadows of themselves
Across his shadow and resist his sense.

(ll. 129-33)

By now Einstein has moved from an initial enclosed identity outward toward reality by ways successively empirical and romantically naturalistic, only to find each of these ways blocked by the resisting powers of outer reality. He adopts a third strategy, that of the mathematical physicist:

Why then if they resist destroy them. Dumb,
Yet speak them in their elements. Whole,
Break them to reason.

(ll. 134-36)

In a long passage of restless, irregular verse (ll. 135-54) in which we hear the rhythms of calculating prose against those of poetic meditation, Einstein, the latest of Democritan atomists, attempts to “cipher” a “them” that gathers syntactically all the external spatial phenomena, from motes to stars, previously introduced into one side of the poem's dialectic. In a positivistic imitation of sexual generation he “lies upon his bed” and with subjective exertion “conceives the universe.” The witty ambiguities of this long passage intermingle the reference worlds of everyday moral, musical and mathematical expression, in such terms as “count,” “numbers,” “dust,” “factor,” “obliquity” and others.

Thus newly empowered, Einstein once again stands and projects his inner intellectual, conceptual self upon a relative world now “conceived” into a mode more receptive to such acts: “And with his mind relaxes the stiff forms / Of all he sees” (11. 156-57). He is surrounded, or surrounds himself, with an intensely imaged space, whose vivid objects display their fluxional life by a series of kinetic verbs:

Sweep over into movement and dissolve
All differences in the indifferent flux!
Crumble to eddyings of dust and drown
In change the thing that changes!
                                                                                There begins
A vague unquiet in the fallow ground,
A seething in the grass, a bubbling swirl
Over the surface of the fields that spreads
Around him gathering until the green
Boils and under frothy loam the rocks
Ferment and simmer and like thinning smoke
The trees melt into nothing.
                                                                                Still he stands
Watching the vortex widen and involve
In swirling dissolution the whole earth
And circle through the skies till swaying time
Collapse, crumpling into dark the stars,
And motion ceases and the sifting world
Opens beneath.

(ll. 161-77)

The verbal and rhythmic eloquence of this climactic passage is characteristic of Einstein. As are the combination of the spatial intimacy of ground, grass, fields and rocks with the immensity of earth, sky and stars. This combination is reinforced by MacLeish's abstractly stylized presentation of the poem's concrete particulars.

MacLeish concludes Einstein's detailed phenomenology as it began, in spatial images. “Infuse,” “within,” “back” and the possible Joycean pun of “spin” reassert the centripetal pull and recoil of Einstein's subjectivity. “All else,” “on the dark” and “withstands” imply the objective “circumference,” as Emily Dickinson would call it, that “still … denies him” (1. 183). Other images—flesh, brain, motes, suns, bones, dark, dust—familiar from earlier in the poem, recapitulate in equally familiar rhythms its literal and symbolic texture.

What of the “something inviolate,” the “living something,” of the last line of the poem? At the beginning of the poem (ll. 2-3) only Einstein's individual stance “seems to keep / something inviolate” and this only conditional on “the stubborn, atavistic ape within” which Grover Smith (p. 23) seems to find still conditioning the poem's outcome. Also at the beginning of the poem (1. 9) the “living something” is within an Einstein whose “seamless arras” walls up any door or window that might admit the not-Me. By the end of the poem the status of both these “somethings” has changed radically. Now the “which” that “seems to keep / something inviolate” catches up syntactically not only the complexly significant preceding lines but, by extension, the whole action of the poem. As a result this “something inviolate” is not confined to Einstein's individual identity but can include the not-Me as well. In turn, by its ambiguous syntax “A living something” is both appositive to the final version of “something inviolate” and independent, self-sufficient, referentially open-ended, a recognition and affirmation of total, “living” reality.

One final question: Does Einstein combine the self with the not-Me, or subsume the self within the not-Me, enough to convey or imply some identifiable world hypothesis, to adopt Stephen C. Pepper's valuable concept and its attendant discriminating, pluralistic categories?²⁰ It would be partly redundant to reexamine the details of Einstein in light of this question; space (of this essay, that is) does not invite such lengthy and systematic reconsideration. But as a short way toward an answer consider the following, from Pepper:

Contextualiam is constantly threatened with evidences for permanent structures in nature. It is constantly on the verge of falling back upon underlying mechanistic structures, or of resolving into the overarching implicit integrations of organicism. Its recourse in these emergencies is always to hurry back to the given event, and to emphasize the change and novelty that is immediately felt there, so that sometimes it seems to be headed for an utter skepticism. But it avoids this impasse by vigorously asserting the reality of the structure of the given event, the historic event as it actually goes on. The whole universe, it asserts is such as this event is, whatever this is.

(pp. 234-35)

Could we have, from the point of view of Pepper's four “relatively adequate” world hypotheses—formism, mechanism, contextualism and organicism—a better descriptive commentary on MacLeish's Einstein? For Einstein embodies through the experiential vividness and authority of its poetics of space that particular vision or hypothesis of the world as event that Pepper presents as contextualism (pp. 232-79) and to which he gives—or so it seems to me—a tentative preference.²¹

This implied world hypothesis of the poem Einstein is not necessarily that implied by the uncompleted speculations of the historical Albert Einstein. But this possible disparity need not trouble us. Rather, it exemplifies that complex dialectic between the scientist's and the poet's view of things, between the truths of correspondence and of concern,²² that is also exemplified by the “intimate immensity” of the poetics of space in MacLeish's remarkable poem.

Notes

Streets in the Moon (Boston, 1926), pp. 43-53.
Einstein (Paris, 1929).
Poems: 1924-1933 (Boston, 1933), pp. 67-75; Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston, 1952), pp. 225-32; Collected Poems (Boston, 1962), pp. 251-58; New and Collected Poems 1917-1976 (Boston, 1976), pp. 137-46.
The most interesting example is Conrad Aiken, ed., American Poetry 1671-1928 (New York, 1929), pp. 339-45, which uses the version of Einstein that appeared in Streets in the Moon.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (1964; rpt. Boston, 1969), pp. 183-210.
Albert Einstein, “A Mathematician's Mind,” in Ideas and Opinions (1954; rpt. New York, 1973), pp. 35-36.
Ideas and Opinions, p. 283.
See Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (1971; rpt. New York, 1972), pp. 72-87, 113-20, for a summary account, and pp. 272-370 for Einstein's world fame by the time MacLeish wrote his poem.
Of whose poetry MacLeish has made an eloquent LP recording complete with a short jacket essay confirming his admiration (Caedmon TC 1359 [New York, 1971]).
All quotations from Einstein are from New and Collected Poems, pp. 137-44. Verse quotations will be given line references to the poem's 186 lines. For Grover Smith, Einstein's gloss has “the double purpose of punctuating the stages of consciousness and locating these in the mind of one individual” (Archibald MacLeish [Minneapolis, 1971] p. 25).
One of the two epigraphs to Streets in the Moon is from Paddy Dignam's funeral; Joyce and Ulysses occur elsewhere in MacLeish's poetry and prose. Grover Smith has drawn a general parallel to Bloom (p. 22). One also wonders, in Joycean terms, what relation, if any, “the gate of stone” has to the fact that according to Ronald Clark the entrance to Einstein's apartment in Bern was, and is, “protected by stone arcades, supported on stout stone pillars” (p. 85).
For a summary history of these images, see Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn (New York, 1966), p. 49 and notes; see also Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago, 1956), p. 46.
For the symbolic door see Bachelard, pp. 222-24, and Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (1959; rpt. New York, 1961), pp. 25-27.
The original version in Streets in the Moon read “ultimately before a mirror accepts the hypothesis of exterior reality” and did not have the next gloss, “… rejecs it.” The gain in thematic and dramatic precision is obvious.
See William Cecil Dampier, A History of Science (4th edition, 1947; rpt. Cambridge, 1966), pp. xxv, 2-3.
See for example, Eliade, pp. 156-58, or at the opposite methodological pole, Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Le sexe des astres,” in To Honour Roman Jakobson (The Hague, 1967), II, 1163-70, as translated in Michael Lane, ed., Introduction to Structuralism (New York, 1970), pp. 330-39. For a discussion of these and certain other images in Einstein, see David Lutyens, The Creative Encounter (London, 1960), pp. 83-89.
Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London, 1955), pp. 67-95.
“He followed the normal student pursuits, picking up on the Zurichsee a passion for sailing that never deserted him,” (Clark, p. 50) and “soon afterwards another influence entered Einstein's life. From the age of six he began to learn the violin” (Clark, p. 29).
Clark, pp. 140-41.
Stephen C. Pepper, World Hypotheses (Berkeley, 1942).
Pp. 147-48, et passim. See also Stephen C. Pepper, The Basis of Criticism in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), pp. 54-73. In this connection, note Arthur Mizener, “The Poetry of Archibald MacLeish,” Sewanee Review, 46 (1938), 505: “Always the thing MacLeish has clung to as most real, as the thing he could trust, has been his apprehension of the quality of things, of their nature, not as a concept, as a unit in a logical intellectual structure, but as a felt experience.”
Northrop Frye, The Critical Path (Bloomington, 1971), passim.

Lauriat Lane, Jr. (essay date March 1987)

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SOURCE: Lane, Lauriat, Jr. “MacLeish at Work: Versions of ‘Bleheris’.” English Studies in Canada 13, no. 1 (March 1987): 79-90.

[In the following essay, Lane investigates MacLeish's revisions of the tale of the Grail knight Bleheris in his The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.]

By 1926 Archibald MacLeish had left well behind both his career as one of Boston's promising young lawyers and the later Victorian/E. A. Robinsonian poetry of his The Happy Marriage and Other Poems (1924). In 1923 he had moved with his family to Paris; in 1925 he had published his first wholly successful major poem, The Pot of Earth, and earlier in 1926 his first major collection, Streets in the Moon, which included Einstein. A year later, December 1927, Houghton Mifflin was to accept The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

Formally and thematically The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is more ambiguous and complex than either The Pot of Earth or Einstein. Including MacLeish's Hamlet among his evidence, Leslie Fiedler gives four reasons why the story of Hamlet appeals to the American literary imagination: (1) “anguish and melancholy,” (2) “the notion of suicide,” (3) “the inhibitory nature of conscience,” and (4) “an oddly apt parable of our relationship to Europe.”¹ In the fourteen contrapuntal parts of his sequence MacLeish expresses these general concerns through both Shakespeare's Hamlet and his own more contemporary, more personal doubts and despairs.

For Conrad Aiken, who may have been too close to the poem in literary time and space, The Hamlet of A. MacLeish was only “a kind of brilliant pastiche … full of beautiful things … so full of echoes as to be positively prismatic with them; not only prosodically and verbally but even in the very frame of the idea, the approach.”² Such “echoes,” of course—pace Aiken—may produce quite genuine effects, from witty tribute to absorbed eloquence. Even Aiken asked “whether his ‘echoes’ might not, by a future generation, be actually preferred to the things they echo.”³ Often, for MacLeish, such echoes are a form of brilliant, purposeful parody, and additional stylistic power more recognizable fifty postmodern years later for what it is. Granting “that this book is influenced by Pound and by Perse (and by Aiken himself) in four specific sections,” MacLeish went on, “But the experience I thought was mine, the emotion mine, the poetry mine.”⁴

Part Three of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish narrates the sea and land journey of a Grail knight, Bleheris, whose active quest, despite its final failure, contrasts—as do the Persean migrations of Parts Six and Nine—with the more passive, inner despairs of the main poem's MacLeish/Hamlet. Certain obvious debts to Eliot and Pound in Part Three should not obscure how much MacLeish goes beyond these debts. Just as MacLeish's use of Frazer in The Pot of Earth diverged importantly from Eliot's in The Waste Land, so does MacLeish's use of Weston's From Ritual to Romance in the Bleheris narrative. For Eliot suffuses such materials—the waste land, the empty chapel—within a total archetypal metaphoric poem made up of many myths; whereas MacLeish, in both his poems, adopts and adapts the complete myth provisionally, as one possible answer to the questions put to the poet, and to us, by the poem's action and inaction. And the presence of Pound in the poem's rhythm and language, what MacLeish called its “mode,” is much more complex than the simple “emulation” claimed by K. L. Goodwin.⁵

Pending the possible availability of manuscripts of this or other MacLeish poems, the three published versions of the Bleheris narrative give as good an example as we have of how MacLeish worked with and through such echoes to confirm his own poetic voice (or voices). The earliest version, which I shall call “Bleheris I,” appeared in 1927 in an anthology of current poetry with the title “Bleheris.”⁶ The second, which I shall call “Bleheris II,” appeared in 1928 in section 3 of the first edition of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.⁷ The third and last, which I shall call “Bleheris III,” was in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish as revised for Poems, 1924-1933 and for later collected editions.⁸ The origins and revisions of this insert tale have great interest both in themselves and for the tale's significance in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

MacLeish kept the sea and land journey, with some revisions, through all three versions. He kept the chapel episode the same through two versions but changed it significantly for the third. He changed the castle episode from the first to the second version and omitted it wholly from the third; hence, in spite of its great interest, it would be unknown to readers of any of MacLeish's collected editions. Let us look more closely at the relation between the three versions of “Bleheris.”

I. “BLEHERIS I”

Bleheris's visits to the chapel and to the castle seem to derive ultimately from Wauchier de Denain's continuation of the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, in which Gawain has these particular adventures, and where we are told that “Bleheris” first told the tales. The best original manuscript of the Perceval and six other manuscripts were in the Bibliothèque Nationale (B.N. 12,576),⁹ where MacLeish worked in 1923-24 at a program of self-education:

I am now at the labor of learning Italian with a view to reading Dante while at the same time reading Laforgue in French (a terribly difficult task) and working over such pre-Chaucerian stuff as I can unearth in this world capital. That for pure letters. My theory is to follow the trend from Anglo-Saxon and Provencal (if I can get at them) sources through Dante and thence through Petrarch and the Pleiade into Chaucer (pre-Pleiade of course) and Surrey and then down. It means a reading knowledge of four languages counting O.E. and Prov. as two. At the same time I want to do the Golden Bough and follow that line. Eliot uncovered something when he did the Waste Land and it would be the purest folly not to pursue it.¹⁰

In theory, then, MacLeish could even have read, or tried to read, the appropriate verses in manuscript or in an edition in middle French, but it seems unlikely. He could easily have acquired what knowledge he required from Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (by way of Eliot's notes to The Waste Land); supplemented, perhaps, by a passage or two from her translation, Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle.

To illustrate this, I have taken the appropriate phrases or sentences out of From Ritual to Romance and rearranged them in the order of MacLeish's “Bleheris”:

Bleheris, who enjoyed a remarkable reputation as a story-teller (194). The story-teller Bleheris could be converted into an Arthurian knight (202). Here the hero sets out on his journey with no clear idea of the task before him (12). He is overtaken by a terrible storm, and coming to a Chapel, standing at a crossways in the middle of a forest, enters for shelter. The altar is bare, with no cloth, or covering, nothing is thereon but a great golden candlestick with a tall taper burning within it. Behind the altar is a window, and as Gawain looks a Hand, black and hideous, comes through the window, and extinguishes the taper, while a voice makes lamentation loud and dire, beneath which the very building rocks. Gawain's horse shies for terror, and the knight, making the sign of the Cross, rides out of the Chapel, to find the storm abated, and the great wind fallen. Thereafter the night was calm and clear (175). The misfortune which has fallen upon the country is that of a prolonged drought, which has destroyed vegetation, and left the land Waste (20-21). The hero's abortive visit to the Grail Castle (16). There is a Dead Knight upon a bier (115). The presence of a weeping woman, or several weeping women (49). Found in juxtaposition assigned to women in the Grail ritual (169). But Lance and Cup, though the most prominent of the symbols, do not always appear alone, but are associated with other objects, the significance of which is not always apparent. Thus the Dish (76). Finally, a Sword appears (76). And a hale king (122). [Bleheris] ought to have enquired concerning the nature of the Grail (12). Bleheris was of Welsh birth and origin (193). At Ross in Pembrokeshire (197).¹¹

To this material MacLeish adds the detail “the spear haft bleeding, blood / Oozing from ash bough,” which he could have derived from Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle: “… suddenly he beheld there a lance, the blade of which was white as snow, … thinking that never had he seen so great a wonder as this lance, which was of wood and yet bled without stanching.”¹² MacLeish's possible use of Weston will be illustrated as we consider, with direct quotation, the respective versions of “Bleheris.”

MacLeish begins all three versions of this first-person narrative with “Now is Bleheris speaking in the book.” Why Bleheris, rather than the better-known Gawain, or Perceval, or Galahad? First, MacLeish chose to make Bleheris both author and hero for a narrative that formed part of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, whose hero was also, in certain senses, its author, and whose author, its hero. Second, Bleheris would have none of the well-known literary and mythological associations of the other three heroes in the original texts and in such divergent modern versions as Tennyson's, Wagner's, and Weston's From Ritual to Romance. The obscure and more modest feats of such an unknown knight would contrast all the more significantly with Hamlet's only-too-well-known, self-absorbed troubles. Third, even if “Bleheris I” were originally only a separate, Poundian exercise in “translation,” later fitted into The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, at that time MacLeish had every reason to speak through a relatively unknown poet/hero. And finally, as Bleheris's the story could not so easily be linked with the many other, quite different stories told of Gawain, Perceval, and Galahad.

In November 1926 MacLeish wrote Pound offering to send him “this piece being one which owes much—if not all—to a certain rhythm in your IInd Canto which said rhythm saved my for the time being life.” Or, as he put it in his next letter, “I can at the present time send you (a) either certain longish but self-supporting sections of my sequence, one of which seems to me to show signs and traces of the excessive admiration in which I hold your cantos, but is nevertheless, I believe, my own, or (b) the batch of short pieces intended for the Miscellany.”¹³ “Bleheris” did, of course, eventually join (b), the short pieces intended for Louis Untermeyer's Miscellany. In December MacLeish replied to Pound's criticism “that I have not found my own speech” by admitting “I accepted your road & your way of going it completely and altogether,” but also insisting “I have always felt (even in a poem like Bleheris, & even facing the patent debtorship) that the stuff was my own.” And, at more length:

Mode of Bleheris. I have not adopted this mode. I should never write another poem in that manner. The reasons why I adopted it here are stated in the foregoing read in the light of the subject matter of the piece. (And there's an odd thing. I know the sea & sailing extremely well. But when I tried to make it as real in words as it was to me in fact I could only use the mode which had before made it verbally real to me, viz. yours. I imagine—but without data—that I know sailing better than you do).¹⁴

MacLeish's reference to “IInd” canto may be a slip of the pen for Pound's translation of Book XI of the Odyssey, which appeared as Canto III in Lustra and as Canto I in later gatherings of cantos:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also …(15)

Yet Canto II does have such lines as:

Water cutting under the keel,
Sea-break from stern forrards,
                                        wake running off from the bow …

To conclude this episode of modern literary history, in January 1927 MacLeish wrote to Robert N. Linscott, “Pound liked the Bleheris fragment & crapped on the rest. Pound has too many rules.”¹⁶

Bleheris's sea journey remained unchanged between I and II, and was changed only in style and descriptive detail for III. It has no obvious source in Weston—certainly the voyage is too universal an archetype to require one. And, as he wrote Pound, the experience was already familiar to MacLeish. Yet some geographical details of the voyage do have a curious resemblance to those of the first part of Octhere's first voyage (as given by Hakluyt):

Whereupon he tooke his voyage directly North along the coast, having upon his steereboord alwayes the desert land, and upon the leereboord the maine Ocean: and continued his course for the space of 3. dayes. … Whence he proceeded in his course still towards the North so farre as he was able to saile in other 3. dayes. At the end whereof he perceived that the coast turned towards the East, or els the sea opened with a maine gulfe into the land, he knew not how farre.¹⁷

MacLeish might also have read the passage, at Yale or in Paris, in an early edition of Sweet's or Bright's Anglo-Saxon reader.

Bleheris's telling of his voyage does have an appropriately Old English flavour: from Pound's cantos and also, perhaps, at a greater distance, from Pound's “The Seafarer.” In October 1926, moreover, MacLeish had asked Maurice Firuski for “what you can find in the way of early English (O.E.) poetry published with translations but giving some idea of O.E. verse forms.”¹⁸ This request, too late for “Bleheris I,” suggests some acquaintance with Old English writings, as proposed in MacLeish's self-education syllabus of 1924. The direct or indirect influence of Anglo-Saxon prosody is also strong in Bleheris's heroic journey through the waste land:

Grass neither nor weed, leaf or stalk never,
Rocks there only, clay cracked in the sun heat.
So still on. Three days rode in the desert,
Steel at noon searing the dry flesh,
Thighs burned under metal, midnights cold,
Cold iron at foot, sleeping in horse cloth.

(228)

Through all three versions Bleheris's sea journey had essentially the same function and effects. It replaces the mythical apparent abruptness and arbitrariness of the Grail romance's (and The Waste Land's) symbolic journeyings and encounters with a more extended, purposeful, experiential, “earned” destiny. As such, Bleheris's journey would compare with the anabasic sea migrations in Part Nine of the poem and, like them, contrast in voice and deed with MacLeish/Hamlet's own indecision.

Certain specific aspects of the voyage add to this contrast. Wind and water embody a more powerful and mysterious directive than the wanderings of a knight's steed. In a line that remained unchanged through all versions Bleheris sails past “Hills and a morning tower in the sun”: refusing, for all its morning imagery and mythical authority, this non-Christian, Yeatsian, symbolic point of epiphany,¹⁹ one that recurs later in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish with ironic force (parts 5, 10). Although lacking the precise literal/symbolic geography of the Ancient Mariner's voyage out, for example, Bleheris's more impressionistic navigation does suggest a significance. Setting out from a western shore like some voyager to the Western Isles or the New World, he sails instead toward the unknown north (northwest in I and II) for two nights and two days, then east by north for a night, and on the third day sleeps while an east wind drives him, like some Greenland Viking, to a western land with fog, pines, grey sand, and a gravel beach onto which he is lifted, at dawn on the fourth day, by the seventh wave.

He is thus brought, by the elements and by his own skill and endurance, to a harsher, more mysterious land of northern myth, into which he rides for a day and a night to the chapel. At the chapel he encounters the dead hand in all three versions, and a burning candle in I and II that the hand puts out. He then, in I and II, rides westward for three days through a waste land and comes to a deserted city and a king's house. There he encounters, in I, a dead knight with women about him, a procession bearing cup, spear, sword, and dish, and “a crowned King walking,” all out of Weston. The dramatized author/reader asks Bleheris:

                                        (Did you not speak to them?
Did you not ask, not ask? Did you not
Speak to it. …)

(230)

But Bleheris says only:

                                        I saw these things Bleheris.
I made this book at Ross in my old days.

These final gratuitous one-and-a-half lines, that appear only in “Bleheris I,” are to me the strongest single piece of evidence that MacLeish drew on Weston rather than some other source for “Bleheris I.”

II. FROM “BLEHERIS I” TO “BLEHERIS II”

For the second version of “Bleheris,” included in the first publication of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, MacLeish changed only the climactic visit to the Grail castle (Weston's term for it). After an old man had taken the reins of his horse, Bleheris addresses the reader in ten lines added to this version:

Now I beseech thee, thou, unknown, whosoever,
Stranger or still as I born by the sea stream,
Thou that readest these words, pray for my rest now.
Dangerous deed it is, rune to discover—
Craft to utter in word: dangerous cunning
Unknown thing to make known. Never man
Thickened by truth say ever. (Nevertheless
Many in older time knew of the mystery:
Priests, keepers of rule; few now and poor men.)
You that can understand—pity the stones!

(13)

In these even more strongly, more awkwardly, and more derivatively Anglo-Saxon accents he emphasizes his special role as poet/hero. He also shows his awareness of the ancient Mystery traditions Weston found behind the Grail legends.²⁰ The dead knight mourned by women in I has vanished from II: “A room, but empty, but no man there, no one” (13), and the more primitive “spear” of I has become the more chivalric “lance” of II.

The “crowned king walking” (230) of I has become the “dead king, crowned” (14) of II. By this important change MacLeish removed an apparent contradiction commented on by Weston: “the presentment of this central figure is much confused; generally termed Le Roi Pescheur, he is sometimes described as in middle life, and in full possession of his bodily powers. Sometimes while still comparatively young he is incapacitated by the effects of a wound” (118-19). Ritually viewed, however, as Weston does view it: “Fisher King, and Maimed King, representing two different aspects of the same personality, may, and probably were, represented as two individuals, but one alone is disabled. … Thus the Bleheris version … is, ritually, the more correct” (122). MacLeish may not have understood Weston's full argument in Chapter IX, “The Fisher King” (113-23). More likely, for “Bleheris II” and its ironic role in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish he chose to cut off the ritual mid-way, before the Fisher King could be restored by the quest and questioning of Bleheris to life and fertility.

MacLeish changed the very ending of II as well. This time Bleheris is addressed not by a parenthetic dramatized author/reader but by a half-line out of Hamlet: “Did you not speak to it” (I.ii.214), thus giving the query Shakespearean, more independent, more universal authority. And this time:

The dead king lay there, secret, his mouth sealed,
His eyes closed up with silence. And my heart
Beat. And my breath came. And I cried aloud
Asking the question. …

(14-15)

The ellipses are the poem's. And what follows is another passage from Hamlet: “… peace! I pray you all / If you have hitherto concealed this sight …” (I.ii.243-44). This “quotation” is directed with interesting ambiguity both to Bleheris just before and to the dramatized author/reader just after, whose “page / Wrinkles with light.” It links even the digressive Bleheris narrative more firmly to the Shakespearean sub-text of MacLeish's text. Above all, it leaves the ritual result of Bleheris's question, like so much else, a mystery to the protagonist of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish.

III. FROM “BLEHERIS II” TO “BLEHERIS III”

For the third, the last, and the definitive version of Part Three of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, MacLeish made two kinds of revisions, thematic and aesthetic. He cut all of the waste land, the ruined city, and the king's house. He thereby brought Bleheris's adventure more into proportion with the other longer parts of the complete poem. He got rid of the more obviously derivative matter in Bleheris's narrative, derivative both in content and in style. More important, Bleheris's visit to what Weston called the Perilous Chapel had been a preparatory initiation, perhaps an Underworld visit,²¹ before achieving the Grail castle. Now this visit itself is the climactic event, the whole point of the voyage, the height of the adventure, and the only meaning Bleheris's quest can have for the complete poem and for MacLeish/Hamlet.

For these new purposes, MacLeish made further aesthetic revisions to the language, sound, rhythm, and detail of the sea and land journey to the Grail chapel. He intensified the physical, existential actuality of crucial acts and strengthened the supporting sound patterns. Bleheris's commitment of himself and his horse to the ship, in I and II:

So entered: and at dusk
The land breeze, warm at first, smelling of furze root,
Cool after.

(225; 7)

became, in III:

And sail was set on the ship and I led the beast by a
Rock's bridge and I cut rope and the wind was
Off shore smelling at first of the furze root,
Afterward cold:

(114)

In I and II:

                                        And the wind held all that day
And the sea was with us, the wind sweep
Crossing the smooth surge.

(225-26; 8)

was condensed in III to:

                              And the wind held all that day
Heaping the wave tops westward,

(115)

and on a smaller scale, “the lee rail / Down, the wake washed out by the sea scud,” became: “the lee rail / Free by a strake, the wake washed out by the sea-scud,” and “Luffed to reef her” became “Luffed to have reefed her,” again improving detail or sound or both. One more example from the sea journey: “Taking her aft, lifting slow with the bilge water” in I and II; in III, “Taking her stern, the lift logged with the bilge water.”

The ten lines in I and II (226; 8-9) that described Bleheris's coming to the unknown country were rearranged and rewritten for III into a much stronger version of this liminal event:

Rain and the wind gone east, the gear wet,
The bow sheer down with water. And I slept
And woke past sunset and I saw the sky
Gold, and against it black, and the black, land:
And the scud blew over it blurring the golden light.
And all that night the surf was through the sea mist:
The pine tops combing through the fog at dawn.
And I struck the sea with the oars but the ship lifted,
Grinding on gravel, and the bow fell off
Waiting the seventh wave and leaned and rode with it

(115)

The clotted atmosphere of the country, in I and II:

Wild-pig, fox-foot, nor birds but three silent,
Nor live thing other but bat on oak branch—no
Cry but of gulls above over the leaf sea,
No sound beneath but hoof on mould and hum
Of soft flies rising sleepy from sap ooze.

(226-27; 9)

is condensed and made even more mysterious in III:

Dog foot, wolf, nor birds but three birds silent,
Nor any live thing other but the bat,
Nor sound but bat's sound nor the whine of flies.

(115)

The actual arrival at the Grail chapel was changed from:

                              So rode on and before me,
A long way off, door framed, dim in the forest,
A light, and called and no voice and rode shouting
And found there, trees over roof, the walls leafy,
Door-sill deep in moss, a church, within
Bare floor, bare altar,

(227; 10)

to:

                                        And I rode and there was
One light lingered through the shut of dark.
That light I followed. And I found a door:
And past the door a church nave: and the church
Empty, the sill moss growing on the stone:
And one bare chapel.

(116)

This last major aesthetic and thematic revision shows every aspect of MacLeish's poetic skills. Like other revisions from II to III, it gives natural emphasis to the first-person narrator. It gets rid of the unfortunate sound effects and excessive, irrelevant foliage of II. It gives the all-important light more emphasis, suggests Bleheris's entrance into the church more exactly, singles out the Grail chapel within the ruined church, and adjusts the syntactical and line rhythms more subtly to the movement of the sense.

For “Bleheris III” MacLeish made one more, thematic, revision that changed the essential force of the chapel itself, of the whole narrative, and of the narrative in relation to the complete Hamlet of A. MacLeish. For the initiation ritual of I and II Bleheris found in the chapel only “tall on golden stick / One candle burning” (227; 10), and it is this candle that the dead hand puts out. Now Bleheris's encounter is mythically false but thematically more definitive:

                                                            And I saw a cup
Crimson and burning and a flame of candles
Burning before it. And I knew that cup.
I knelt there thanking Jesus Christ.

(116)

For early, surviving fertility symbols out of Weston by Frazer, MacLeish has substituted the later, more orthodox Christian Grail out of Tennyson by Malory; brought, by tradition, to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea.²² In MacLeish's final version of this narrative Bleheris finds the Grail only to lose it, rather than the one candle:

The nails gone, shriveled, a dead hand, and droop
And close about the vessel. And the flame
Leapt and the night had all. Then silence.

(116)

By this crucial change MacLeish/Hamlet's concerns in the complete poem are contrasted with Bleheris's more exact, orthodox quest. But when Bleheris loses the Grail to the demonic dead hand (of doubt?), contrast turns into comparison: his loss becomes analogous to whatever belief it is the protagonist of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish has lost in his turn. For III MacLeish has added to the significance of this loss by glossing it, rather than the Grail castle of I and II, with Horatio's lines:

                                                            … both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes.

(I.ii.209-11)

MacLeish ends this third and last version of the narrative of Bleheris's aborted quest on an almost Frostian note of natural order:

Came to a clearing in the wood and reined
And saw the storm had passed there and the sky all
Clean, the stars out …

(116)

but one which is not, we remind ourselves, the ending of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish:

It is time we should accept …
                                                                                                              Thou wouldst not think
                                        How ill all's here about my heart!

Notes

“Caliban or Hamlet,” Unfinished Business (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), pp. 99-100.
A Reviewer's ABC (New York: Meridian, 1958), p. 282.
Ibid., p. 283.
Archibald MacLeish, Letters, 1907-1982, ed. R. H. Winnick (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), p. 222.
The Influence of Ezra Pound (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 180.
Louis Untermeyer, ed., American Poetry 1927: A Miscellany (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), pp. 225-30.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), pp. 6-15.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), pp. 6-9; Collected Poems 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), pp. 202-04; Collected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 228-30; New and Collected Poems 1917-1976 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 114-16. All quotations from the third version are from New and Collected Poems.
Jessie L. Weston, The Legend of Sir Perceval (London: David Nutt, 1906), I, 28-29.
Letters, p. 125.
Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920; New York: Doubleday, 1957).
Jessie L. Weston, trans., Sir Gawain at the Grail Castle (1903; New York: AMS Press, 1970), p. 22.
Letters, pp. 186-88.
Letters, pp. 191-92.
Ezra Pound, Lustra (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1917), p. 198; Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1948), p. 3; see also Donald Gallup, A Bibliography of Ezra Pound (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969), items A17 (Quia Pauper Amavi) and A26 (A Draft of XVI Cantos).
Letters, p. 194.
Richard Hakluyt, Voyages, 8 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), I, 57. In July 1926 MacLeish indicated at least his general familiarity with such material by asking Lewis Galantière to order for MacLeish's son “any titles in the publications of the Hakluyt Society which you think he could go? … I fancy there are some. If not in that series perhaps under the general head of voyages” (Letters, p. 179).
Letters, p. 186.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 203-06.
From Ritual to Romance, Chapter X, “The Secret of the Grail (1) The Mysteries,” pp. 137-48.
From Ritual to Romance, pp. 184-86.
Jessie L. Weston, The Quest of the Holy Grail (1913; New York: Haskell House, 1965), pp. 53-62; From Ritual to Romance, pp. 160-61.

Janis P. Stout (essay date fall 1987)

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SOURCE: Stout, Janis P. “Re-Visions of Job: J. B. and ‘A Masque of Reason’.” Essays in Literature 14, no. 2 (fall 1987): 225-39.

[In the following essay, Stout compares MacLeish's verse play J. B. and Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” as modern re-compositions of the biblical Book of Job.]

The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ notes. Jude's face changed more: he whispered slowly, his parched lips scarcely moving:

‘Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.’

(‘Hurrah!’)

—Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

The Book of Job is one of those monumental texts that evoke allusions in great numbers, so that we seem to encounter them at every turn, from Herman Melville to Neil Simon.¹ Thomas Carlyle pronounced it unsurpassed by anything either in the Bible or outside it. All this might not at first seem surprising, when one considers that Job raises the most profoundly evocative of questions and of necessity leaves them shrouded in mystery, inviting further questioning. Yet, on closer examination, the stature of Job is puzzling. The story of a pious man who loses everything and then, because he hasn't complained, gets it all back—as if that made it all right—would scarcely, in itself, seem likely to evoke the meditations of a Melville or a Hardy. And indeed the Job to which they give the tribute of allusive response is not the patient Job of the familiar fable but the protesting Job of the book's middle chapters, who hurls his suffering back in God's teeth and demands an explanation. Yet these central chapters, powerful and provocative as they are, are also at times turgid and repetitious. It is no more to be supposed that they alone could have secured the place Job occupies in western literature, let alone in popular memory, than to think the much older and rather primitive folk tale which frames them could have achieved such literary eminence.² To be sure, the situation, undeserved suffering, is profoundly troubling and evocative. It is not so much the Job story as a whole as Job's situation that provides the human specificity within which the poetic discourses gain their resonance.

This is not to say, however, that the Book of Job is an easy or comfortable totality. The discourses do not simply resonate within the ancient folk tale, but actually call its assumptions and implications into question. Job might well be called a self-deconstructing text. Furthermore, it is a book in disorder, so cumbered with textual uncertainties that scholars can seldom agree as to the inclusion or exclusion of certain verses, the correct sequence of whole sections, or the attribution of the work to one or more poets, let alone the message or meaning of the whole. Perhaps it is for this reason especially, though it would be natural enough in any event, that one more often encounters passing allusions to Job than extended parallels. In the case of borrowings from Job, the anxiety of influence would appear to be peculiarly heightened by uncertainty.

My concern here is with two revisionary responses to Job, Robert Frost's dramatic poem “A Masque of Reason” (1945) and Archibald MacLeish's verse drama J. B. (1956), which are unusual in the relative completeness with which they re-present the Biblical situation and ideas. The two are very different in tone, in their degree of closeness to the primary text, and in the particular aspects of Job they stress. Neither is simply a modernized version; each admits the ancient text selectively and with major structural reordering. What they share is an intentionality of re-viewing the Job story and its theological/philosophical implications. Thus we can fairly ask not only how each writer appropriates and responds to the primary text as he develops his revisionary text, but also whether he offers a relatively rich or a relatively reductive version of it. It is this entire revisionary process that I address in these two works.

In J. B., MacLeish writes a Job for modern, Hiroshima-haunted humanity. That is not to say that he merely adapts the Biblical text to modern conditions by updating its terms. Hence critics who have argued that he does, or does not, adequately present the Biblical story have gone astray.³ What he adopts from Job is the concept of undeserved suffering, the confrontational mode, and a tone of high seriousness. He writes an inspirational tragedy suited equally to those parameters and to his time, and signals the fact, but not the nature, of its relation to the Biblical text by using similar names, incidents, and language. In this way he invites us to read J. B. in reference to, and in tension with, Job.

The outlines of J. B. are familiar. It is a play within a play, produced by two circus vendors, Zuss (Zeus?) and Nickles (Old Nick?), who show a profound emotional stake in the production and who also, wearing traditional dramatic masks, assume the roles of God and Satan. One might expect that the circus setting would impart something of a comic or parodic tone, but actually it has the effect of increasing the bitterness of the whole, since it is not the presence but the absence of circus spectacle that is emphasized. The lights are darkened; action occurs in an out-of-the-way corner of the big top; Zuss and Nickles are shabby, broken-down, tired, and obsessed by religious loss; even their popcorn and balloons have failed to attract buyers. Every detail conveys loss, an absence of well-being. The circus setting thus intensifies by contrast the somberness of Zuss and Nickles and the suffering of J. B. It is their isolation from the forced gaiety of the circus, like Job's isolation on the ash-heap, and therefore their greater authenticity, that are emphasized.

Structurally, MacLeish appropriates from the Book of Job both the story line of the frame chapters and its central debate over the meaning of what happens. Furthermore, the play-within-a-play structure, with its duality of levels, recalls the dual levels of the Joban frame story, which occurs on an earthly level and on a transcendent level, in alternation. But the work as a whole does not approximate the structural organization of the primary text. In re-viewing Job, MacLeish restructures it. And the nature of the restructuring is enormously important to our understanding of his work.

In Job, in the opening “frame” or prologue (chapters 1 and 2), the righteous Job is introduced; Satan (or more properly the Satan, the divine watchdog or accuser or tester) impugns Job's virtue in conversation with God, implying it is mere prudential self-interest; God gives permission for the testing of Job by affliction; as a result, disasters befall Job in rapid succession. He remains steadfastly pious and does not complain against God. In the closing “frame,” or epilogue (42:10-17), following the lengthy poetic commentary and debate among Job, his three friends, and a young objector, Elihu, Job gets back his health, his possessions, and his family, or at any rate a replacement family.

MacLeish both emulates and drastically re-constitutes these structural divisions. The frame story's scene of the heavenly challenge becomes an extended Prologue between Zuss and Nickles, in which they discuss the necessity of putting on the play, the unceasing recurrence of Job-figures in all times and places, and the nature of God and Satan, as conveyed by the two masks. The rapid Biblical account of Job's disasters appear in the play itself, a series of eleven scenes shifting between J. B.'s earthly life and the commentaries delivered by Zuss and Nickles from a raised platform where they watch the action. This shifting, of course, approximates the Biblical shifting between the earthly and the heavenly plane in chapters 1 and 2—but not the central chapters of the Biblical text, which occur entirely on the human plane. The eleven scenes of the play, then, comprise a re-presentation of materials from both the prose frame of Job and the poetic central chapters, the lament and philosophic dialogues. Significantly, the closing “frame” of Job has no equivalent in J. B.

In a sense, MacLeish reverses the positions of frame and center, narrative and discussion, placing the bulk of the discussion first, in the extended prologue. Portions of the folk-tale frame are shifted to the drama of J. B.—the messages of disaster to Scenes I, III, IV, V, VI, and VIII, and God's granting Satan permission for the torments (1:12 and 2:6) to the end of Scenes II and VII. The substance of the Joban central chapters, the debate, is shifted to Zuss and Nickles's disputes in the Prologue and in Scenes II, V, VII, VIII, and X. Personages representing J. B.'s social context, including three intellectuals called by the Biblical names Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, add their comments in Scenes VIII and IX. We can see, then, that W. D. White, an early critic of J. B. who faulted the work for not being a closer emulation of the original, is incorrect in asserting that most of the play is based on only the prologue and epilogue (or frame story) of Job and that only Scene IX “specifically draws upon” the poetic part.⁴ Both parts of Job are appropriated, but action and meditation/discussion are not so clearly severed as in the Bible. Because of the play-within-a-play structure, action itself becomes, in a sense, part of the discussion.

The stage action in J. B. does not occur within conventions of verisimilitude. In the Biblical narrative, when we are told that such and such events happened to Job as a result of the conversation between God and Satan, we are expected to regard those events with some degree of credence. In J. B., that kind of credence is forestalled by the Prologue, which establishes an immediate and ongoing sense that the dramatic scenes are being staged by Zuss and Nickles, in cooperation with an outside power, as an example of some greater and more widespread principle which is explicitly identified with the Book of Job. The Biblical text is not only a model or source but a live issue. That issue is seen and felt more keenly by Nickles, who identifies with Job in his suffering and his defiance, than by Zuss. The God whom Zuss will play, Zuss says, is the God who “challenges” Job with the spectacle of His vast creativity when Job has been so “ridiculous” as to demand justice.⁵ In the Biblical account, Job's response to that spectacle is to cover his mouth and confess his inadequacy:

Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee?
          I lay my hand on my mouth.
I have spoken once, and I will not answer;
          twice, but I will proceed no further.

(40:4-5)

Nickles, however, insists that Job covers his mouth, not because he is “abashed,” but because he is hiding a laugh.⁶ He does not explain why Job laughed, but apparently believes that Job saw God's exhibit as a vast, transparent evasion of the real issue, which is not power, after all, but fairness. As Nickles puts the problem in his mocking jingle, “If God is God He is not good, / If God is good He is not God” (p. 11). It is the old problem of reconciling omnipotence with benevolence: the two would not appear to be compatible, yet both, to an infinite degree, have traditionally been attributed to the Judeo-Christian God.

Nickles, with his acute sense of the conflict, has at first assumed that he is to play Job. But Zuss insists that there are plenty of actors for that part: “Job is everywhere we go, / His children dead, his work for nothing, / Counting his losses, scraping his boils” (p. 13). Indeed, Job is to be seen not only in individuals but in mankind as a whole, suffering collective calamities:

Millions and millions of mankind
Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated
.....Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—
London, Dresden, Hiroshima.
There never could have been so many
Suffered more for less.

(p. 12)

The collective aspect of the Job problem will be picked up again in Scenes VI, VIII, and IX, in references to nuclear destruction.⁷ Instead of playing Job, Nickles will of course play Satan. The role is not a pleasant one; putting on the Satan mask is an ordeal. Wearing the Satan mask, with its tormented grin, Nickles sees even more clearly than before the sadness and trouble of human life. In contrast, the God mask worn by Zuss is smooth and blank, impervious to hurt, with “closed eyes” (p. 16).

When the two put on their masks and begin to speak lines from the Bible, they are taken over by forces outside themselves, and voices from outside the stage setting begin to speak and to react to stage action. When White says that J. B. includes “no reality beyond the human situation,”⁸ he seems to ignore this unspecified but certainly transcendent dimension that impinges on the play at several points. As Elizabeth Bieman observes, the Distant Voice allows the possibility of “profound mystery.”⁹ The fact that this mystery or implied transcendent dimension is not located on the raised platform occupied by Nickles and Zuss, but instead impinges on the entire drama from somewhere outside, conveys very precisely the nature of MacLeish's humanistic vision. He allows for the possibility of the Distant Voice, but cannot vouch for it by locating it on his stage. His two dimensions, the lower level where J. B. and his family appear and the platform, are both earthly. The heavenly dimension included in the Joban folk tale is displaced to the undefined Beyond.

At the God-mask's (Zuss's) intoning of the Biblical phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job,” the scene shifts to J. B.'s family Thanksgiving at some pre-War time. It is immediately clear that J. B. differs from the Biblical Job in being more a glad pagan than a pious servant. The cautious quality of Job's piety (he offers weekly sacrifices just in case one of his sons has unintentionally sinned) is deflected onto J. B.'s wife Sarah, who fears that if everyone doesn't pay a debt of proper gratitude, God will “forget. Forever. In everything” (p. 30). J. B., however, believes in a kind of natural piety, an innate gladness in the unmerited bounty God sends. Unlike the Biblical Job, who knows he has not deserved the enormity of ill he gets, J. B. is certain he has not deserved the good that has come to him and equally certain that deserving is not necessary. Sarah voices the barter theory of virtue and reward, attributed in the Bible to Job's advisers and Job's own cautious sacrifices. J. B. voices a belief that we do not have to buy God's favors with our good behavior and also a sense of the astounding richness of creation—attitudes toward which Job's thinking seems to be tending in the later chapters of the Biblical discourses, but which are not directly expressed there. At the start of the play, J. B. blesses all of life, without differentiation: “To be, become, and end are beautiful” (p. 43). But he can do that because he has no real sense of adversity.

Nickles finds J. B.'s happy piety “insufferable” and pronounces it “bought and paid for” (p. 46). Like the Biblical Satan, he is convinced that if J. B. should lose his rich blessings “he'd sing / Another canticle to different music.” Zuss is equally certain that

Nothing this good man might suffer,
Nothing at all, would make him yelp
As you do. He'd praise God no matter.

(p. 48)

Out of this conflict comes the wager or test that issues in Job's/J. B.'s sufferings.

It is this aspect of a wager that has made the Biblical story so theologically unacceptable to many readers, including, apparently, the poet or poets of the central chapters. It is unacceptable as well to Nickles, despite the fact that he continues to play his part. In response to Zuss's confident assertion that nothing would make J. B. “yelp,” he asks, in a whisper that catches Zuss off guard, “Why must he suffer then?” What is the point of putting him through it all if Zuss, the God-mask, really knows in advance how he will behave? Zuss has no answer except to assert that it ought to be that way to prove that it ought to—a circular response which Nickles summarizes, “And so he suffers to see God: / Sees God because he suffers” (p. 50). Scene II ends with the Distant Voice reminding Zuss to state the Biblical limitation, “Only / Upon himself / Put not forth thy hand!” (p. 52).

In Scenes III through VI, J. B. and Sarah are informed by messengers that their children are all destroyed and their wealth is wiped out. Like Job's wife in the Bible, Sarah in effect calls God a murderer while J. B., like the patient Job, clings to his faith and continues to bless the name of the Lord. The pace of these scenes of disaster is considerably different from that of the Biblical story, where each messenger of doom arrives virtually on the heels of the one before. MacLeish allows time for his characters' human reactions and for the commentary of the observing Zuss and Nickles. Yet the reports are scarcely, as some critics have said, drawn out. The difference is largely a matter of narrative convention. In Biblical narrative, as Robert Alter has demonstrated, all details except the most salient are totally suppressed, and action is typically reported in dialogue.¹⁰ In modern narrative or dramatic representation we expect both verisimilitude of background detail and a developed fullness of psychological exploration. Given this difference, and considering the absence of any scenes in the interim to show periods of recovery, the disasters of J. B. come with rapidity.

After the last loss comes a scene given both to dispute over J. B.'s continuing praise of the Lord and to the second phase of the wager, bodily affliction. This scene serves the function, then, partly of the Biblical folk tale of the wager in heaven and partly of the theological disputes between Job and his friends. Zuss comfortably calls J. B.'s expression of acceptance and praise an “affirmation,” a “great / Yea-saying” (p. 92), and predicts that he will continue to accept the grand necessity of things as they are. Nickles, voicing Job's accusation of divine injustice, argues that J. B.'s needless affliction “stinks” and the “white, calm, unconcerned” God-mask, or God's merciless behavior itself, “isn't decent! / It isn't moral even! It's disgusting!” (p. 93).

In Scene IX, when J. B. appears blighted with sores, his suffering is generalized to that of the victims of nuclear holocaust. Here MacLeish's work becomes indeed the Job of a post-World War II era that sees all of society as victim. As Nickles puts it, accusing God,

Count on you to make a mess of it!
Every blessed blundering time

You hit at one man you blast thousands.
Think of that flood of yours—a massacre!
Now you've fumbled it again:
Tumbled a whole city down
To blister one man's skin with agony.

(p. 99)

In misery, J. B. wishes to die. Even now, however, he does not lash out with the bitterness of his wife. Sarah is clear that God Himself has “set the dark alight / With horror” (p. 108). But J. B. wonders why. Unlike Job, who insists upon his innocence even in the face of his friends' urging to repentance, J. B. can only believe that God is “just” and “will not punish without cause” (p. 109). Rather than insisting that he is adequately innocent because he knows of no real guilt, J. B. insists that he is guilty because he does not know he is innocent. Thoroughly post-Freudian and post-Hitlerian, he is attuned to possibilities of subconscious complicity and is desperately certain that only such guilt can possibly make acceptable sense of the enormities of the world. “We have no choice but to be guilty,” he declares. “God is unthinkable if we are innocent” (p. 111). But Sarah clings to her knowledge of her own children:

                                                                                                    They are
Dead and they were innocent: I will not
Let you sacrifice their deaths
To make injustice justice and God good!

(p. 110)

Urging J. B. to “curse God and die,” as Job's wife had urged him, she leaves. Thus J. B. reaches the same condition of alienation as Job, though he has come to it by a different way.

In Scene X, after a chorus of old women huddling together in the rubble have voiced society's view of J. B.'s afflictions, the three Biblically named comforters enter to scoff at him for thinking that God in His “Unconsciousness,” “Necessity,” “Mystery,” and “Mindlessness” has time to respond to one man's cries (p. 119). In the Bible, the friends told Job he was wrong to demand God's answer; here, they tell J. B. he is foolish. Bildad, jeering at J. B.'s concern with innocence and guilt, offers the rationale of Marxist collectivism, and Eliphaz argues a Freudian theory of human beings as “victims” of the subconscious and of ingrained psychological patterns (pp. 121-23). J. B. rejects both systems, even though they would allow him to escape any sense of guilt, on grounds that they drain life of meaning by denying individual responsibility. The third of the false comforters, Zophar, at first seems to resemble the comforters of Job in that he seeks to convict J. B. not of innocence but of guilt. Speaking for neo-fundamentalism, he argues that of course J. B. is guilty; everyone is guilty; no one is or can be innocent. Even the most trivial adolescent sin is still sin and deserves whatever misery God may send. To J. B., this is the “cruelest comfort” of all in that it too deprives life of ethical meaning by dissolving all distinctions of magnitude into a universal smuttiness.

Having rejected, then, three major strands of mid-twentieth-century thought, J. B. cries out, in the language of the Bible itself (Job 23:3-4, 8), “Oh that I knew where I might find him …”—to which the Distant Voice that has been heard intermittently throughout the play responds with lines from God's speech out of the whirlwind, overwhelming Job/J. B. with the spectacle of His mighty creation. J. B., again using the words of Job, is humbled and repents. But the question remains, as it does in the Bible, of what does he repent? After all, God will later say that his servant Job has spoken correctly. MacLeish does not resolve this question, but does provide comments on it and a response to it.

First, in Scene X we see that neither Nickles nor Zuss is satisfied with Job's repentance. Nickles has hoped that this time Job might persevere in his defiance, and Zuss has hoped to see the Almighty not only acknowledged but embraced. True, the Distant Voice demands and gets J. B.'s acknowledgment of his own inferiority in power and understanding, but Zuss feels humiliated in the exchange. God, he says, “stood stooping there to show him” and J. B. “gentled” the divine rage by giving his admission and “forgave” it (pp. 138-39). As Zuss sees it, J. B. in effect comes off as the superior. He repents, but perhaps he repents only the effort to find a nonexistent justice or reasonableness in the Ultimate. Instead, justice has to be made or built by J. B.'s own efforts and his own persistence in living.

The play ends with J. B. rewarded, not with gifts from above, but by discovering within himself the strength to go on trying to make a life. Whether the capacity to find that inner strength is a part of the creative vitality displayed to him by the Distant Voice is a point MacLeish leaves moot. Sarah returns, bringing as an emblem of persistent renewal a blooming forsythia branch she has picked out of the ash-heap of general destruction. Together she and J. B. decide that even if God does not love, they, miraculously, do. That is their basis for hope. The “light” they need to see by will not shine from above but from within. The conclusion is indeed, as it has often been called, humanistic, but at the same time it incorporates, in a rather evanescent way, a sense of religious wonder. The “talisman” of the “persistence of natural life in the face of atomic destruction,” as Bieman puts it, the forsythia branch, both demonstrates a larger natural dimension—the very dimension God Himself puts on exhibit in his message out of the whirlwind—and recalls, as Bieman incisively points out, a whole series of Biblical life-in-death images ranging from Abraham's Sarah as a “bloom from a barren branch” to Calvary's tree.¹¹ The message, then, takes on a different emphasis from that of the Biblical text, but its humanism is combined with a kind of residual religious urge. The play, then, ends very much as do the dialogues of Job, excluding the closing frame story, on a note of elevated seriousness but in uncertainty of final truths. Given the questions, we can scarcely imagine more definitive answers. For this reason, the ending, though it lacks philosophical closure, is satisfying.

In turning to Frost's “A Masque of Reason,” we take up a very different kind of work. MacLeish's concern is with the Book of Job; Frost's is with Job himself. His poem is not so much an interpretive retelling of the forty-two-chapter Biblical text as a comment on it, in the form of a sequel. What, Frost wryly asks, would the principals of the ancient encounter have had to say to each other later, much later? And so he brings them together in a kind of fantasy no-place, at some undefined no-time. His approach is more emphatically demythologizing even than MacLeish's. If MacLeish displaces the divine dimension to a voice coming from outside the two-level dramatic arena, Frost displaces it absolutely by bringing the deity himself down to the “human” arena, on the “human” level. To be sure, that level is not even as realistic as the world of J. B., itself an expressionistic drama; it is not the human level as we know it. But that is a matter of aesthetic tact: if one proposes to depict God physically, one can scarcely assert that the scene is set in the everyday world.

“A Masque of Reason,” then, is both more fantastic than J. B. and, in a sense, more radically secular. God and Satan, whom MacLeish shows as human projections having no supernal dimensions (except the unexplained voice), are here introduced as visible realities. But they are realities brought down to the same level, in their actions and discourse, as humans. They are debunked. The colloquial directness of the language helps to place these eternal beings as surely as the uni-level stage; it undercuts ideas of transcendent goodness, wisdom, and foreordination as surely as it undercuts the primary text's tone of elevated seriousness, which MacLeish had re-created.

If the marked dissimilarity between “A Masque of Reason” and J. B. is largely a matter of focus and of the degree to which the writer entertains, by way of structure and language, the idea of a transcendent dimension, it is also a matter of literary genre. The generic approach, generally taken by critics favorable to the work, emphasizes its fulfillment of the conventions of the masque, a didactic form of satire operating through light fantasy and spectacle. Such an argument is appealing, particularly when it is refined to a consideration specifically of anti-masque, as it is, for example, by Heyward Brock and by Reuben Brower.¹² The problem with such a reading, however, is that it does not allow the work to stand on its own. “A Masque of Reason” as anti-masque must be read in conjunction with “A Masque of Mercy” as masque proper.¹³ Yet the two were published as separate works and, it seems to me, must validate themselves separately, if at all, even though additional resonance may be gained when they are paired.

In Frost's sequel to the Biblical drama, only the four chief characters appear: Job, his wife Thyatira (named in allusion to Revelation 2:20), God, and Satan. The three friends and Elihu, for whom MacLeish substitutes spokesmen of twentieth-century ideologies, have been omitted altogether. Frost's God dismisses them from notice with the comment, “Your comforters were wrong” (paralleling Job 42:7) and then goes on to complain about committees in general.¹⁴ But eliminating the comforters, or any representatives of their role, also eliminates the possibility for philosophical discourse. As Job finds out, you can't argue an issue with God; he isn't reasonable.

As the masque opens, Job and his wife are discovered lounging at ease in a desert oasis, their ordeals long past. Action begins with the arrival of God, who emerges from a Christmas tree/burning bush where he has been “caught in the branches”—trapped, one might say, in the misconceptions perpetrated by religious tradition. Immediately upon arrival he “pitches throne” (pp. 587-88), setting up a hinged plywood model he carries around with him. These details, together with the offhand quality of Job's and Thyatira's remarks, which Reuben Brower describes as “broad parody or burlesque,”¹⁵ quickly establish the de-mythologizing tone. Frost will not regard the ancient story with awe, but with a kind of reductive mockery, a full-scale expansion of the device of the comic drop.¹⁶ It is not that the issues of human suffering and the human need to understand are not taken seriously. Job still asks for justice, or at least for a just estimate of himself:

                                                            … this is Judgment Day.
I trust it is. Here's where I lay aside
My varying opinion of myself
And come to rest in an official verdict.

(p. 588)

But the serious question is posed in a direct, everyday mode that reduces the rhetorical grandeur of the Bible to a friendly chat, just as the intensity of Job's physical torment is reduced to a “reminiscent twinge of rheumatism” (p. 589). Job talks to God as to an equal—if that. It is in this atmosphere of lowered intensity and lowered expectation, an atmosphere utterly unlike the solemn ironies of MacLeish's moral drama under the big top, that God explains, or doesn't explain, Himself. MacLeish expects us to feel the pain that makes of all humankind a Job. His work is designed as a real play for real production, and a play in the tragic mode at that, and as such it seizes its audience's emotions. Frost's closet drama, never seriously conceived as a work for the stage, operates through the intellect, reductively, in detachment.

The God of “A Masque of Reason” is not God Almighty. Not only does He have to struggle free of the bush at the outset, but His throne tends to fall down when difficult questions are raised¹⁷ and He has trouble finding the right words. It is almost in the voice of a human character, then, that He addresses Job, thanking him for his help in establishing the irrationality of things and freeing Him, God, from the need to follow a predictable system of rewards and punishments:

I've had you on my mind a thousand years
To thank you someday for the way you helped me
Establish once for all the principle
There's no connection man can reason out
Between his just deserts and what he gets.
Virtue may fail and wickedness succeed.

(p. 589)

In addition, God apologizes for “the apparently unmeaning sorrow / You were afflicted with in those old days” (p. 589). But God's apology, conveyed as it is in Frost's colloquial blank verse, with its almost casual air, is too easy. He seems to feel no deep compassion, but remarks of Job's extraordinary suffering only that it “came out all right”—as if the suffering itself did not matter. Similarly, when pressed by Thyatira in the matter of women prophets, He reveals blandly that the burning of the Witch of Endor is not on record in his Note Book. Pain, it seems, is not a major issue with God.

Besides His statement that Job's affliction provided a valuable demonstration of theological principle, which Job calls a “justifying expost-facto” excuse, not a real reason, God offers a general explanation of injustice, simply, “That's the way it is” (p. 592). But Job presses for more. Though he gives tacit agreement to his wife's statement that “in the abstract high singular / There isn't any universal reason,” he would like to have some “scraps of palliative reason” (p. 593). He asks, specifically, “Why did you hurt me so?” Cornered at last, God gives an answer, but one scarcely calculated to satisfy: “I was just showing off to the Devil, Job, / As is set forth in Chapters One and Two” (p. 600). Small wonder Job is confounded! “I expected more / Than I could understand,” he says, “and what I get / Is almost less than I can understand.”¹⁸

It is at this point that Satan appears, in a “diaphanous” wasp-like form (p. 605). With a brief comment on the foolishness of men's attempting to find high-flown reasons for their own torments—which, one must suppose by now, they do because God's reasons are inadequate for them—he starts to move off again on a curious piece of stage machinery, something like a moving sidewalk, which Job identifies as a “tendency.” Tendency toward what, the reader is not told. Apparently, it is the very tendency toward Protestant liberalism that has reduced Satan to a mere “shadow of himself” (p. 603) by underplaying the concept of Satanic evil. In response to Thyatira's invitation, however, he alights once more to pose for a snapshot with God and Job. And so the three are grouped, as enigmatically as ever. It is Job's wife who has the last word: “Now if you three have settled anything”—but plainly they have not—“you'd as well smile as frown on the occasion” (p. 606).

Smiling on the occasion is precisely what the “Masque” does. Thyatira's practical, irreverent attitude pervades the work, making it what might almost be called a feminist undermining of the solemn patriarchal myth. Thyatira's attitude is not fully equivalent to the author's; his comic vision includes her, while she is unable to see herself as plainly as she sees the rather pompous males she has had to deal with. Frost regards the plight of all of us creatures of a fallible God, including Thyatira, with a rueful grin. It is that grin, that element of joking or burlesque, that makes the work so startling and creates such problems of interpretation.

On the whole, readers have tended to find the “Masque” essentially trivializing and flat. Anna Juhnke is perhaps typical in commenting that at the end it “dribbles out into an idle futility.”¹⁹ Arguing the contrary, that the masque is appropriately “unreasonable and inconclusive” because it “demonstrates the inability of unaided human reason to comprehend divine reason,” Heyward Brock comes up against the problem of imitative form, that when one reads a work that shows unreason by being unreasonable, or shows foolishness by being foolish, one finds very little ground for deciding what is seriously meant.²⁰ It is not enough to assume, as Brock seems to do, that God must be right and man wrong. Within the terms of the text itself, it is by no means clear that this is true. Frost's God says that he was “just showing off”—that is, that he was behaving in a manner both reasonless and contemptible. There is no clear evidence in the text that the statement is facetious. And to dismiss unsympathetic critics by calling them people who “cannot understand how comedy … can heighten the sense of high tragedy in Job's affliction”²¹ merely begs the question.

The problem of relating the comedy in “A Masque of Reason” to some coherent or ultimately serious point is perhaps not fully resolvable. It may help us put the question of the comic treatment in perspective, however, to point out that Frost does not create the comic view out of whole cloth.²² Certain aspects of the Biblical text itself have clear comic potential: the impossible excess of the afflictions; the pompousness of Elihu's attempt to give a definitive explanation of God's proceedings; and the pervasive disparity between God's supposed all-sufficiency and His need to shore Himself up by proving His follower's devotion; indeed, the disparity between mankind's need for reason and the fact of unreason. These are the disparities that in J. B. are projected in the jarring incongruity of a tragedy set in a circus tent. MacLeish emphasizes the tragic element, the pain and grief; Frost distances the pain to emphasize the incongruity. Or again, the Biblical text allows the possibility of regarding God as a morally questionable being. He makes wagers on human life and suffering, and His response to Job's heartfelt cry for understanding can be seen as a strong-arm display. To be sure, that is not the only possible interpretation, but it is one possibility. MacLeish, for instance, takes that view in stressing God's divine impassivity—from the human perspective, a deficiency indeed. The issue is taken seriously. In “A Masque of Reason,” it is taken as a joke. The idea of the wager, objectionable enough at best, is further downgraded to mere “showing off.” Job responds tolerantly, but not happily, ‘“Twas human of you”—a concession as disparaging of humanity as it is of the Deity.

Like J. B., and like Job itself, “A Masque of Reason” is indeterminate, but more radically so, in that it fails to reach adequate definition of its own issues.²³ In part, this is a function of Frost's choice of the perspective of the sequel, the forty-third chapter. Just as “A Masque of Reason” cannot be read as anti-masque without “A Masque of Mercy,” so it cannot be read as sequel without Job itself. As Peter Stanlis comments, “no one can understand his masque without a complete knowledge of the Book of Job.”²⁴ But even with that knowledge, the “Masque” can scarcely stand alone. Frost's expectation that both the story of Job and its theological issues will be implicit in his addendum through the reader's prior knowledge is not borne out. The issues need to be directly and explicitly dealt with if they are to become aesthetically operative in the work. Since they are not, the work never establishes a sense either of pain or of urgency in the search for adequate conceptions of deity. Both of these are fully present in the Biblical text and, it seems to me, in MacLeish's play.

The point here is not that emulation of the Bible produces literary merit. Given, however, that both works invite consideration as re-visions of either the Book of Job or the figure of Job, the fullness of the re-vision becomes a pertinent question. J. B. more nearly conveys the full Joban situation and its related issues, both the folk story and the poetic accusation of God. The interplay of its dual levels builds a tension similar to that of the interplay between the Biblical frame story and the poetic debates. The drama as a whole conveys an urgent sense that both the author and the reader have a stake in the outcome of the trials and the questioning. Frost's masque, operating in a generically appropriate cerebral mode, disavows any stake in the issue. But pain, indeed a grand immensity of pain, is not a concept that lends itself to detachment or to satire. The reader's prior knowledge of the prototype, with its immensity of pain and the grandeur of its truth-seeking, overwhelms and in a sense disallows Frost's revisionary undercutting.

My interest here has been not only in the two works themselves and the ways in which they appropriate the Book of Job, but also in the more elusive question of why the ancient Biblical text should continue to evoke emulation, comment, and re-vision. One fairly obvious reason is that the Biblical text asks some of the hardest questions that can be asked. The problem of suffering and its relation, if any, to justice, even without the problematic role of an active deity in that complex, has scarcely been resolved today any more than it had been in the sixth century b.c. (or whenever the Job poet worked). Sy Kahn criticizes J. B. because its questions “outreach the answers that the work provides.”²⁵ But the same could be said of the Biblical text itself. It, too, is radically indeterminate. It cannot provide answers to its own questions, only an appeal to divine authority. MacLeish appeals instead to human integrity and persistence. But neither resolves the question of the ultimate reasons for things. The very fact that the Book of Job betrays multiple hands, that it is a text in some ways divided against itself, invites the response of re-vision. As a source text, Job accommodates enormously varying responses, and can do so precisely because its own inconsistencies and uncertainties forestall closure.

Notes

On the extent and nature of Melville's engagement with Job, see my article “Herman Melville's Use of the Book of Job,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 162-74.
Most Biblical scholars now agree that the Book of Job as canonized is a combination of one great poet's work (or one great poet's and one or more lesser poets') with an ancient folk tale used as a “frame,” or a prologue and epilogue. See, for instance, Samuel Terrien and Paul Scherer's Introduction, Exposition, and Exegesis of The Book of Job in The Interpreter's Bible, Volume III of Twelve (New York: Abingdon Press, 1954), pp. 877-1198, and Robert Gordis' commentary in The Book of God and Man: A Study of Job (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965). Elizabeth Bieman, in “Faithful to the Bible in Its Fashion: MacLeish's J. B.,” Studies in Religion: A Canadian Journal, 4 (1974), 25-30, apparently feels no need to argue the point when she refers to the “Biblical folk narrative.” However, H. H. Rowley, editor of Job in The Century Bible: New Series (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1970), argues that the book is entirely a product of its author, not a compendium, and that to regard the frame as extraneous or a “blot” on the whole is “completely to misunderstand” (pp. 10-11). Rowley's Century Bible edition will be cited in this paper.
John H. Stroupe, in “The Masks of MacLeish's J. B.,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 15 (1970), 75, was correct in complaining that “far too much attention” had been given to the “Biblical source” of J. B. at the expense of critical attention to the work itself. Early reactions were taken up almost entirely with questions of content, whether MacLeish represented the Book of Job with theological correctness, adequate grandeur, etc. It is undeniable, however, that the Biblical source asserts its presence in MacLeish's text very insistently. The present study will consider the source, but will emphasize the formal evidences of the revisionary process.
W. D. White, “MacLeish's J. B.—Is It a Modern Job?” Mosaic, 4 (1970), 14. Similarly, Horace M. Kallen, The Book of Job As a Greek Tragedy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1959), p. xi.
Archibald MacLeish, J. B. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1958), p. 9. Page references for further citations will be provided in the text of my essay.
It is perhaps gratuitous to point out that Nickles's interpretation of the response to God's first speech out of the whirlwind is unparalleled among Biblical commentators. The standard interpretation is that Job is simply overwhelmed by God's display of inscrutable power. Some scholars, however, find that Job is comforted by God's act of making Himself present, as Job had asked, even though the nature of the response is so overwhelming. Gordis offers the distinctive and very interesting view that Job is awed not by the display of power, which he had acknowledged all along, but by the array of creatures, in the first speech, of no use to man and even, in the second speech, positively odious to man, which are nevertheless treasured by God. Gordis would thus resolve both the problem of Job's abasement and the problem of the second speech out of the whirlwind, the Behemoth and Leviathan speech, which some commentators have rejected on grounds of redundancy or a lower pitch of poetic achievement.
It is worth stressing that MacLeish's sense of what we must call the human condition is informed by an awareness of World War II atrocities and the atomic bomb. As to the universalizing of Job, Thornton Wilder earlier universalized Job in The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)—if indeed that play of Adam or Everyman can properly be considered a play on Job—but in so doing he discarded the idea of extraordinary suffering. The exact wording of Wilder's allusive title is significant: in Job 19:20 the phrase is “the skin of my teeth.”
White, p. 20.
Beiman, p. 27. Going further, Donna Gerstenberger explicitly labels the Voice “the voice of God.” See “Three Verse Playwrights and the American Fifties,” in Modern American Drama: Essays in Criticism, ed. William E. Taylor (De Land, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1968), p. 124.
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
Bieman, p. 29. In contrast, Sy Kahn calls the forsythia branch a symbol of “her own future fecundity, we might suppose, or life's.” See “The Games God Plays with Man: A Discussion of J. B.,” The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, ed. Warren French (De Land, FL: Everett/Edwards, Inc., 1970), pp. 249-59.
Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963). Heyward Brock, “Robert Frost's Masques Reconsidererd,” Renascence, 30 (1978), 137-51.
In a variant of the generic argument, Noam Flinker finds that “A Masque of Mercy” operates as both anti-masque and masque and judges “A Masque of Reason” to be inferior because it does not similarly encompass both qualities. For Flinker, the work fails because it is essentially an anti-masque without a masque. See “Robert Frost's Masques: The Genre and the Poems,” Papers on Language and Literature, 15 (1979), 59-72.
Robert Frost, “A Masque of Reason,” in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1949), pp. 587-608; here p. 602. Page references for further citations will be provided in the text of my essay.
Brower, p. 211.
Brock (p. 141) terms Frost's overall strategy in the work “a type of reductio ad absurdum.” This is a considerably different view from my own, however, in that Brock finds the target of the satire to be people who fail to take a correct attitude of reverent awe toward God. That is, he finds Frost's comedy directed at itself (hence a reductio ad absurdum) rather than at its apparent target, the behavior of God in the Job story and the religious framework of unquestioning belief that shaped the story.
Specifically, the plywood throne collapses when Thyatira asks why female prophets have generally been burned as witches while male prophets have been honored. It is unclear why Peter Stanlis calls this question, which would appear to be both legitimate and seriously disturbing, “ludicrous” and goes on to assert that she thereby provides “the comic equivalent of Job's serious case against God.” Stanlis' entire treatment of the character of Thyatira betrays sexist preconceptions. See “Robert Frost's Masques and the Classic American Tradition,” in Frost Centennial Essays, ed. Jac L. Tharpe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1974), pp. 441-68.
Brock, however, comments (p. 142) that “Job never really understands why God let him suffer,” as if he should or could.
Anna K. Juhnke, “Religion in Robert Frost's Poetry: The Play for Self-Possession,” American Literature, 36 (1964), 161.
Brock, p. 142.
Stanlis, p. 447.
Neil Simon's God's Favorite (1976) is another comic rendering of the Book of Job, which capitalizes on the unreasonableness of God's afflicting Job because He loves him so much. Simon's play otherwise leaves the central philosophical issues untouched. Robert K. Johnson, Neil Simon (Boston: Twayne, 1983), p. 87, calls it “the poorest play Simon has written.”
To illustrate the extreme variance in interpretation to which the work leaves itself open, Stanlis concludes that Frost appeals to “supernatural faith” (p. 459), while the abstract of a recent doctoral dissertation summarizes the message of “A Masque of Reason” as, “man must seek out his own salvation in a world that requires tremendous courage to act because the ‘odds’ are stacked against him”—in other words, a thoroughly humanistic conception. Linda L. Labin, “The Whale and the Ash-Heap: Transfigurations of Jonah and Job in Modern American Literature: Frost, MacLeish, and Vonnegut,” Dissertation Abstracts International, 41 (1981): 4713A.
Stanlis, p. 445.
Kahn, p. 255.

David Barber (essay date fall 1988)

PDF

SOURCE: Barber, David. “In Search of an ‘Image of Mankind’: The Public Poetry and Prose of Archibald MacLeish.” American Studies 29 (fall 1988): 31-56.

[In the following essay, Barber probes the strong social and public component of MacLeish's poetry, charting its development particularly over the period from 1930 to 1945.]

In the course of that long migration they had come of age as a people. They had conceived a good idea of themselves; they had dared to imagine and determine who they were.

—N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain¹

In 1931 Archibald MacLeish conceived a goal which he never afterward abandoned, though his idea of how to accomplish it changed: to identify or generate a vision for humanity, a motivating “image of mankind in which men can again believe.”² This image, both in its American and its worldwide versions, would express and thereby advance democracy, cultural coherence, “brotherhood,” and human potential.

Who could accomplish this daunting task? MacLeish's various answers correspond closely to the activities of his own multiple career. Primarily he thought of himself as a poet, and his first hope was always that through poetry or other forms of art the needed cultural vision would come. But he also worked as a journalist. He wrote for Henry Luce's Fortune in the thirties and was always writing essays for various magazines. His final attempt to locate and express his long sought vision appeared as a prose poem on the front page of the New York Times. Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944, as assistant secretary of state 1944-1946, professor at Harvard 1949-1962, MacLeish continually insisted that scholars had their public role to play, as did the producers of film and radio drama (MacLeish wrote radio plays, produced one film, and saw another film inspired by an essay of his).

Of the groups who have been left out, the most glaring omission—for a democrat and advocate of human “brotherhood”—is of course the common people, who are merely to receive the image and be improved thereby. Here is the great weakness of MacLeish's project, from which all the charges of arrogance, patrician mentality, dedication to big-brother government, and even fascism derived. Indeed he was inconsistent: he both embraced and denied democracy, especially during the Depression and World War II. These were also the years when he made his strongest claims for poetry as generator of the vision.

Of course, many deny that such a role is proper or possible for poetry, and MacLeish met his fiercest resistance when he enlisted art for a social purpose. His concept of poetry's public role could always be used against him by those who took poetry to be in its essence private, and government to contaminate all it touched. In 1960, when Henry Luce and others were stimulating a debate on “national purpose,” John Chamberlain argued that the idea of a single national purpose was coercive and false to the true nature of American society. “America Was Purposes,” said the title of his brief essay, playing on MacLeish's 1939 poem “America Was Promises.”

When America was purposes, not purpose, the young Archibald MacLeish walked out of a Boston law office to sit at the feet of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot and learn the art of poetry. In those days MacLeish had not yet succumbed to the idea that government is divinely ordained to compel individuals to a national purpose.³

In Chamberlain's view MacLeish as poet was separate from, and superior to, MacLeish as government sympathizer. The poet disappeared as the propagandist emerged. The effort to persuade the American people to a single “purpose” was somehow at odds with the nature of poetry and society's health. Public poetry, Chamberlain evidently believed, is a contradiction in terms.

Neither Chamberlain nor more recent American cultural critics and historians denied poets a place in pluralistic America. But Chamberlain appeared more at ease with American diversity than most commentators, who have sought common institutions, purposes, and values that can enhance both individual lives and cultural cohesion. Like MacLeish, they have wanted to revitalize the social ideals of “brotherhood” and citizenship. But few of them have seen a significant role in this enterprise for poets.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, for example, traced the fragile Idea of Fraternity in America (1973) and conceded that it is no longer possible to create a comprehensive fraternal tradition for American society. McWilliams hoped, however, that the ideal of citizenship, “eclipsed” in our time, might re-emerge, at least in enclaves, so that “a fraternal city can exist within an unfraternal polity.”⁴ Relying heavily on classic American authors for his evidence, he saw them as analysts but not as influences in creating the fraternal city. With similar goals Robert H. Wiebe described The Segmented Society, which is comprised of small social units including kinship networks, occupational groups, and ethnic affiliations. Wiebe traced the weakening public roles, activities, and influence of Americans, as political power has become concentrated in the hands of an elite. Wiebe saw little hope of reversing “the planned obsolescence of citizenship,”⁵ and he certainly did not look to writers and artists for help.

Somewhat more hopeful was Robert Nisbet, whose Twilight of Authority connected contemporary American problems to the general decline of the political state in the West. After presenting this sobering picture, he suggested ways to restore “authority” and therefore social health in the United States. He wanted to strengthen the social units that Wiebe has called “segments,” including kinship ties, regional loyalties, and voluntary associations. Nisbet rejected Plato's (and MacLeish's) unitary state in favor of the pluralistic society conceived by Aristotle and Edmund Burke, in which family, neighborhood, local and regional institutions provide (as Burke wrote) “little images of the great country in which the heart has found something it could fill.”⁶ Like McWilliams and Wiebe, Nisbet saw no major societal role for poets and artists.

In Habits of the Heart (1985) Robert Bellah and four associates examined the problems caused by American individualism, which they feared has become “cancerous.” They explored ways to regain a cohesive, sustaining spirit of citizenship. One of their many ways of verifying cultural fragmentation was to establish that poetry cannot portray our society as unified, and that contemporary poets cannot speak on public issues as members of the community. The authors took as authority Wendell Berry, who claimed (in Bellah's words) that in a fragmentary, specialized society controlled by science, “poets can no longer be public persons, so that even when, as of late, some of them have turned to protest, it is a private protest.”⁷

And therefore it is an ineffectual, unheard protest. But not everyone agrees that poets, even today, are barred from an effective public role. Cary Nelson and Robert von Hallberg have challenged this negative view. Nelson saw American poetry as in its essence public because it presents us with a vision of possibility: “Our poetry continually addresses the world at large … [with] a dream of the people we might become; it therefore rarely pretends finality, it prophesies possibilities.”⁸ Von Hallberg asserted that public poets exist and thrive and that public poems, “far from deserving the stigma of inauthenticity, … honor the loftiest ambitions poets and critics have traditionally voiced for the art.”⁹ Von Hallberg accepted Matthew Arnold's idea of the “classic national author,” fully attuned to the spirit of his or her culture, and cited Olson, Ginsberg, Lowell and others as aspiring classic national American authors (2-3). And he argued that at least as recently as the 1950s, there was a strong sense of cultural coherence in the United States; American poets were significant in expressing that coherence, and even now many excellent American poets express “the tone of the center” of our culture, to a wide audience. These poets draw from the energy of our culture while maintaining “an ironic, sophisticated attitude” that prevents “facile jingoism” (6). Nelson and von Hallberg thus opposed critics like Christopher Clausen, who argued in 1981 that American poets have failed to find “a successful way of reintroducing poetry into the mainstream of culture” and whose efforts to do so have “merely deepened their own solitude.”¹⁰

It is by no means established that poets do not, cannot, or should not have an influential public voice when they deal with American society and public events. Nor are these questions settled in regard to social scientists or humanists. Archibald MacLeish's sense of the public role and responsibility of poets is not entirely out of date, nor is his parallel insistence on the social obligations of scholars and all whose tools are words and images. The authors of Habits of the Heart, for example, felt compelled to argue that sociologists should be—as sociologists—participating members of society. They concluded the book with an essay on “Social Science as Public Philosophy,” in which they argued that “social science is not a disembodied enterprise. It is a tradition, or set of traditions, deeply rooted in the philosophical and humanistic (and … the religious) history of the West” (301). Habits of the Heart urged social scientists to help forge a new American cohesion through shared values that root individuals constructively within society.

Similarly, historians are debating whether and how to increase their public audience and contribute to our public life. Side-by-side articles in the June 1986 Journal of American History recently helped to define the issue for American historians. John Bodnar warned against simplistic synthesis when historians confront ideologically weighted subjects, and especially when they do so in the employment of public agencies such as the National Park Service.¹¹ Examining recent historical studies of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, Bodnar reminded historians that their work “is not tied solely to the past” but may serve “the maintenance of power and influence in the present” by creating an oversimple and distorted image of the past (147). Association with government and its special ideologies greatly intensifies the threat. Alongside this warning against the wrong kind of synthesis and public influence, Thomas Bender argued that historians must try to produce valid synthetic interpretations of American society.¹² Historians have lost their public and therefore their place in contemporary culture, he asserted, because of the narrow specialization of recent historical studies. Only by acknowledging a “public debt” to tell the public how they envision American society as a whole: “our interpretations of how our society and nation works” (136), can historians arrest the “declining significance of history in the general intellectual culture of our time” (120). Bender offered a framework for the task, not a guiding image but a “quasi-event,” “a plot that is adequate to our proliferating knowledge about society[:] … the making of public culture” (122). In a kindred spirit Lynne V. Cheney, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has begun an inquiry into “the scholar and society” by examining the theory and practice of literary scholars.¹³

No one today could recover, or would wish to recover, the innocence of MacLeish's visionary ambition in 1931. But the issues in which MacLeish's search involved him are hardly dead: the nature of American society with its tension between citizenship and individualism, the public roles of poets, artists, and scholars, the danger that association with government will distort one's vision and values. MacLeish dealt with them all as he explored the public roles first of poets and artists, then also of historians, journalists, film makers, librarians, and humanists generally. Should they let society's welfare guide their judgments and efforts? Should they and can they influence society's vision and direction? MacLeish answered these questions differently during four main periods of his life: his youth to about 1920, his period of social withdrawal until 1930, his major period of “public poetry,” until 1941, and the forty years following. This paper traces the evolution of his answers, concentrating on the period 1930-1945, when the Depression and World War II underscored the issue of art's social function. Now, when the literature of the Vietnam War has again focused attention on this issue, MacLeish's theory and practice can help us decide what public literature can and cannot do.

“I do not believe there is a school in the world that does more to produce moral earnestness and manly self-reliance than Hotchkiss,” Martha Hilliard MacLeish wrote to the headmaster of her son's school in 1909.¹⁴ Mrs. MacLeish clearly did her own part in developing these qualities in him, as well as a sense of social responsibility that included a certain noblesse oblige. These traits appeared early, as when he protested, to the Yale Daily News in 1914, irreverent comments about Nathan Hale: “To mock his supreme sacrifice is to mock what most of us hold worthy of reverence.”¹⁵ Patriotic loyalties forbade disrespect. Yale students had obligations, and so did poets, whose fraternity MacLeish always aspired to join. “I shall never attempt poetry,” he wrote to a friend in 1916, “till there is in me a great truth crying to be preached. Yes—pedagogy in verse—even so!” Although his reaction to World War I eventually destroyed, for a few years, this desire to teach and to have an effect on America public life, he could still declare in 1919 that “It is not the practice of the idea but its expression in terms that convince that produces change” and in 1922: “Political science and such poetry as I really wish to write will fuse.”¹⁶

Having married in 1916, MacLeish entered the U.S. Army in 1917 and served in France while rising from private to captain. The combat death of his brother Kenneth contributed to his judgment of World War I as “an awful, awful, failure. A hideous joke.”¹⁷ Perhaps this disillusionment influenced his decision in 1923 to leave his social obligation in Boston and devote himself to writing poetry in Paris about isolated individuals. But all his statements about the move suggest that his desire to be a poet, and his growing conviction that to continue practicing law would destroy his poetic goals, were the primary motivators. “I knew this much before I went: If I hadn't gone when I did—that was about the last possible moment—I was thirty-one years old in 1923, … I would have continued to be a lawyer; I would have had to be.”¹⁸

And yet his sense of social loyalty and obligation was not really dead but merely transferred onto an abstraction he called poetry,

I was writing, yes [in Boston], but out of the margins of my life, and the work showed it: lines like letters from a brief vacation in another country. And though I had solved, as I thought, the problem of supporting a family and writing verse, I did not feel I had solved anything. If I had, why should I wake at morning with that sense of owing? Owing what? To whom?¹⁹

He was at this time in the process of creating an entity, “poetry,” and transferring his allegiance to it. “It was the art I owed” (75). Here, undoubtedly, the effects of World War I were important. In the temporary loss of his social ideal, he kept the societal commitment alive by putting a reified art in society's place and pledging his allegiance to it. The many critics who later in the thirties complained that MacLeish jumped with suspicious haste from “pure” art into public poetry did not know the internal logic of his transformations.

In his Paris sojourn from 1923 to 1928, MacLeish was as usual a little behind the leaders: he left the United States the year that Malcolm Cowley returned. Like Cowley, he went to Europe partly because he felt nostalgic toward American life before 1916 and despaired of ever finding it. Like Cowley he discovered in Europe a new sense of America and American themes.²⁰ And although in the mid-twenties he wrote poem after poem about solitary individuals, their sense of void was largely sadness at lacking a place in a cohesive, supportive society. The most solitary of his characters was a Mr. Beck, who, alone in the natural world, mourns the loss of religion and human relations. Before MacLeish finally succeeded in publishing Biography of Mr. Beck the Suicide, he gave it a whole new public dimension by incorporating one of the most dynamic figures of the intellectual and cultural life of the period. He retitled the poem Einstein!²¹ Gradually a new sense of connection to the public world was infiltrating his devotion to pure “poetry.” Well before returning to the United States in 1928, MacLeish was planning a major poem on an American theme, which eventually became Conquistador. In 1928 he returned to America, as he said later, “in every possible sense.”²²

With him he brought the rudiments of a program designed to coordinate his personal ambitions with his wide-ranging sense of obligation. Maintaining his devotion to “poetry,” he was also regaining his loyalty to society. This alliance of allegiances would allow him to fulfill his youthful goal to preach through poetry. Having gone to Paris to satisfy an obligation to the entity “poetry,” he now saw poetry as both receiver of a debt (from poets) and ower of one (to society). Poetry's obligation, he was convinced by 1931, was to provide a cultural vision. The old romantic individualism was a dead concept. “The individual is no longer the unit, the sacred integer, the solemn end. He is a fraction. He is an agent” who “can only realize himself in his social role.”²³The Waste Land, MacLeish declared, had showed us the old dead world of individualism. Now we needed a vision of a world in which individuals were genuinely free but found their significance in community—realized themselves in their social role. Poetry could provide this vision. “Poetry, which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt—an image of mankind in which men can again believe,” (216, emphasis added).

If poetry owed such a vision, then poets had a public role to play. And in the act of fulfilling a social obligation, a poet could satisfy personal ambitions.²⁴

From the early thirties through World War II MacLeish was perhaps the most controversial poet in America. There were non-political reasons: his tone struck many as pompous and self-righteous; the sincerity of his views was attacked because he changed them often;²⁵ his poems were criticized because he followed stylistic and thematic leads of Pound and Eliot. Some thought him ambitious, opportunistic, and self-serving. Edmund Wilson eventually summed up such objections in his brilliant, vicious “Omelet of A. MacLeish”:

These and the Cantos of Pound: O how they came pat!
Nimble at other men's arts how I picked up the trick of it
.....A clean and clever lad
                                                  who is doing
                                                                                          his best
                                                                                                              to get on. …(26)

But the core of controversy over MacLeish was at once aesthetic and political, and in the thirties especially it involved his theory and practice of “public poetry.” What public poetry is, and what good public poetry is, are disputed questions. According to Patrick Cosgrave, Robert Lowell is a public poet who “burns to judge men and affairs against an immutable and objective standard. The work is public, too, in a more obvious sense, in that much of it deals with the world of politics and public affairs.”²⁷ Public poetry need not, however, be fiercely judgmental, and it may cast a wider cultural net than politics and affairs. In some way it must engage the values and aspirations of a culture. Given this quality, what others—besides reaching a wide audience—make public poetry successful? The answer depends partly on whether we take the poet's evident purpose into account. Judith Nantrell asserts that certain public poems of Rafael Alberti must be evaluated for their “instrumental rather than aesthetic value. The reader must, therefore, learn to approach the poem in a new way, namely as a verbal means to obtain a specific political end.”²⁸ But few readers will be willing to divorce aesthetics from political purpose in this way, or to see poems merely as instruments for political ends. Thomas R. Edwards argues for a more complex instrumentality:

If no new perception of the public case is achieved, the poem is dead; yet complete transformation makes the poem only a glibber version of the politician's own magical rhetoric, which smoothes all conflict into the glassy calm of easy solution. … It is the note of uncertainty or even dismay that I am looking for, the imagination's troubled recognition of its own involvement in the spectacle of power.²⁹

Similarly, von Hallberg insists that “poets who wish to speak from the center must accept a measure of responsibility for established institutions whose acts are beyond the control of any single writer. Centrist poets, that is, must live with their complicity” (4). MacLeish indeed accepted such responsibility. The problem was he demanded that others accept responsibility also—his idea of it. And seldom was he either flexible or reflective. This is why MacLeish's public poetry of the thirties (also his public prose) usually lacked power. It was true, as Marcus Klein asserted, that for MacLeish and others, public history during the Depression made possible “a refreshment of poetry” and “a new literary authenticity.”³⁰ But MacLeish's poetry of that era did not show a mind exploring complexity or its own relation to power; it did often smooth “conflict into the glassy calm of easy solution.” Nor is there much evidence that his poems changed minds or influenced behavior. His poems did not establish a sense of personal authority that would command assent.³¹ He did not quite fit the role, and Louise Bogan was correct, though snide, in saying that, “His manner still irrevocably colored by private pathos, he came out for ‘public speech.’ The result was a curious one.”³² MacLeish was clearly one of Cary Nelson's “first” (naive, idealistic, pre-Vietnam) poets who imposed a unitary vision of America on the actual culture he lived in. It is the intensity, not the success, of his effort to relate poet, poem, and society that gives him his interest. Throughout the thirties MacLeish never deviated from his main point, that poetry should, and more than any other cultural force could, provide a common, sustaining vision of human hopes and aspirations. It took him a few years, however, to realize just how this idea implicated the poet in political activity: activity as poet.

At first he seemed to believe that the poet should not take sides on social issues. “Invocation to the Social Muse” (1932) portrayed poets as

Whores, Fraulein: poets, Fraulein, are persons of
Known vocation following troops: they must sleep with
Stragglers from either prince and of both views.
The rules permit them to further the business of neither.(33)

Readers have always assumed that the speaker represents MacLeish's view. But the poem bears ambiguous witness; it reads most convincingly, I believe, as an ironic protest against “the rules” and poets' prostituted condition. Read this way, the poem certainly does take a position—it denies its presumed refusal to take political positions. Another poem from his supposedly pre-commitment period, “Background With Revolutionaries” (1933), takes a strong anti-Communist stance, and the volume in which it appears, Frescoes For Mr. Rockefeller's City, makes political judgments throughout. Why then is MacLeish considered to have refused during the early thirties to take stands? The reason is that in his prose he was arguing that the purity of art needed to be defended from contamination by social and political allegiances. His prose did not always seem to know what his poetry was doing. Or possibly he was debating with himself in print, from poems to essays and back again, trying to discover his own true beliefs. But readers took each change in his position as final, an understandable reaction to his prose style, since MacLeish wrote with a tone of great finality, as though he expected each word to be carved in rock.

MacLeish's prose self, at least, did not firmly decide until 1934 whether poets should take sides on social issues. We can see the development of his thinking in two essays published only two months apart in that year. In “The Poetry of Karl Marx” (February), MacLeish defined the poet's social role. “The real question,” he wrote,

is not whether the poet should know and draw upon the existing world of his time, but whether he should know and draw upon that world as an artist with an artist's single and arrogant demand of artistic significance or as a partisan with the ulterior and calculated interest of the champion of a cause. Briefly the real question is whether the poet should serve a cause or serve an art. … He will choose one alternative or the other and cannot possibly choose both.³⁴

Partisanship is incompatible with art, and the poet is only to be trusted when acting as poet with “artistic disinterestedness” (49), that is, resisting mere propaganda. Art precludes championing a cause. On this point MacLeish, having already changed his mind in poetry, was about to do so in prose.

“Preface to an American Manifesto” (April) signaled the change. MacLeish concluded that if poets were to present a sustaining vision of humanity, then one cause demanded allegiance. “What is above all necessary to the free writer, is to consider … the kind of world he himself would like to bring about.”³⁵ For MacLeish only one such vision sufficed: “That world for all artists, for all men of spirit is the democratic world, the world in which a man is free to do his own work” (20). MacLeish felt he could devote himself to the cause of democracy without violating the integrity of the artist because he saw democratic freedom as a precondition of art itself. Artists who reject democracy also deny their art in longing for a “social womb” in which “the blood of a social organism is pumped through their hearts in substitution for their own blood, and the thoughts of a social mind are dreamed through their brains in substitution for their own thoughts” (21). Democracy permits, while fascism and communism destroy, the artist's individuality. Therefore, MacLeish believed that although the artist's choice to defend democracy is free, it is also necessary, since he owes to it his existence as an artist.

The growth of fascism in the early thirties had convinced MacLeish that poets must defend democracy. Perhaps the charge from the Left that he himself had fascist leanings influenced the intensity of his pronouncements. This charge originated in reactions by John Strachey and Michael Gold to “Invocation to the Social Muse,” in which MacLeish attacked rich bankers, and “Background With Revolutionaries,” in which a name (Comrade Levine, later changed to Devine) and a passage of dialect (“D'glassic historic objective broves you are brudders”) exposed him to the charge of bias against the lower classes, foreigners, and Jews. Strachey wrote: “Now where have these two emotions of revolt—of revolt against the bankers and of revolt against anything foreign—appeared together before? The answer is that they have appeared in the rank and file of every fascist movement in the world.” Strachey and Mike Gold, who made a similar accusation, allowed that MacLeish's fascism was probably unconscious.³⁶ According to Daniel Aaron, the Left ceased to call MacLeish a fascist and anti-Semite in 1935, when he supported a strike against the Ohrbach Department Store and showed other signs of right thinking.³⁷ (The charge of fascism, however, would be revived again in 1939.)

MacLeish now set out to show why and how poets might involve themselves effectively in public life, through what he called “public speech”: poems directed at the people in order to affirm democracy. For the next several years MacLeish kept arguing that the nature of poetry, the demands of the period, and the people's need required poets to perform this social and political role. The best poets in most ages, as he argued in 1938, had always been public poets anyway, had “known more of their time—and not only of its spirit but of its economics and its politics—than those among whom they lived. … Their poetry was public speech. It reached conclusions.”³⁸ But the nineteenth century reduced the poet to private experience, and although modern poetry started to regain poetry's public scope, Eliot and Pound went only a little way in this direction; MacLeish felt that even Yeats

has moved only briefly and unwillingly at the point where the poetic revolution crosses the revolution in the social and political and economic structure of the post-war world, which so deeply concerns our generation in this country. But it is precisely at that point that the greatest victories of modern poetry may be won.

(67, emphasis added)

By “greatest victories” MacLeish could only mean, in 1938, victories against fascism. For poets, living in “a revolutionary time in which the public life has washed in over the dikes of private existence,”³⁹ there was really no other subject. The destiny of the poet was to portray the public-private world of democracy under siege. The duty of poetry was to help rescue this world.

This was public poetry at its most instrumental. To accomplish such a task the poet must reach a wide audience with a compelling vision of democratic America. Fascism and communism were threats only because the people had lost faith in their democratic traditions and in themselves. The poets' “image of mankind in which men can again believe” would revitalize their faith in themselves and in the democratic tradition of which “the people” are the core.

MacLeish attempted such an image in his art with the verse play Panic (1935) and the poems of Public Speech (1936). Public Speech, the less successful effort, affirmed values that could sustain us in an imperiled time. Thus “Pole Star” asserts that love, in a world of oppression, must become “like hatred and as bright,” in order to fight the oppressors.⁴⁰ The point is well taken, but the poem is too obviously a package of symbol plus statement. “Speech to Those Who Say Comrade” argues that true brotherhood comes only from living and suffering together: “Hunger and hurt are the great begetters of brotherhood” (303). The poem identifies this need for brotherhood, but it neither dramatizes the need nor explores the nature of brotherhood between social classes. Will such brotherhood survive the immediate crisis?⁴¹ “Speech to a Crowd” exhorts the people not to rely passively on authorities. “Tell yourselves the earth is yours to take!” (308) But MacLeish, in this and later poems, could not specify just what to take or how. He could articulate the general “image of mankind” that people needed in order to change their lives. But he seldom reached beyond surface statement and quick sketch. This inability to dramatize a precise, positive “image of mankind” is the core weakness in all of MacLeish's public poetry.

In his plays of the thirties, however, MacLeish framed his pronouncements within vivid dramatic situations, and the effects were at times compelling. If he could not forcefully fix an “image of mankind” in the minds of his viewers, hearers, and readers, he could at least dramatize the need for such an image. MacLeish's first attempt was Panic (1935), a play about a powerful financier whose faith in the American democratic system is undermined by the despair around him. McGafferty initially has hope and courage and the will to fight:

What can we do but face it—raise the cash—
Carry the wrecked ones till the wind blows over?
.....It's been done before
Our fathers did it.(42)

And he despises the fainthearted who reject “Man's burden of living their forefathers won for them!— / Rid of the liberty!—rid of the hard choice!” (48). But McGafferty is surrounded by voices of fear: terrified bankers, a mistress who lures him toward a totally private existence, and a chorus of desperate men and women. Then a blind Marxist prophet appears, to whom the “fathers” are simply those who set up the system of capitalistic corruption. Now, he claims, the course of history is set; the doom is certain. When McGafferty, unsettled by all these negating voices, hears that another banker, whom he thought the strongest of all, has killed himself, he despairs also and jumps out the window. Panic thus demonstrates how the lack of faith and will can destroy. It shows that Americans need to believe in themselves and their history—by showing what happens when they do not.

Seeing the fate of Panic on Broadway—three performances, one underwritten by leftists so they could argue with him after the play—MacLeish turned to radio, which he thought would reach “an infinitely greater number of people” and then shape “sections of that greater number into a living audience which the poet and his actors can feel.”⁴³ His enthusiasm for the medium was short-lived, but The Fall of the City (1937) and Air Raid (1938) have genuine dramatic power. These verse plays were instrumental public poetry in that they did in fact alert many people to the dangers of events in Europe. The Fall of the City was one of the first dramatic hits in radio history. MacLeish in old age recalled “that CBS figured out, with great astonishment, that The Fall of the City [in two performances, from New York and Hollywood] reached an audience which was well over one million souls.”⁴⁴The Fall of the City also had historical foresight or luck (somewhat like the film The China Syndrome in preceding the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island): it anticipated the Anschluss in Austria.⁴⁵

Like Panic, The Fall of the City (1937) presented the people as impotent in the face of a threat which with resolute action they could overcome. Lacking faith in liberty, they give up before the fight, crying:

The city is doomed!
There's no holding it!
Let the conqueror have it! It's his!
The age is his! It's his century!
Our institutions are obsolete.
He marches a mile while we sit in a meeting,

leaving the Announcer [Orson Welles in the radio broadcast] to conclude:

The people invent their oppressors: they wish to believe in them.
They wish to be free of their freedom: released from their liberty:—
The long labor of liberty ended!
                                                                                                              They lie there!(46)

Thus MacLeish, anticipating events about to unfold in Europe, located the cause of the contemporary crisis in a weakness of the people themselves. His other radio play, Air Raid (1938), inspired by Picasso's Guernica,⁴⁷ presented the people as simply victims who mistakenly believe that the war will pass them by. Air Raid was neither so satisfying nor so successful as The Fall of the City, and MacLeish thereafter lost interest in radio. Perhaps he felt that the result did not justify the effort; perhaps he felt the frustrations of collaborative production, a mild audio form of the trauma many writers were having in Hollywood. In any case, his radio plays were significantly innovative, combining poetry with radio technology in order to impart the elusive “vision of mankind” and of America to a large and new audience.

Soon after abandoning this route, he undertook another collaborative effort, this time combining his verse with a collection of Depression photographs. He wrote a poem as “accompaniment in words” to photographs.⁴⁸ I do not know where MacLeish got the inspiration for this effort. Erskine Caldwell's pioneering collaboration with Margaret Bourke-White appeared in 1937, but in 1937 MacLeish already was writing the text for Land of the Free (1938). Perhaps the idea came from his Fortune boss, Henry Luce, who in 1936 sent James Agee and Walker Evans to roam the South collecting materials from which eventually came Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). MacLeish's work was not an active collaboration of that kind; rather, he began with a set of Farm Security Administration photographs, by Dorothea Lange and several others, and composed his “accompaniment,” “a book of photographs illustrated by a poem” (89), in private. The book is a multi-media effort involving poetry, photography and a hint of film, for in the text the poem is called “the sound track.”⁴⁹ In any case, the poem is intentionally subdued to the visual images and should be read in this context.

Land of the Free presented victims of the Depression, demoralized by the loss of their land and therefore their identity and autonomy.

Now that the land's behind us we get wondering
We wonder if the liberty was land and the
Land's gone: the liberty's back of us.

(29)

However, these people were now receptive to a deeper understanding:

We wonder if the liberty is done:
The dreaming is finished
We can't say
We aren't sure
Or if there's something different men can dream
                    [facing photograph of a political rally]
Or if there's something different men can mean by
Liberty. …
                    [facing photograph of a vote at an open-air labor meeting]
Or if there's liberty a man can mean that's
Men: not land
          [facing photograph of a large, cheering group, with an American flag prominently waving].

(84-87)

The people were thus ready to receive an image of themselves in which they could believe, and MacLeish gave them a well focused political one. In the same year his essay “In Challenge Not Defense” considered who, given the people's inability to believe in themselves, could stimulate in them vision and desire.⁵⁰ Not economists: they can analyze the past but have no foresight. Not the church: it merely refers earthly problems to another world. From this problem “only poetry can deliver us” (215). Why only poetry? Because

Poetry alone imagines, and imagining creates, the world that men can wish to live in and make true. For what is lacking in the crisis of our time is only this: this image. Its absence is the crisis. … Once we know the thing that we desire to be[,] the things that we must do will follow of themselves.

(218)

So he challenged “all those who quarrel about the means by which the people shall be saved to hold their tongues and be silent until the poets shall have given the people speech” (218).

Perhaps, if pressed, MacLeish would allow that “poetry” might include anyone whose work depended on words and images. But no matter: MacLeish was insinuating that some sort of aesthetic and moral elite wanted, as John Chamberlain was to say two decades later, to “compel individuals to a national purpose.” MacLeish's challenge was of course rejected. In the next issue of Poetry Harold Rosenberg found only insolence and contempt in MacLeish's view of the people, not to mention his dismissal of “those who quarrel about the means.” No new image or vision is needed, Rosenberg argued. “There is no lack of desire in the broad masses—desire for peace, for security, for decent living conditions, for social participation. There is no lack of conviction in the people that they want freedom and education. It is the means they are seeking.”⁵¹ MacLeish could not refute Rosenberg's point about “the means.” He could only state his preference for poets against Marxists as shapers of the American people's imagination (thus asserting that Rosenberg too was unwilling to let the people formulate their own vision).⁵² It was a fair retort.

MacLeish tried once more, before his changing interests and government positions ended this phase of his writing, to present in a poem that elusive image of America for Americans to live by. America Was Promises (1939) relied on evocations of the “fathers” (Jefferson, Adams, Paine), of American places, of the “promises” of America and their betrayal. America was promises, and still is: “Never were there promises as now.” “Dead men in the pits” of Spain, Poland, China are telling us: “The promises are theirs who take them.”⁵³ The promises are to us, and if we don't take them, “others” will. But what are the promises? Who are the “others”? Who, for that matter, are “we”? The poem's vague declarations generate frustration with each line, and in the end it resorts to pleading:

America is promises to
Take!
America is promises to
Us
To take them
Brutally
With love but
Take them.

Oh believe this!

(331)

What action is required? Revolution, union organizing, the New Deal? Poetic public speech of this sort had little power, and it was probably fortunate that MacLeish's poetic career took a forced vacation in 1939, when President Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress. The urgency of the war in Europe in 1939 and 1940 also drew him away from poetry into arguments in prose, which he felt the time demanded of him. MacLeish had been a fervent interventionist for some time; he had taken the appropriate lesson from the Spanish Civil War. He had also long since worked through his bitterness regarding World War I, and he rejected the isolationist thesis that the developing conflict in Europe was merely repeating that war. In these qualities he was unusual among intellectuals, and his official position now reinforced his isolation. As poet, former writer for Fortune, and Librarian of Congress, MacLeish was triply suspect of whoring after strange and incompatible gods.⁵⁴ All of these qualities magnified the impact of two essays of 1940, The Irresponsibles and “Postwar Writers and Prewar Readers,” which attacked American artists and scholars as unprepared and unwilling to face the fascist threat.

The Irresponsibles was the first influential assault on intellectuals for failing to oppose fascism, an offensive continued over the next few years by Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Bernard De Voto, and other culture-critics with strong unitary visions of American society.⁵⁵ Writers had abandoned the sustaining values of Western civilization, MacLeish maintained, and looked at the world “as a god sees it—without morality, without care, without judgment.”⁵⁶ They had failed, that is, to support the one “image” that gave hope for mankind in that troubled time: democracy. They ignored the public world. Creative writers withdrew into their feelings, and scholars (MacLeish had mainly historians in mind) into their ideology of scientific objectivity. Meanwhile the Nazis were trying to destroy the world that allowed these writers to exist.

MacLeish's target included all those who live by words and ideas, and his guiding principle was that in a time of crisis, words and ideas are weapons. He attacked “scholars and writers,” the scholars being mostly historians and the writers mostly novelists. They had failed to see the real danger in Europe, or, if they saw it, had done nothing with their distinctive weapons, their words.

The writer-artist will write a bloody story about the expense of blood. He will present the face of agony as it has rarely been presented. But not even then will he take the weapon of his words and carry it to the barricades of intellectual warfare, to the storming of belief, the fortifying of conviction where alone this fighting can be won.

(33)

The Irresponsibles, itself a work of propaganda, blatantly called for the production of propaganda. Its notoriety was greatly increased because “Postwar Writers and Prewar Readers,” published a few days before Hitler took Paris, named names.⁵⁷ Dos Passos and Hemingway were among those who had undermined the war effort: “The books they wrote in the years just after the war,” MacLeish asserted, “have done more to disarm democracy in the face of fascism than any other single influence” (790). Now at least and at last writers must do their duty. MacLeish made this point in an ominous way. He identified himself as a former member of this offending group (thus becoming the only poet in it) and conceded that therefore “I have no right to judge them”—after having judged them rather severely. Then he suggested a solution:

Perhaps writers, having so great a responsibility to the future, must not weaken the validity of the Word even when the deceptions of the Word have injured them. Perhaps the luxury of the complete confession, the uttermost despair, the farthest doubt should be denied themselves by writers living in any but the most ordered and settled times.

(790)

Finally, MacLeish insinuated that those opposing his point of view were leaning toward treason.

Those who wish to see us weak will employ every means of deception, of misrepresentation and of fraud to keep us so. They will suggest to us that we cannot defend ourselves against fascism without ourselves becoming fascists. … They will tell us that we cannot make judgments of good and evil without becoming ourselves burners of books and regimenters of men's minds.

(790, emphasis added)

This pre-emptive strike of course misfired. No one was going to argue that the only way to fight fascism was to become fascist. The response was rather that some people—government officials, for example—seemed willing to use fascist tactics in fighting freedom. MacLeish's own guns were turned back on him. He appeared to want to burn books and regiment minds in the interests of a party line. “That is,” Edmund Wilson responded in parody of MacLeish's position, “if you have ever suffered from falling a victim to somebody or other's phony propaganda, you should not expose it, but let it go on duping others, for fear of destroying the integrity of ‘the Word.’” And Wilson found it unsettling, “at this moment of strain and excitement, to hear the Librarian of Congress talking about ‘dangerous’ books. … He makes it plain that he thinks certain kinds of writers should be discouraged from giving expression to certain kinds of ideas.” Morton Dauen Zabel judged that “an indictment of writers and scholars equal in severity to this has seldom been heard in public places in modern times, in America or elsewhere. Perhaps the maledictions of Hitler and Goebbels alone have surpassed it within living memory.” And Burton Rascoe, hatchet man for The American Mercury, found it “rather appalling having him suddenly cast, or self-cast, in the role of Fuhrer. … Archie in his newly fashionable incarnation has the same idea as Hitler but doesn't know how to express it.”⁵⁸ MacLeish was now a fascist with a vengeance: almost the archfiend himself.

He wanted to stimulate voluntary restraint. He believed deeply in the national need to mobilize public opinion. How did he suffer such lapses of judgment? Perhaps his new public position combined unfortunately with his moral earnestness and social conscience to distort his perspective. MacLeish, however, had a long history of making impulsive and injudicious statements, some of which I have been quoting, and he clearly enjoyed a fight. Beneath the sombre moralist was a playful controversialist, an aspect that MacLeish first expressed publically in 1923, when with Lawrence Mason he perpetrated a hoax in the North American Review.⁵⁹ The most important reason, however, is that MacLeish fell into that common trap of government officials: identifying the government with the nation, and then using the implied power of the government to intimidate. This tendency only increased when he began in 1941 to direct Roosevelt's information and propaganda agencies, the Office of Facts and Figures and then the Office of War Information.⁶⁰ For example, he was advising the press in 1942 to “police itself, not only to avoid the necessity of a policing by government which neither government nor the press desires, but also to … perform the duties it has traditionally undertaken in American life.”⁶¹

Frequently he made his case by blatant name-calling, as when insisting on the duty “of the loyal and honest press to hunt out and to expose by every instrument of truth the skulkers in the journalistic ambush—the cowardly, half-hearted publishers, and the venal editors of their staffs, who use for their own disloyal purposes the cover of the noblest right that free men boast of.”⁶² In claiming that recent Nazi influence in American political campaigns “aimed at the destruction of confidence in the elected officers of the people—and thus at the destruction of confidence in elected government itself,”⁶³ MacLeish suggested that criticizing governmental officials amounted to attacking democracy. Morton Zabel responded fairly to MacLeish's rhetoric by quoting Montaigne, “that there are some things not allowed, even in fighting an enemy, … that all things are not permissible to a man of honor because he happens to be in the service of his king, his country, and the laws.”⁶⁴

In a time of great national stress, MacLeish's idea of public speech had degenerated into manipulative, coercive public speeches which no desire to persuade or to stimulate debate could excuse. Nevertheless, it is difficult now to agree with Zabel, Wilson and others that MacLeish's zeal flowed solely from an egoistic ambition energized by the exhilaration of public office. MacLeish believed that fascism threatened democracy, that the threat to democracy imperiled art, that words are weapons with unique persuasive powers, and that artists and intellectuals were obligated to use these powers to defend democracy—and so ultimately the world of art and ideas. His impulses toward duty and self-interest collaborated in a primarily admirable effort to serve both art and his country. These qualities served him well, for example, in his tenure at the Library of Congress, where, according to his colleague David C. Mearns, MacLeish's “spirit of mission was contagious; he gave libraries (and particularly his own Library) a consciousness of new duties and new responsibilities.”⁶⁵

But in what sense the spirit of mission is “contagious” depends on the relation between sender, message and receiver. When the leader of librarians attempted to guide both the people and the intellectuals, he learned what a delicate and thankless task he had undertaken: many perceived his spirit of mission as a disease.

III

MacLeish always maintained that poetry has an important social role. Early during World War II, however, he ceased to think of poetry as the primary agent of social change. As late as 1941 he was claiming that

What a people can become is the accomplishment in act of what a people can conceive. What the people of a nation can conceive is what their artists and their poets can make actual to them and thus possible. It is the power truly to inhabit the present—the power to inhabit the possibilities of their own lives—which the poets of a people can confer upon them.⁶⁶

But in the same year he tacitly acknowledged the inadequacy of his own public poetry. The occasion was his introduction to a collection of patriotic statements by recent immigrants.⁶⁷ MacLeish had been asked, he said, to make a statement, originally a radio broadcast, “because I had written a poem called America Was Promises which concerned itself with this country and the people who came to it.” He went on to explicate the poem, first giving the meaning of the title and then of the whole poem. He outlined the major sections and characters, finally applying the poem's themes to recent events in Europe. No poet, I am confident, would do this to his or her own poem believing that it could stand on its own, or could communicate as a prose paraphrase could not. MacLeish could have reprinted the poem, but in paraphrasing and explicating it, he showed that his faith in the special power of public poetry, if not public prose, had greatly diminished.

After 1941, therefore, his claims for poetry's social function moderated greatly. Perhaps his work in the government propaganda agencies showed him the power of other means of public persuasion. As he criticized the press for not supporting the war effort fully, he may have concluded that journalism, with radio, photography and film at its disposal, could help perform the social function he had previously reserved for art. Other forms of communication and other image-creators began to share the “one debt to mankind” that MacLeish had announced in 1931 to be poetry's alone. When he attacked the motion picture industry in 1942 for its “escapist and delusive” influence on public opinion, the potential of that medium was implicit in its responsibility, “along with the radio and the press and the book trade and the colleges and the schools and all the rest of us, for the failure of the American people to understand … the nature of the world they lived in.”⁶⁸ As generators of national and democratic images, poets found themselves competing with journalists, film makers, librarians (for their ability to lure Americans to books) and “humanists.” A humanist, MacLeish explained in 1944, was anyone who held “some notion of a universal dignity which men possess as men and by virtue of their manhood.”⁶⁹ He hoped he was describing the educators who would create a democratic postwar world.

A guiding vision of the future might come from anywhere. We find MacLeish as early as 1942 looking beyond poetry for sources of the needed public vision. In a lecture of that year he asserted that “the idea of victory, the conception of victory, eludes us”.⁷⁰ We lack the image of the world we want after the war. But we can develop this vision, MacLeish asserted, with the aid of the revolutionary invention of our time: the airplane might help us envision the coming world as the sea once helped men conceive of freedom and new possibilities. The image that the airplane makes possible (if we defeat the Nazis!) is of a democratic world, “a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center—an equal earth which all men occupy as equals” (188-89).

MacLeish published no new poems until 1948. Times and aesthetics had changed. Art as a social force was out of style; the private individual and the isolated artist were back.⁷¹ Although MacLeish did not fully accept this postwar view, he was certainly influenced by it. He did not entirely abandon public poetry, but the tone of such poems changed from robust exhortation to pointed ironic criticism. The gain in power was substantial. His subject was still American goals and visions, but poems of 1948 and later, like “Brave New World” “The Black Day,” and “Ship of Fools”⁷² focused more sharply on issues (such as McCarthyism) than did any of his thirties poems. After finally casting off the roles of the public poet and the public figure, his poetry was better able to define and examine the public world and the individual's place in it. When he set out, in Actfive (1948), to demolish various false images of modern saviors (including the state), what remained was the solitary individual who recognizes an obligation to endure and love:

The heart persists. The love survives.
The nameless flesh and bone accepts
Some duty to be beautiful and brave.

(359)

This was still public poetry, aiming to influence people not to rely on or glorify industry, science, heroes, the state, the self and “the Crowd”! But the didactic quality of the thirties poems is gone, and with it the sense that he was trying to use poetry like a speech! Actfive does not give “the Word” or vaguely exhort to action; it describes what the citizen must accept in the cold postwar reality. Like his poems of the twenties, Actfive focuses on the individual, whose death MacLeish had announced prematurely in 1931. But now the individual is placed solidly in a social context. One is to maintain a singleness but recognize the obligation to keep striving, loving, enduring. Actfive stresses society's false leads but still holds individuals responsible for creating a community.

MacLeish's tone became more authentic when he admitted that poetry could not singlehandedly save the world and that public poetry was only one of several valid types. But it was still one valid type. Although the world has grown more complex and is dominated by science, he wrote in 1961, “so that there is no place for a poem to stroll but up and down inside,” we nevertheless have at least Yeats's political poems to show that a poet can influence the public's political perceptions. Discussing “Easter 1916,” MacLeish questioned whether the leaders of the rebellion “had changed everything or the poem itself which, five months after that tragic Easter, gave their deaths their meaning.”⁷³ The meaning of the rebellion, he intimated, did not exist in the public mind until the poem established it there. Clearly, public poetry remained for MacLeish extraordinarily powerful. A great poet might yet “give” an image or event its meaning and fix it in the public mind.

Insofar as MacLeish ever found his unifying image of mankind, however, it came from a machine, a modern improvement on that World War II airplane. In December 1968 Apollo 8 curved behind the moon and photographed the earth. The photograph so impressed MacLeish that he wrote a brief “Reflection: Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in the Eternal Cold” and published it on Christmas Day, 1968, on the front page of the New York Times.⁷⁴ Here was an image to replace that of modern science just as that vision had replaced the medieval Christian one.

No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality and blind with blood, man may at last become himself. To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

This widely reprinted prose poem has in fact been influential in establishing the idea of “spaceship earth.” If rocket technology provided the opportunity, if a camera took the picture and the news media sent it around the earth, MacLeish's words helped to fix its meaning. It was a typical endeavor for MacLeish, whose faith in the power of the word never vanished. Nor did his intense concern for America, alternating and almost interchangeable with his fixation on “mankind,” ever diminish. Those who study American culture today cannot afford to ignore either his purposes or his activities. If his mistakes are more instructive than his successes, his vision is dated only superficially. While scholars still examine the eclipse of citizenship (McWilliams), its planned obsolescence (Wiebe) and cancerous individualism (Bellah); while they hope to explain American society by the history of public culture (Bender), to unite scholar and society (Cheney), to restore authority (Nisbet); then MacLeish's values and methods merit attention. If it proves true, as Bellah hopes, that “because we share a common tradition, certain habits of the heart, we can work together to construct a common future,”⁷⁵ MacLeish may once again, and more happily than in The Fall of the City, anticipate history.

His defects are in little danger of being forgotten, they are so visible. He failed to explain in prose, or demonstrate in poetry, just how poets can influence society's vision and direction. During World War II he claimed to want a national dialogue but contrived to set limits of allowable debate. He misused the podium of public office attempting to coerce the image makers: poets and artists and historians and journalists and film makers, into supporting his position. Perhaps his later opposition to McCarthyism, or his primary role in securing the release of Ezra Pound, or his repeated public reminders throughout the postwar period that Americans must know what they are for, not just what they are against—perhaps such activities were his atonement. Not that he ever expressed a need to repent, or failed ultimately to prove his sincerity if not his judgment. Though Edmund Wilson always believed him a charlatan, MacLeish was doing, admittedly in a patronizing way, what Americans and all cultures need: exhorting them to conceive “a good idea of themselves.” Thinking for a time that poetry alone could generate that vision, he eventually moderated this hope; and though he continued to seek a modern Dante to give our age its motivating vision, he lived to see no such genius appear. Certain of his enemies believed that MacLeish saw himself in this role; possibly at some point he did.⁷⁶ To think that the people merely need someone to give them their vision, this perhaps was his failure of faith. It was a weakness he shared with Walt Whitman.

And also—to descend from the sublime—with Amy Lowell. In MacLeish's pivotal year 1931 she had doubted whether MacLeish could play such a role. Perhaps, she mused, he lacked a certain “gusto.” Perhaps we needed to wait for “some poet of grit and brawn, some prophet of grandeur and laughter, some cross between John Milton and Ogden Nash, to tell us the whole truth and save the world.”⁷⁷

If so, we are still waiting for this paragon to help us dare, like Momaday's Kiowa people, to imagine and determine who we are. In the meantime we can give Archibald MacLeish his due. Denying Malcolm Cowley's dictum that “duty is the greatest temptation to the poet and the worst,”⁷⁸ MacLeish acted as he believed a citizen and poet ought to act. He knew that for any citizen the public and the private worlds intersect. Like Bellah and his associates, he understood what is wrong with the term “private citizen.” When we say “private citizen,” the authors of Habits of the Heart insist, “the very meaning of citizenship escapes us” (271).

Notes

(Albuquerque, 1969), 4.
“Nevertheless One Debt,” Poetry 38 (1931), 216.
National Review 8 (18 June 1960), 395. See also John Jeffries, “The ‘Quest for National Purpose’ of 1960,” American Quarterly 30 (Fall, 1978), 451-60.
Wilson Carey McWilliams, Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley, 1973), 623.
The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America (New York, 1975), 190.
(New York), 287.
Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American life (Berkeley, 1985), vii, 278.
Carey Nelson, Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry (Urbana, 1981), 23. This may seem a strange statement for one arguing that the Vietnam War destroyed poets' faith that their idealistic vision of America might coincide with historical reality. But Carey believes that although American poetry was forever altered by that war, it has maintained its power and increased its ability to confront history more adequately.
Von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture 1945-1980 (Cambridge, 1985), 2.
Christopher Clausen The Place of Poetry: Two Centuries of an Art in Crisis (Lexington), 131. (Like the authors of Habits of the Heart, Clausen enlisted Wendell Berry to support his case that contemporary poetry is isolated.)
John Bodnar, “Symbols and Servants: Immigrant America and the Limits of Public History,” Journal of American History, 73 (June, 1986), 137-51.
Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History (June, 1986), 120-36. In a later issue of the Journal, respondents to Bender's article approved at least his goals. They agreed that historians should have a public influence and can gain it by developing synthetic theories of American society and by addressing these theories to the general public. David Thelen, Nell Irvin Painter, Richard Wightman Fox, Roy Rosenzweig, Thomas Bender, “A Round Table: Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987), 107-30. see also Herbert G. Gutman, “Whatever Happened to History?” Nation (21 November 1981), 521, 553-54.
Cheney assembled a panel of literary scholars and found that they disagreed as to the “health” of the humanities and the extent to which literary scholarship speaks to the public. They seemed to agree, however, that a public voice and influence for humanists is desirable. (While there is no reason to think anyone's views were insincere, participants were of course aware that NEH exists to foster the public role of the humanities, inclines toward certain traditional concepts of American society, and is a major source of funding for humanities research. The position of humanists working with NEH, therefore, can be as delicate as that of historians working for the National Park Service.) Soon Ms. Cheney will expand her inquiry to include “the news media, museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions.” Scott Heller, “Experts Convened by Endowment Head Are Divided in Assessing the Health of the Humanities,” Chronicle of Higher Education (9 March 1988), A4, A11.
To Huber Gray Buehler (14 February 1909), Letters of Archibald MacLeish 1907-1982, ed. R. H. Winnick (Boston, 1983), 7-8.
To the Editor of the Yale Daily News (14 November 1914), Letters, 12.
To Francis Hyde Bangs (11 November 1916), Letters, 30; to Dean Acheson (30 December 1919), 64; to Dean Acheson (12 September 1922), 92.
To Ishbel MacLeish (31 May 1924), 137.
Videotape, Those Paris Years: A Conversation Between Archibald MacLeish and Samuel Hazo (International Poetry Forum of Pittsburgh, Robert Costa, producer and director, 1987).
Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections (Boston, 1978), 73.
Cowley's Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York, 1951) gives the classic account of the European experience of twenties expatriates. Robert M. Crunden's From Self to Society (New Jersey, 1972) is useful regarding the entire period between the world wars.
Biography of Mr. Beck the Suicide was accepted by the North American Review in 1923, but for some reason the Review did not publish it. MacLeish transformed the poem in 1924 or 1925, changing the title and adding a gloss, marginal notes referring to Einstein. He did not, however, significantly revise the main test of the poem. See Winnick's notes, Letters, 117, 120. A manuscript draft of Mr. Beck, a copy of which Mr. Winnick generously showed me, is at the Library of Congress.
Stanley Koehler, “A Conversation with A. MacLeish,” Pembroke Magazine 7 (1976), 98.
“Nevertheless One Debt,” Poetry 38 (1931), 210-11.
Of course MacLeish was reflecting a widespread aesthetic shift in the early thirties. As Malcolm Cowley wrote, “a new conception of art was replacing the idea that it was something purposeless, useless, wholly individual and forever opposed to a stupid world. The artist and his art had once more become a part of the world, produced by and perhaps affecting it” (Exile's Return, 287). Cowley's statement is, however, cautious and balanced whereas MacLeish's is assertive and dogmatic. He had no use for “perhaps.”
As Dwight MacDonald admitted, however, “whirligig changes … were typical” of the thirties, Memoirs of a Revolutionist: Essays in Political Criticism (New York, 1957), 9. Many critics treated MacLeish unfairly in this regard. Eric Homberger discusses various writers who made swift shifts of political position, such as Edmund Wilson, in American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39: Equivocal Commitments (London, 1986).
New Yorker (14 January 1939), 23-24.
Patrick Cosgrave, The Public Poetry of Robert Lowell (London, 1970), 24.
Rafael Alberti's Poetry of the Thirties: The Poet's Public Voice, (Athens, 1986), 9-10.
Imagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes (New York, 1971), 5-6.
Foreigners: The Making of American Literature 1900-1940 (Chicago, 1981), 133.
Patrick Cosgrave argued, Robert Lowell, 31-48, that modern public poems must rely on this authority and power of personality, since the poet lacks a strong supporting culture whose resources help carry the weight of social criticism. According to Cosgrave, the poet who was first forced to use his personality to compensate for this lack of cultural support was Samuel Johnson.
“Poetry,” in Harold Stearns, ed., America Now: An Inquiry Into Civilization in the United States (New York, 1938), 59. Bogan went on to generalize about the public poetry of MacLeish and other converted leftists: “The new political verse was infused with a kind of gloom. Its hopeful tendencies were accompanied by no clear clarion voice. When it tried to be ambitious it became turgid and dull; when it strove to be vigorous and heartening it often gave off a shrill hysterical sound”.
Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (Boston, 1985), 296. Subsequent references regarding poems (except plays and Land of the Free) are to this edition.
A Time to Speak, (Boston, 1941), 46.
ibid. 20.
Strachey is quoted in Klein, Foreigners, 310. Klein summarizes MacLeish's social-aesthetic views during the early thirties, 131-33.
In his old age MacLeish remembered the event this way: In a radio speech Strachey “was referring to me as a ‘fascist,’ an ‘obvious Fascist,’ a clear supporter of Franco and Hitler, because in the ‘Landscape with Revolutionaries’ I used some dialect lingo for the talk of some of my revolutionaries. I guess Strachey had a right to complain about that, but still I'd do it again if I had it to do again. There are certain short cuts you ought to be permitted,” Reflections, 91. Mike Gold's “Out of the Fascist Unconscious,” New Republic 73 (26 July 1933), 295, was more influential than Strachey in labeling MacLeish an “unconscious Fascist.”
A useful discussion of fascist ideology and the basis of its appeal to Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, is Cairns Craig, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry (Pittsburgh, 1982).
Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (New York, 1961), 276. Aaron describes MacLeish's political relations with the Left, 264-67 and passim.
“Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry,” A Time to Speak, 63.
“Poetry and the Public World,” Atlantic 163 (1939), 826.
Collected Poems, 303.
McWilliams charged that in this poem MacLeish, “like so many of his fellows, ignored the obvious question: Are the ‘hurts’ that intellectuals feel and suffer the same as those of their brethren?” The Idea of Fraternity in America, 541.
Panic, A Play in Verse (Boston, 1935), 23-24.
“Foreword,” The Fall of the City, a Verse Play for Radio (New York, 1937), xii-xiii.
Reflections, 108-09.
By eleven months. Memory operating over years could reduce that interval to [a] few days. A classmate said to MacLeish in later years: “Did you know that the Nazis were going to enter Austria and just at that time?” Telling this story to interviewers, MacLeish acknowledged that he wasn't sure of the dates and would need to look them up. Reflections, 108.
The Fall of the City, 29, 32.
“Preface” to Air Raid,Six Plays (Boston, 1980), 97-98.
Land of the Free (New York, 1977; facsimile of first edition, New York, 1938), 89.
At this time MacLeish was collaborating with Hemingway in producing the film The Spanish Earth. Perhaps he was also remembering that Pare Lorentz had used MacLeish's Fortune essay entitled “The Plow That Broke the Plains” as the basis for the film. On his activities regarding The Spanish Earth, see MacLeish's letters to Hemingway, 8 August 1937 and 6 August 1938, Letters, 289-90, 294-95, and Winnick's note, 290. On the Lorentz film, see Reflections, 80, 243.
“In Challenge Not Defense,” Poetry 52 (1938), 212-29.
“The God in the Car,” Poetry 52 (1938), 340.
“A Letter from Archibald MacLeish,” Poetry 52 (1938), 342-43.
Collected Poems, 330.
MacLeish worked on Fortune for Henry Luce, fellow graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, who allowed him to spend part of each year writing poetry. Fortune during the thirties was a hotbed of leftists; see MacDonald, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 8-11. Alice G. Marquis describes thirties magazines in Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times 1929-1939 (New York, 1986), 91-139.
For an impartial discussion of this controversy, see Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century America (Bloomington, Indiana, 1980), 246-55. For a partial one, see Dwight MacDonald, “Kulturbolshewismus & Mr. Van Wyck Brooks,” Memoirs of a Revolutionist, 203-14 (and passim, for nasty comments on MacLeish).
The Irresponsibles, (New York, 1940), 31.
“Postwar Writers and Prewar Readers,” New Republic 10 (June, 1940), 789-90.
Wilson, “Archibald MacLeish and ‘the Word,’” New Republic (1 July 1940), 31, 32; Zabel, “The Poet on Capitol Hill,” Partisan Review 8 (1941), 3; Rascoe, “The Tough-Muscle Boys of Literature,” American Mercury 51 (1940), 370, 374.
“The Next Philosophy,” NAR 217 (1923), 698-704. MacLeish admitted the hoax, in which he and Mason celebrated a nonexistent philosopher, in “Notebooks 1924-1938,” Poetry 72 (1948), 40.
As director of OFF and especially as assistant director of OWI, MacLeish tried to influence these agencies to disseminate not just daily facts about the war but the values and goals behind it. In this effort he was rebuffed, and he resigned from OWI in early 1943. On MacLeish's involvement see Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942-1945 (New Haven, 1978), 9-42.
“The Strategy of Truth” (address delivered April 1942), A Time to Act (Boston, 1943), 27.
“The Responsibility of the Press” (address delivered April 1942), A Time to Act, 13.
“Divided We Fall” (address delivered March 1942), A Time to Act, 121.
“The Poet on Capitol Hill (Part 2),” Partisan Review 8 (1941), 145.
Quoted in Eva M. Goldschmidt, “Introduction” to Archibald MacLeish, Champion of a Cause: Essays and Addresses on Librarianship (Chicago, 1971), 6.
The American Cause (New York, 1941), 39.
Robert S. Benjamin, ed., I Am an American: By Famous Naturalized Americans (Chicago and New York, 1941), vii-ix. The twenty-six contributors included Thomas Mann, Claudette Colbert and Albert Einstein.
“The Power of the Book” (address delivered May 1942), A Time to Act, 150.
“The Belief in Man,” Freedom Is the Right to Choose (Boston, 1951), 157.
“The Image of Victory” (address delivered May 1942) A Time to Act, 179.
As Charles C. Alexander has argued, that “what intellectuals and artists did should contribute directly to social change … fell into critical disrepute. Both the idea of a national culture and the idea of socially purposeful art, according to the postwar critical consensus, expressed an inherent fallacy about a necessarily idiosyncratic creative process.” Here the Country Lies, 242.
Collected Poems, 382-84, 403, 429-30.
Poetry and Experience (Boston), 118, 142.
Reprinted in revised form as “Bubble of Blue Air,” Riders on the Earth, xiii-xiv, and elsewhere, e. g., Erich Lessing, Discoverers of Space: A Pictorial Narration, John Drury, tr. (West Germany, 1969), 4.
Habits of the Heart, 252.
Rosenberg, for example, scorned MacLeish as “the Poet Leader who has put poetry in the place formerly occupied by God (“The God in the Car,” 338, 340), and Zabel surmised that the opening of World War II gave MacLeish “his chance to impress on his fellow-citizens the fact that a Milton not only should be living in this hour but by miraculous good fortune is (“The Poet on Capitol Hill,” 4).
“Comment: Archibald MacLeish,” Poetry 38 (1931), 155.
Poetry and Experience, 119.

John Morton Blum (essay date April 1993)

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SOURCE: Blum, John Morton. “Archibald MacLeish: Art for Action.” Yale Review 81, no. 2 (April 1993): 106-33.

[In the following essay, Blum recounts MacLeish's literary and political career, stressing the poet's liberalism and belief in democracy.]

Art encompassed experience: so believed Archibald MacLeish; and since politics was part of experience, art encompassed politics. On the contrary, politics encompassed art: so contended the Fascists and Communists of the 1930s and their spiritual successors who used the power of the state to brutalize art and artists. MacLeish condemned them for what they thought and what they did. He also exhorted his fellow American artists to abandon their posture of political neutrality and accept the responsibility of art for action. Only action would protect the freedom of the individual and of the states that nurtured that freedom from the attacks of the new barbarians ravaging Europe in 1940. Later MacLeish again exhorted Americans, artists not the least, to protect their tradition of freedom from the barbarians among their countrymen who were ravaging the politics of democracy in the postwar decades. As MacLeish saw it, a poet had no other choice. A responsible artist, a man or a woman of letters, had to be a man or a woman of action.

MacLeish, who was born in 1892 and lived to be ninety, reached that conclusion before his fortieth year. Then and later it gave unity to his life. Though he arrived at it in stages, it inhered in the restless and precocious versatility of his youth, even in the influence of his parents. Beginning with those parents, Scott Donaldson in his new biography of MacLeish [Archibald MacLeish: An American Life] describes in copious detail his subject's long private and public life. Donaldson continually takes his clues from his protagonist, from observations in MacLeish's private notebooks as well as from MacLeish's poetry, some of it previously unpublished, which he weaves into his text. In assessing MacLeish's poetry, Donaldson refers to negative as well as positive reviews, although he usually agrees with the latter. He is largely nonjudgmental about MacLeish's private life—his marriage, his relations with his children, his several love affairs. MacLeish, too, was “circumspect” about those matters. All in all, Donaldson finds MacLeish a sympathetic figure, as did R. H. Winnick, whose earlier research informs Donaldson's work. A talented, vigorous, articulate man, MacLeish evoked that kind of treatment.

But Donaldson's biography has about it the touch of an authorized life, which Winnick had set out to write. In places mechanical, the book lacks passion—especially the passion of committed liberalism, which MacLeish exuded. Donaldson, who is primarily a literary critic, seems less comfortable with MacLeish's politics than with his poetry. He shares the almost universal literary judgment that MacLeish wrote better lyrical than political verse—an assessment hard to avoid—but he does not much inquire into the ways that MacLeish's politics and poetry penetrated each other. Yet the passion explicit in MacLeish's politics was explicit also in his verse dramas (though not always gracefully), as well as internalized in his lyric poetry. Donaldson's instructive book supplies the information from which such a comment can be drawn. But a historian working with many of the materials he used—MacLeish's published poetry and letters, his plays and speeches—could properly conclude that MacLeish's contribution to American literature was no greater than his contribution to American politics.

Each in a different way, MacLeish's parents had towering expectations for him. His father, a wealthy Chicago merchant fifty years his senior, brought a stiff Calvinism with him from his native Scotland. Archibald, the second child of his third marriage, found him as remote and formidable as Jehovah. (“If God is God he is not good.”) MacLeish had his father's financial support for his extensive education and years of apprenticeship in Paris but never his father's love or even praise. That deprivation may have accounted for MacLeish's lifelong striving for approval from the poets and critics he most admired. But MacLeish's mother, the descendant of Puritans, believed in striving, too. Before her marriage, Martha Hillard MacLeish, a devout Christian, had been the principal of Rockford Seminary; as a wife and mother, she dedicated herself to good causes, social and religious as well as educational, and expected her children to follow her example. Her earnest liberalism marked her son more deeply than did the patrician smugness he encountered at the Hotchkiss School, which he hated, and at Yale College, which he loved.

At Yale, then “deep in the blue sweater era,” MacLeish excelled at everything he undertook. He made the varsity football team and Phi Beta Kappa, was editor of the Yale Literary Magazine, and was elected to the most prestigious of senior societies, Skull and Bones, whose initiates considered themselves the most accomplished and respected sons of Eli. Then and thereafter, MacLeish was socially most comfortable with such men and women. Yet he was a democrat. In his own mind he invested Yale, as he did his country, with an ideal democratic spirit. And as R. W. B. Lewis observed, though no one seemed to know him intimately, almost every one he met quickly called him Archie.

In 1917, with America's entry into World War I, MacLeish, who led his class at the Harvard Law School, interrupted his studies to volunteer for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. After arriving in France, he moved to the field artillery, where he saw action as a captain. In 1917 he also published Tower of Ivory, his first book of poetry. That early verse displayed a sentimentality that enveloped many aspects of his life—his romantic attachments, his own (and his mother's) vision of America, and his Wilsonian belief that World War I would be the war to end all wars and save democracy. MacLeish's poetry at that time dwelt on memories of love, thoughts of death, and collegiate landscapes. He believed, he wrote, “that beauty is attainable, that the world of the mind is real, that men are in nature seekers of the true God” and that the war was being fought to preserve those verities from destruction by the Germans.

Those sentiments made MacLeish especially vulnerable to the general disillusionment that grew out of the brutality of the war and the selfishness of the terms for peace. He was unsettled even more by the accidental death in Belgium of his younger brother Kenneth, a naval aviator. As so often with MacLeish, the particular merged with the general. “Men become the symbols of ideas by losing their familiar and personal qualities,” he wrote his mother in 1920, two years after Kenneth's death. “And Kenny as the symbol of brave youth content to die for the battle's sake will really exist when Kenny … has a little paled and faded into oblivion.” Then, on a visit to Kenneth's grave in 1924, the particular—and, with it, the general—changed: “It seems to me grotesque … that that beautiful boy should be lying under the sand in a field he never saw—for nothing. … It is horrible. … It is very still. The sky has become black and threatening. I feel nothing except the numbness of the earth, its silentness. … It is absurd to die anyhow. What difference does it make when you die. It is ridiculous to lie quite still. … Perhaps you will understand my feeling about the war that creates my feeling about Kenny. It was an awful, awful, failure. A hideous joke.”

MacLeish realized that his emotions had “a way of crystallizing around some sensuous object.” Kenny's grave affected him, but so did the funeral of Woodrow Wilson. “Does it strike you,” he wrote Dean Acheson, his Yale classmate and lifelong friend, “as whimsical that a man who spent most of his public life, all his popularity and the greater part of his health in the fight for peace should be loaded onto a gun carriage as soon as he is past resistance and put away to a tune of gun fire and brass? But they can't get rid of him that way. Hot air through a bugle will do for H. C. Lodge.” MacLeish's feelings about the war, then, did not damp his belief in Wilsonian ideals, in a “peace without victory.” Like other liberals of the 1920s, he blamed Lodge and the Republicans for the American rejection of the League of Nations. He was disillusioned with the outcome of the war, not with Wilson's avowed purpose. And not wholly with the fighting itself, for he never forgot the experience of a brotherhood of arms: “Those are as brothers whose bodies have shared fear / Or shared harm or shared hurt or indignity. / Why are the old soldiers brothers and nearest? / For this: with their minds they go over the sea a little / And find themselves in their youth again.”

After the war, back at the Harvard Law School, where he said he received his education, MacLeish went on to practice law, teach political science to undergraduates, worry about the state of the world, join the campaign for justice for Sacco and Vanzetti, and dither about his future. He had always had doubts about the law as a career; it was at best a “compromise” that allowed some leisure for writing. Law had its fascinations, though; he greatly admired the dissent of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the Abrams case, a majestic plea for liberty of speech and opinion. As he wrote Acheson, MacLeish had a large regard for “the law as a social instrument” and for “the infinite capacity of the human brain to shape that instrument.” And, like his mother, he also believed a man “must … act upon the world.” But poetry still attracted him. Unlike the law, poetry “must not prove, must not explain,” though the poet had to have an expressible idea. “The high function of the human mind,” MacLeish wrote Acheson, was “its own expression … the expression of its ideal of life” which was “not important as a reforming agency” but as “an act of creation.” Obviously MacLeish was torn. “The question,” he proposed, “is how to work at reality. … We can be amateur philosophers … but that won't do. What you and I are fitted for is the serious … study of political and social science … as the means of salvation.” Though law and poetry were “eternal irritants,” political science “and such poetry as I really wish to write will fuse.” In that sense, he could have it both ways.

Declining a partnership in a prestigious Boston law firm in 1923, the thirty-one-year-old MacLeish took his family to Paris in order to read and write poetry and to find his own personal and artistic world. Once there, he realized he shared the estrangement of other literary exiles, his contemporaries and soon his friends, who had preceded him. “The arts,” as he put it later, “were discovering … that an age ended with the First World War … that the city of man was now a heap of stones. … A generation born in the century of stability and order … could still … see the old safe world behind the war. … It was not the Lost Generation which was lost: It was the world out of which that generation came.” That understanding, MacLeish maintained, produced the great art of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and other Americans who were expatriates because their patria was “no longer waiting for them anywhere.”

In Paris MacLeish developed the poetic voice that characterized his best work then and thereafter. He put himself through a course of readings modeled upon Pound's and Eliot's personal curricula. He made friends with the foremost artists of the glittering Parisian scene. And he explored his inner self without fully revealing it. He had been “remiss in the practice … of religion,” he admitted to his mother, but he retained “that gravitation of the spirit which is properly called faith.” Partly to find himself “in that direction” he needed “this time for real work.” His work, his religious work, was poetry. He concluded, not surprisingly, that the proper techniques of poetry were consonant with those of Pound and Eliot: “To create an emotion by the imperfect representation in words of objects which are imperfectly associated with the emotion desired. That is … the problem. … Grammatical construction beyond the absolute minimum is not desirable. The effort is the direction of attention. … But beauty of rhythm and sound are tremendously desirable because they are the greatest possible aids in the creation of the emotion desired.” He admired “a compact, precise edged poetry which could be terribly poignant.” He wanted to “arrive at a direct statement,” to achieve “lucidity and concreteness.”

Those qualities made memorable the poems collected in New Found Land (1930). Fusing thought and emotion, they received glowing reviews. They brought a sensuous musicality to themes which had occupied poets for centuries. “Immortal Autumn” and “You, Andrew Marvell” became and remained standard choices for anthologists. The collection in itself validated MacLeish's decision to make poetry his calling. Supplemented by the best of his later work, the book provided impressive evidence for the view of perceptive critics—among others, R. W. B. Lewis, Louis Martz, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur—that of all the things MacLeish was, he was first a poet.

Self-consciously he hewed to the conventions of his art. Though he knew that the world of his youth, the world of stability and order, had vanished, his poetry spoke of the order inherent in nature as he observed it. Joyce and Proust and others he read wrote with a revolutionary sense of time and space. Not so MacLeish. He found inspiration in the rhythms of the day and of the year. “Immortal Autumn” was one of many poems that used the seasons to evoke the emotions he wanted to express: “I praise the fall: it is the human season.” To the same end, “You, Andrew Marvell” used the diurnal: “To feel the always coming on / The always rising of the night.” MacLeish knew what he was doing. “Why should the time conception so move our generation?” he asked Wyndham Lewis. “Why do I … respond to images of the turning world as to nothing else? … When the posts of religion are knocked out does the whole flood come down of necessity?” Since MacLeish made a religion of nature as he made a religion of poetry, the last question answered its predecessors. But great poetry, after all, had always explored the connectedness of mood and time.

Though he wrote some beautiful poetry, MacLeish was not a great poet—particularly in his longer works. In both Nobodaddy (1925), a play in verse, and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), he went about “the business of poetry … to make sense of the chaos of our lives. … To compose an order which the bewildered … heart can recognize. To imagine man.” Nobodaddy, his contorted version of the Fall, put Cain and God's curse upon him at center stage. Burdened by his knowledge of good and evil, Cain, “a fugitive and a vagabond,” had to survive outside the Garden of Eden. That was also the burden of mankind—to endure in spite of the knowledge of human depravity, a lesson imparted to MacLeish by World War I. But MacLeish did not mention the war even by implication, and he did not express in any way what he meant by evil. The play anticipated his responses to later demonstrations of a lost past of “golden innocence” but it did not succeed either as drama or as blank verse.

The Hamlet also failed. Here MacLeish exposed his own bewildered heart, blamed himself for seeking fame, and urged himself to set more selfless goals. He bared his grief over the deaths of his son, his brother, and several friends; he also lamented his fear in times of danger. But there was a shallowness about his lamentations: he seemed to bewail his sins without recognizing the possibility of evil within the human heart. Critics, many of whom had found MacLeish's lyric poetry derivative, repeated and expanded that charge in their reviews of The Hamlet. Conrad Aiken, a major poet himself, considered MacLeish enslaved to Eliot and other modernists. Edmund Wilson wrote his savage parody, “The Omelette of A. MacLeish.” MacLeish acknowledged the influence of Pound and Eliot but defended himself from Aiken's charges. “The experience … was mine,” he wrote, “the emotion mine, the poetry mine.” But for a long season the negative voices damaged MacLeish's reputation, as did The Hamlet itself. In that work, he did not make poetic order of the chaos in his or any life.

Between 1929 and 1932, both MacLeish's life and his poetry were changing. The collapse of the stock market and the ensuing depression cut off the income from his father's estate that had supported his residence in Paris. That loss precipitated his departure from Europe. Even before returning to the United States, MacLeish began to plan a celebration of America that turned away from Europe and rested on a poetry neither lyrical nor internalized. Valuing his privacy as he did, he believed that the subject matter of poetry did not have to involve the poet's personality. The poignancy and beauty of a poem, he proposed, depended “in very large part upon its faithfulness to the earth and to moral life.” Nature and human nature provided essential ingredients for his next major venture, a poem in fifteen books entitled Conquistador (1932). That poem retold the story of Cortés's conquest of Mexico through the voice of a common Spanish soldier who spoke for all of his compatriots and with them “looked to the west.” The long poem read as an artistically stated saga of brutal heroism. The march westward across Mexico moved over terrain MacLeish had explored in 1929, land he now described with affection and precision. Their journey took Cortés and his men away from the old world toward a new world of imagined riches. Cruel conquerors though they clearly were, they were also adventurers who followed the sun and were freed from the confining civilization of Spain. Then European civilization followed them: “And the west is gone now: the west is the ocean sky.”

A critical success, Conquistador won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Delighted by that recognition, MacLeish nevertheless complained that critics had missed the point of his long poem. The text prompted most of them to see it as a drama of brave men and brave, albeit horrid, deeds. MacLeish meant it otherwise, as a metaphor: “it is a lot more about our time than most of the daily papers.” The content of the poem did make a metaphor of westering, of America as westering; and westering had been an experience of high expectations, of hope as well as adventure and danger and despoliation. MacLeish had wanted to suggest more. Still, hope and courage did have special connotations for the daily papers in 1932 and for the political campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that desperate year. And in the 1930s a poetry faithful to life, MacLeish decided, could properly be a political poetry.

In order to support himself and his family, MacLeish went to work in 1932 for his Yale contemporary, Henry Luce, as an editor of Fortune, then a new monthly magazine. He wrote most of the text for many issues and all of several series later published as books by “the Editors of Fortune.” An able journalist, MacLeish gave most of his time to his new responsibilities. Nevertheless he continued to write poetry and drama. Further, his position with Fortune gave him access to men in positions of authority in government, and his assignments took him on journeys through the nation so he could see for himself the traumatic social effects of the Great Depression. His experience as a journalist reinforced his liberal views, and both his observations and his politics continually informed his poetry.

Toward the end of the presidential contest of 1932 the New Republic published MacLeish's “Invocation to the Social Muse,” a poem soaked in irony that rejected both the avid capitalism of Herbert Hoover and J. P. Morgan and the communist doctrines then gaining converts in the United States. MacLeish had earlier warned his banker friends that communism appealed to the emotions of working men and women; capitalism had therefore to identify itself with hope, or lose the world. But in this poem about the calling of the poet he refused to take sides. Here in America technological development is a mixed blessing; we have “progress and science and tractors and revolutions and / Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous / And music in every home: there is also Hoover.” He lampooned both capitalism (among the “handful of things a man likes … Mister Morgan is not one”) and communism (“Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army?”) and concluded that for poets “There is nothing worse … than to be in style.” The poem antagonized the New Masses and other literary arbiters in the Communist Party of the United States. It would have had the same effect on many of Fortune's subscribers had they read and understood it.

So, too, with Elpenor (1933), MacLeish's Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, which took its title from the name of a companion of Odysseus whose spirit, after his death, had descended “into the gloomy shades” of Hell. Visiting Elpenor, Odysseus found Hell to be like the America of 1933, with “Millions starving for corn with / Mountains of waste corn and / Millions cold for a house with / Cities of empty houses.” In Hell were “fools booming like oracles, / Philosophers promising more / And worse to come,” and also “Kings, dukes, dictators … ranting orations from balconies,” but Elpenor had not lost his head. When Odysseus asked for directions home, Elpenor urged him not to return but to adventure further: “For myself—if you ask me—there's no way back. … There is only the way on.” The “home” that Odysseus seeks can only be found in “a new land.” That was the New Deal's way, MacLeish believed—the way of social experimentation that would reject the failed capitalism of the 1920s to build a new and more equitable nation. He had learned about the New Dealers' many plans and he praised their enactment in months to come.

Later in the year MacLeish pilloried the New Deal's enemies on the right and on the left in his Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933). The title for the poem grew out of the public controversy over the Rockefellers' decision to fire Diego Rivera, the talented Communist artist whom they had hired to paint murals for their new buildings. MacLeish's poem had six parts, each separately entitled, each a fresco in words, each describing the kind of relationship that different groups of Americans had to the land. He began with “Landscape as a Nude,” praising the American land—so often the vehicle by which he expressed his feelings about democracy—as if it were a lover's body or a work of art: “She lies on her left side her flank golden: / Her hair is burned black with the strong sun. / The scent of her hair is of rain in the dust on her shoulders: / She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.” Then he went on to Crazy Horse, the victor over General Custer: “Do you ask why he should fight? It was his country.” In contrast to Crazy Horse and the Sioux, whose hearts were “big with the love [they] had for that country,” stood the railroad barons: “It was all prices to them: they never looked at it: / why should they look at the land? they were Empire Builders.” The true builders were not the bosses but the laborers, “all foreign-born men,” who died on the job and whose bodies have become part of the land they worked. The poem continued with scorn for Commodore Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and Bruce Barton, the symbols of high finance and deluding advertising whom he called “the Makers Making America”: “They screwed her scrawny and gaunt with their seven-year panics: / They bought her back on their mortgages old-whore-cheap: / They fattened their bonds at her breasts till the thin blood ran from them.”

Like FDR, MacLeish welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists without hating capitalism as a system. He also scorned the “Marxian” left and its doctrines. “Background with Revolutionaries,” the last part of Frescoes, satirized those who embraced the Communist Party: “For Marx has said to us, Workers what do you need? / And Stalin has said to us, Starvers what do you need? / You need the Dialectical Materialism!” Americans were too tough for those deceptions, MacLeish concluded, as their land was tough—and anyway, “There is too much sun on the lids of my eyes to be listening.” Communist critics such as Mike Gold retaliated, calling MacLeish “an unconscious Fascist” and a bad poet. “Those Frescoes,” MacLeish wrote a friend, “seem to have gotten way under the Marxian hide.”

Distressed as he was by the wretchedness of the poor, MacLeish was tempted now and then by the Communist Party's claim to be the sole agency for social justice. For several reasons he was able to resist that temptation. As Frescoes suggested, he rejected both dialectical materialism as a theory and Stalin as a leader. The economic determinism of dialectical materialism made no allowance for the significance in history, as in life, of the individual, a significance in which MacLeish believed deeply. And Stalin, as totalitarian a dictator as were Mussolini and Hitler, had starved millions of peasants in order to advance industrialization in the Soviet Union. Like all Communist parties, the Communist Party of the United States took its orders directly from Moscow, from Stalin. That dependency was far more than MacLeish could tolerate. Answering the criticisms of the poet Rolfe Humphries, a Communist, MacLeish wrote: “I am not a Fascist. … I am as strongly opposed to a dictatorship of the Right as of the Left—more strongly in fact since a dictatorship of the Right is an actual possibility in America. … My warm distaste for fascism does not in the least cancel my equally warm distaste for those spiritually insufficient members of our society who join (or do not quite join) The Party as their prototypes joined (or did not quite join) the Masons or the Elks or the Church. And for the same reasons.”

One of those reasons was fear—fear of loneliness, fear of freedom, fear of individual life in a difficult world. That kind of fear had characterized American industrial leaders in their response to the early years of the Great Depression. “They have been fearful … bewildered and void,” MacLeish wrote Henry Luce. “They are sterile.” Like the Communists captives of their own theories, they lacked the imagination to meet the economic crisis. Those ideas provided the theme for Panic (1935), a play in verse, in which MacLeish created a protagonist, J. P. McGafferty, a businessman who had the courage to act until he lost confidence in himself and then, like others, yielded to the grip of financial ruin and committed suicide. He should have fought on, as his wife and a friend urged him to: “Trouble's no unexpected guest in these parts. The new thing's not the trouble. … It's you. It's your kind waiting for the great disaster.” The real hero of the play was “the free man's choosing of the free man's journey,” for “it's always one man makes a world.”

When MacLeish later rewrote Panic as a radio play, he identified his message of courage explicitly with Franklin Roosevelt. But when Panic played in New York in 1935, that meaning was lost on an audience irritated by MacLeish's criticism of big business. The play was to run only two nights, but the Communist Party sponsored a third performance followed by a symposium in which three party intellectuals berated MacLeish for not taking as his theme the inevitable doom of capitalism. But he never intended to write a Communist tract. His real failure was literary. The characters in the play lacked definition either as people or as symbols, and the plot lacked drama.

In Public Speech (1936) his poetry reached the level of excellence he wanted to get across the political truths he cherished. The poem “Pole Star” defined love as the only remaining light guiding men and women, for “Liberty and pride and hope— / Every guide-mark of the mind / That led our blindness once has vanished.” There was no justice where tyrants ruled; the lamp of liberty had burned out. “The German Girls! The German Girls!” uses irony to single out the Nazis as the bringers of darkness:

Are we familiar with the mounted men!—
The grocery lot with the loud talk in restaurants,
Smellers of delicatessen, ex-cops,
Barbers, fruit-sellers, sewers of underwear, shop-keepers,
Those with fat rumps foolish in uniforms. …

Both the Nazis and the Communists threatened democracy. “The real issue,” MacLeish wrote Carl Sandburg in 1936, “is whether or not we believe in the people.” Both poets did. “No revolution,” MacLeish continued, “will succeed in America which professes to take the government away from the people and create the kind of cabinet tyranny which we see now in its intrigues and its jealousies in Russia in this fantastic trial”—a reference to Stalin's rigged trials of his Trotskyite opponents, so recently his collaborators, within the Communist Party. “You and I,” MacLeish went on, “have a considerable responsibility. We are poets but we are also men able to live in the world. We cannot escape our duties as political animals.” Sandburg had fulfilled his duty with his recent poetry and the first volumes of his adoring biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg's work, a “basis for political action,” made the issue of democracy clear. Both poets had now to act “politically to drive this issue into the forefront of the sensitive minds of all men. … We must now become pamphleteers, propagandists.”

In referring to “the people” and “democracy,” MacLeish was using the vocabulary of the liberalism of the time. Those abstractions informed his political actions, poetry, and speeches. Then and later his letters and publications would refer to things that stirred his democratic feelings, but they suggested not so much a program as a political position and its surrounding state of mind. MacLeish believed in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He praised some New Deal programs, especially those that involved refinancing farmers' mortgages, providing federal support for needy artists, and devising national codes for industrial cooperation between management and labor. He shared the view of those New Dealers who recognized the economic interdependence of capital, labor, and agriculture, and of all industrialized nations. But those specific matters did not inspire his poetry or provide it with useful metaphors. In his poetry, he embodied his beliefs in individuals, especially Jefferson and Lincoln, not as they may really have been in history but as their names evoked American democratic values. In MacLeish's usage Jefferson represents the western reach of free land, the individual liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and representative democracy. Lincoln stands for the universal freedom of men and women and of their labor, the mystical meaning of the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and the identification of America with opportunity and brotherhood. By implication, the New Deal contained those values. Nazism and communism explicitly denied them.

In 1937 fascism and communism clashed in the civil war in Spain. As MacLeish saw it, that war arose from “an inexcusable and unjustifiable act of aggression by reactionary forces against a popular government.” Franco and his fellow fascists, the aggressors, received vital material assistance from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. In retaliation, the Soviet Union provided aid to the Spanish Loyalists. Like many of the Loyalists themselves, MacLeish underestimated the subversive intentions of both the Spanish and Soviet communists. He cared more about the Loyalist cause than about the company he kept in supporting it. As part of that support, he helped to found Contemporary Historians, Inc., a corporation that raised funds to make and distribute The Spanish Earth, a film about the war as seen from a Loyalist perspective.

But MacLeish was not fooled by the revised Communist Party doctrine that called for a “popular front” of cooperation with socialists and liberals to fight fascism. To be sure, he contributed to the New Masses, a Communist journal, but on his own terms which included forthright criticism of both the magazine and the party. He also joined the pro-Loyalist League of American Writers, a group of prominent literary folk that included some members of the Communist Party. “The man who refuses to defend his convictions,” he told a congress of the League, “for fear that he may defend them in the wrong company, has no convictions.” That statement began his reply to those, the FBI included, who considered him a “fellow traveller.” He continued to urge others to fight for their beliefs in the poem “Speech to the Scholars,” delivered at the Columbia Phi Beta Kappa exercises. Like the artists who held that the search for beauty and for truth precluded politics in art, many scholars believed in a deliberate political neutrality. “I say the guns are in your house,” MacLeish told them. “Arise O scholars from your peace! Arise! Enlist! Take arms and fight!”

In writing as he did, MacLeish explained to Walter Lippmann, he interpreted the conflict between fascism and communism as “superficial and temporary in comparison with the profound conflict between the conception of intellectual and moral freedom on the one side and on the other, the conception of the totalitarian state.” That insight positioned MacLeish far in advance of most American intellectuals. He and his like-minded literary friends also displayed extraordinary courage in openly opposing fascism at a time when the establishment in the United States and much of western Europe, fearful of communism and anxious to preserve even a superficial and uneasy peace, refused to acknowledge the danger and the barbarity of Hitler. MacLeish risked offending not only his Ivy League acquaintances but some of the poets—Yeats and Frost, for example—whose approbation he craved.

In 1937 MacLeish completed The Fall of the City, the first play in verse ever produced for radio; it was a work of propaganda in the service of freedom. “The city of masterless men,” said the prophecy at the start of the play, “will take a master.” An orator addressed the crowd. Resist, he recommended in the spirit of an apolitical idealist, not with spears but with scorn; reason and truth would prevail without recourse to arms. A messenger, a defeatist, then warned of the strength of the approaching conqueror. A general tried to fire up the timorous crowd: “There's nothing in this world worse … than doing the Strong Man's will! The free will fight for their freedom. … You can stand on the stairs and meet him! You can hold in the dark of a hall! You can die!—or your children will crawl for it.” But overcome by fear, the citizens concluded that the city was doomed, that “Freedom's for fools: Force is the certainty! … Men must be ruled.” So the city fell to the conqueror who marched in, huge in his armor. But his visor fell open, revealing emptiness: “The helmet is hollow! … The armor is empty.” The citizens, lying silent on the pavement, saw nothing: “They wish to be free of their freedom: released of their liberty.” Their voices roared: “The city of masterless men has found a master. The city has fallen.” As a work of art the play was wanting, but as a tract for the time it was germane. In a new preface, MacLeish later wrote: “Too many nations had walked away from freedom … and accepted tyranny in its place.”

Tyranny rode to power on the destruction of the innocent, but too many decent people could not conceive of the brutality of fascism. That was the message of MacLeish's Air Raid (1938), another radio drama in verse, inspired by Picasso's Guernica. Like that painting, it described the “new and unspeakable horror of war.” The play opened on an unidentified town, “very quiet and orderly,” the men working in the surrounding fields, the women busy with laundry and gossip, scoffing at their men's talk of war. They ignored a siren that warned of an airplane circling overhead; they paid no heed to a policeman urging them to take cover. Perhaps the plane was coming, one old woman said: “But if it is / It's not for housewives in this town they're coming. / They're after the generals … the cabinet ministers … the square.” The policeman tried again: “This enemy kills women.” The women laughed, but a formation of planes banked to attack. Still incredulous, the women called: “Show it our softness! … Show it our womanhood!” Then curtain, with “the shrieking voices … the shattering noise of guns … the diminishing drone of the planes.”

MacLeish was using a powerful and popular medium, radio, to issue a warning unwelcome to his American audience. In 1938 he also used another powerful medium, photography, to respond to declining popular support for the New Deal and its ideals. The economic recession of 1937-38 shook confidence in New Deal policies. Roosevelt largely failed in his efforts to help liberal Democrats defeat their conservative opponents in party primaries in 1938, and that year the Republicans gained enough seats in Congress to form, with conservative Democrats, a coalition that blocked progressive legislation. But MacLeish spoke from the left in the sparse text he wrote for Land of the Free (1938)—his “sound track,” he called it—that accompanied photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency created to assist displaced and impoverished farm families. The book anticipated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans: both works used the previously little explored medium of photography to tell a story and not just illustrate it; both focused on the powerless and dispossessed. In his volume, MacLeish associated freedom with the unspoiled land and the spirit of westering Americans of an earlier era. He praised their individualism, contrasted their democratic condition to the indignity of the itinerant farmers and embattled labor organizers of his own time, and by implication referred to the New Deal as the vehicle for restoring the freedom and equality Lincoln had celebrated.

MacLeish returned to those themes in America Was Promises (1939): “America was promises—to whom? / Jefferson knew: / Declared it before God and before history: / … The promises were Man's: the land was his— / Man endowed by his Creator: / Earnest in love: perfectible by reason: / Just and perceiving justice.” The promises to man were land and liberty, humanity, self-respect and common decency. But “The Aristocracy of Wealth and Talents” also grabbed for the promise of America. So the people had to reach to control their own destiny, for: “unless we take them for ourselves / Others will take them. … America is promises to / Take!”

Those domestic themes are another version of the clash MacLeish described between democracy and authoritarianism in Europe. His political poetry called upon Americans to protect freedom both at home and abroad. As his critics contended, his political verse lacked the intimacy, the tenderness, the melodiousness of his lyric poetry. But early and late, as he had said in his youth, he was expressing his particular self; therefore, in the late 1930s, he wrote of his sense of urgency about the perils confronting the nation. His political poetry was action, and it needed a vocabulary and cadence different from those required by intimacy. The nature of MacLeish's preoccupations had changed, and with it, so had his techniques.

MacLeish was also changing some aspects of his life. Uncomfortable with the politics of Henry Luce's publications, he resigned from Fortune and took a part-time position at Harvard as curator of the Nieman Foundation, a program for promising young journalists. But that was a way station. While registering his usual qualms about any responsibility that would interfere with his writing, in 1939 he accepted appointment as the librarian of Congress. He had moved at last directly into Franklin Roosevelt's capacious political tent. The appointment aroused predictable opposition from professional librarians, who wanted one of their own in charge of the nation's most important library; from the Communist Party, long inimical to MacLeish; and from conservative congressmen who considered his political opinions dangerous and un-American. The librarians were wrong. MacLeish proved to be a tactful, innovative, successful administrator. But MacLeish's ideological opponents were correct in their fears. His position enhanced his public stature and provided a platform from which he could broadcast his political messages with increased effect.

Roosevelt had not talked with MacLeish about world affairs, but he put him in a place from which he could reach a larger audience just in time. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, Hitler and Stalin joined in an alliance of convenience to divide Poland between them. The ensuing invasion of Poland, which Britain and France had promised to defend, marked the start of World War II and exposed the Nazis and Communists as common aggressors and common enemies of freedom. When MacLeish arrived in Washington, few of Roosevelt's political family were sufficiently articulate and foresighted to challenge the isolationist mood of the nation, to explain that the war in Europe involved American interests, to persuade their fellow citizens that Hitler could not be defeated unless Americans sided with his victims. MacLeish joined Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, and Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, in taking that message to the country. He had been doing so for several years. Now he continued particularly to address artists and scholars, many of whom still regarded World War I as a disaster, war in any cause as an ultimate horror, and the European conflict as no business of the United States.

MacLeish believed that this self-deluding position could not be sustained after the Nazis overran much of western Europe in the spring of 1940. In June France fell, and England fought alone against the Nazis. The civilization of the West, built over two millennia, stood close to a new dark age. Two months earlier, MacLeish had addressed “The Irresponsibles,” the intellectuals still committed to a deliberate neutrality. They had a responsibility, he asserted, to defend “the common inherited culture of the West” by which they had lived, a culture now “attacked in other countries with a stated … purpose to destroy.” In Germany the use of force “in the name of force alone” was destroying the “self-respect and … dignity of individual life without which the existence of art and learning is inconceivable.” The revolution of Nazism was “a revolution of negatives … of despair … created out of disorder by terror of disorder; … a revolution of gangs … against … the rule of moral law … of intellectual truth. … Caliban in the miserable and besotted swamp is the symbol of this revolution.” The beneficiaries of democracy now had the duty to fight back.

MacLeish had also indicted the Nazis for their racial theories. Hitler's crimes against Jews helped MacLeish outgrow the anti-Semitism inculcated at Hotchkiss and at Yale. In 1943 his Colloquy for the States added ethnic pluralism to his roster of democratic values. There was talk “on the east wind,” the poem said, about how Americans married: “We marry Irish girls, … Spaniards with the evening eyes, … golden Swedes, … Jews for remembrance. … We're mixed people.” Americans were unlike the “blood we left behind … the blood afraid of change … afraid of strangers” that stayed home “and married their … cousins who looked like their mother.” Race did not bother Americans, MacLeish said in a speech in 1940: “They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People … the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.”

In the great and continuing debate of 1940-41 between those who urged assistance to the British and those who advocated American isolation, MacLeish made it his task to remind Americans that the Nazis attacked not with planes or tanks alone “but with violence of belief.” The enemies of liberty, he said in one speech, confused democracy with a way of owning property or a way of doing business. That was not what Jefferson had thought democracy meant, or what John Adams thought, “or those who took it westward.” They meant “the simple man's belief in liberty of mind and spirit.” So MacLeish condemned the isolationists, particularly their organization, America First. The most ardent voices of that group included the reactionary Chicago Tribune, the aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh, who had accepted a Nazi decoration, and his wife, the author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who praised fascism as an irresistible “wave of the future.” That famous woman, MacLeish said, assured us “in a beautiful and cadenced prose that democracy is dead in every country,” and she accepted instead the “alternatives of terror and despair.” She was wrong. Americans “knew which way to take to reach tomorrow”—the way of democracy and freedom.

MacLeish had become a leading propagandist for democracy before the president made his role official in the fall of 1941 by appointing him director of the newly established Office of Facts and Figures (OFF). MacLeish took that position without salary and in addition to his responsibilities at the Library of Congress. From the outset he was crippled in his task. Roosevelt, remembering the hyperbolic propaganda of World War I, had created OFF only under pressure from his wife Eleanor and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York. Even then the president defined the purpose of the agency narrowly: “to disseminate … factual information on the defense effort and to facilitate a widespread understanding of the status and progress of that effort.” He gave OFF no authority to extract information from other governmental agencies. Consequently MacLeish, committed as an individual to increasing American participation in the war against Hitler, found himself forced as a bureaucrat to operate within the restrictions of his mandate, which called for data, not passion. He said as much announcing a “strategy of truth.” “Democratic government,” he added, “is more concerned with the provision of information to the people than it is with the communication of dreams and aspirations.” On the basis of the facts, the people would judge.

But MacLeish was a man of dreams, and OFF could not produce the facts. As the United States moved closer and closer to war in the Atlantic, federal defense agencies controlled information so as not to release details about shortages or plans for military and naval deployment. Though MacLeish could not change that policy, the press blamed OFF for censorship. Uninformed himself about military matters, MacLeish was as surprised as other Americans by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the next months, as American, British, and Russian forces suffered severe defeats, the War and Navy departments refused to release the depressing facts about losses, facts that would have helped the enemy. OFF continued largely to produce pamphlets about the war effort. MacLeish's staff urged him to use the agency to dramatize the war, but the radio programs OFF then generated—one of them about FDR—struck Republicans in Congress as partisan propaganda.

Believing, as he put it, in “human liberty and … the moral order of the world,” MacLeish held that the United States was defending “not the American continent” but “the American idea and the world in which the American idea can live.” That was a difficult conception to get across to the public either by the release of information or the dramatization of FDR. At OFF MacLeish was simply playing the wrong part.

In the spring of 1942 Roosevelt abolished the agency and replaced it with the Office of War Information (OWI) under the journalist Elmer Davis with a larger, though still restricted, authority. MacLeish remained as one of several men on Davis's advisory board. But MacLeish soon became restless with OWI's policy—even though the policy was Roosevelt's—of reporting information rather than promoting a Wilsonian postwar internationalism. OWI, he wrote Davis, should “accept responsibility for the job of putting before the people … the principal issues which must be decided, in a form which will excite and encourage discussion.” Others in the agency, Davis included, decided that OWI should maintain a “policy of objectivity,” present the facts, and not “make policy.” MacLeish, who disagreed “emphatically,” soon resigned.

He was ready also to leave the Library of Congress, as he told Roosevelt; but as soon as the president accepted his resignation in November 1944 he at once appointed MacLeish assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs. In that position MacLeish, the only liberal in the group of new State Department officials FDR named, was to direct public relations on behalf of the United Nations, which was not yet officially created but anticipated by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. As the president knew, MacLeish had been speaking in public about the nature of the postwar peace. He rejected the idea of a war for empire—what Henry Luce called the “American Century.” Instead, he associated himself with the “Century of the Common Man,” which he defined as “the long democratic revolution of which Henry Wallace has so movingly spoken.” The war, MacLeish also said, “must be a war … for the freedom of mankind, and the peace must be a peace for liberty in fact.” The nation and the world owed that debt to “The Young Dead Soldiers,” who address us from their graves: “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. / We were young. … We have died. Remember us.”

To help to build that monument, MacLeish, assisted by Adlai Stevenson, publicized the workings of the San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations. He participated in the drafting of the preamble of the UN charter and later in writing the charter for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But this activity could not obscure one very important loss: when Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, MacLeish, like thousands of other Americans, mourned the revered leader. MacLeish memorialized FDR quietly in one stanza of “Actfive.” It was the title poem of a short book of poetry which, MacLeish wrote, “sought to interpret the events of the war as an expression of the heroic struggle of humanity to ‘endure and live.’” He portrayed Roosevelt as he had seen him at the end of his days: “The responsible man, death's hand upon his shoulder, / Knowing well the liars may prevail / … tired tired tired to the heart,” nevertheless “Does what must be done: dies in his chair / Fagged out, worn down, sick / With the weight of his own bones, the task finished, / The war won, the victory assured, / The glory left behind him for the others.”

For MacLeish by 1948 there was nothing of glory in the failure of liberty in much of the world, in the collapse of the wartime alliance, in the inception of the Cold War. In spite of the UN, Wilsonian internationalism had yielded to rival Soviet and American imperialisms. As MacLeish saw it, the Cold War threatened freedom everywhere. No apologist either for the Soviet Union or for communism, he nevertheless argued that American policy supported governments abroad only because they opposed the Russians, and that often assistance extended in the name of freedom was being used to buttress oppressive and undemocratic regimes. Worse, fear of communism lent credibility to American demagogues who exploited that fear for personal and partisan ends, and in so doing violated the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. MacLeish's liberal vision of a free people under a just government—of a world of such peoples and governments—was under heavy assault.

In those unsettling times MacLeish, as always, turned to poetry—“the process of reducing to a form at once sensuous and intelligible the fragmentary, reluctant, and inarticulate experience of man … the one known process, by which men present to themselves an image of their lives and so possess them.” His wartime and early postwar poetry were tinged with melancholy, as the poems in Actfive (1948) attested. “Voyage West” offered a melodious but bittersweet commentary on a love affair that had ended, and “Brave New World” expressed anger as well as disappointment: “Freedom that was a thing to use / They've made a thing to save / And staked it in and fenced it round / Like a dead man's grave.”

“Freedom,” MacLeish wrote Henry Luce, “is not something you have: it is something you do.” Yet the Luce magazines, MacLeish continued in another letter, had been “largely silent on the great critical issues within the United States affecting the realization of this dream of responsible individual freedom—the issues of freedom of the mind and freedom of the press and freedom of education which are now not only urgent but dangerous—dangerous to speak out about: dangerous to be silent about.” Speaking out about freedom was the work of poetry. So MacLeish dedicated “That Black Day” to the memory of Laurence Duggan, a former State Department officer who had been vilified just hours after his death by two members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Representatives Karl Mundt and Richard Nixon: “God help that country where informers thrive! / Where slander flourishes and lies contrive / To kill by whispers! Where men lie to live!”

“It is truly to testify we are here—to bear witness—those of us who are artists,” MacLeish wrote a friend. And he continued to bear witness while Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, a position he accepted in 1949. He openly attacked Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name came to connote the whole atmosphere of deliberate political slander that Mundt and Nixon and HUAC had contrived. In 1952 MacLeish naturally supported his good friend Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois and the Democratic presidential candidate, who had the courage to condemn McCarthy and his vile accusations. Replying to Stevenson's invitation to help draft a speech for delivery to the American Legion, MacLeish discussed the “ideal of patriotism.” That ideal, he pointed out, holds the Legion together but “it is also the mask behind which some of the most dangerous and evil influences of our day conceal themselves—in the Legion and outside it.” Patriotism was love of country but not just of the land: “No, of the people … their accomplishments, their endurance, their hopes.” Stevenson's campaign, as MacLeish knew, spoke to the “critical issue of individual freedom in a frightened world.”

When Stevenson ran again in 1956, McCarthyism had spent most of its force, but now MacLeish called for an attack on the complacency of Americans and the “flatulent fat-headedness in Washington.” “What is at stake,” he wrote Stevenson, “is our greatness as a people.” Communism was “as evil as ever” and the Soviet Union “enormously powerful” but communism had obsessed Americans too long. They should begin “to think in terms of the great world revolution which is sweeping across Asia and will inevitably reach every ‘backward’ area,” a revolution with “infinite possibilities for human good” and human hurt. “We cannot live defensively,” MacLeish continued. “In a time of enormous change, a great nation … must shape the change.” That was the counsel of a liberal who had retained his ideals and moved with the times. So had Stevenson. He again lost the election but his foresightedness and inspiration sustained MacLeish's hopes.

Shed of his melancholy, MacLeish brought his refreshed convictions to his poetry and essays. In 1955 he defined his liberalism more clearly than ever in a critique of Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy. Lippmann argued, in MacLeish's paraphrase, that since 1917 in western countries “there had been too much democracy and … too little government.” The alternative, so Lippmann wrote, demanded “popular assent to radical measures which will restore government strong enough to govern.” Such a government would be strong enough “to resist the encroachment of assemblies and of mass opinion and strong enough to guarantee private liberty against the pressure of the masses.” Those radical measures required democratic societies to accept the values of Natural Law, which would free government from subservience to mass opinion. MacLeish considered that proposal elitist, the antithesis of “the idea of the greatest possible individual freedom to which we have been committed … since the end of the eighteenth century.” In contrast to Lippmann, he believed it had been essential to involve the people “in the determination of the great issue of war or peace” in 1917 and again in 1941. “Men will die for peace and freedom but not for the terms of a treaty,” MacLeish wrote, “and it was the conviction of my generation in the war of its youth and the war of its middle age that the American government and the governments of the free world had made some progress toward a more effective democracy by the recognition of that fact.”

Lippmann erred especially, MacLeish continued, in his conception of freedom. In The Public Philosophy he was concerned with “modern men who find a freedom from constraints of the ancestral order an intolerable loss of guidance and support,” who find that “the burden of freedom is too great an anxiety.” True freedom for Lippmann was “founded on the postulate that there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed: within that public agreement … it was safe to permit … dissent.” That argument rejected MacLeish's “basic philosophy of liberalism—the belief in the liberation of the individual human spirit to find its own way to … truth.” Liberal democracy, MacLeish held, rested on the “proposition that men may shape their own destiny and are capable of realizing their dreams of the good life.” Particular generations, dreading loneliness, might retreat “into the warmth … and protection of conformity as millions in Europe and Asia have done in our time,” but the human journey had not turned back. So the arts attested: “In all the modern arts of words, in modern painting, in modern music, a common impulse is at work.” That impulse, which MacLeish called “almost a compulsion” was “to penetrate the undiscovered country of the individual human consciousness, the human self.” Safety and security lay not in a renunciation of individual freedom but in the achievement of individuality, in “the deeper reality of the world within.” So for MacLeish the mission of the arts defined the politics of freedom. His poetry and his liberalism remained a whole.

MacLeish's art and his politics alike expressed his faith in man, a faith hardened over the years. He acknowledged the injustice of the times and affirmed the indispensability of love in J. B. (1958), his most beautiful and most successful play in verse. It was his reworking in modern terms of the Book of Job. In the prologue, two circus vendors, Nickles and Mr. Zuss, introduced the themes of the play. Job, Mr. Zuss says, challenged God, demanded justice of God. That was ridiculous, Nickles replies. God has killed Job's sons and daughters, stolen his livestock, left him “stricken on a dung heap,” all for no reason. Nickles sings: “If God is God He is not good, / If God is good he is not God.” Millions of mankind have known injustice, he says, millions were slaughtered “For walking around in the wrong skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids: / Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—London, Dresden, Hiroshima.” The play begins. J. B., who starts off as a prosperous and grateful man who believes that God is just, proceeds to lose his children in various accidents and to lose his wealth; finally his wife Sarah leaves him because he persists in believing that “God is just … the fault is mine.” His guilt is misplaced, as several comforters show him. Innocence is irrelevant; suffering, random. Sarah returns when J. B. learns, as she had, the futility of guilt, the futility of challenging God or expecting justice. “You wanted justice,” Sarah says, “and there was none— / Only love.” J. B. replies that God “does not love. He / Is.” Sarah: “But we do. That's the wonder.” And with love, they accept their place in the universe.

“J. B.'s recognition,” MacLeish wrote the director of the play, “is a recognition not only of the insignificance of his human place but of the significance of that insignificance. He is at least a man. It is his ‘integrity’ as a man (Job's word) that he has been struggling for.” J. B. must struggle “to accept life again, which means … to accept love, to risk himself again in love.” In J. B. MacLeish, as ever, dealt with human nature, and also, as ever, he saw the social and political implications of his message. “It is part of the essential naivety of the successful American business man,” he wrote the editor of the New York Times, “to believe that something in the order of things justifies his having what he has. Rich men in my father's generation were candid about this to the point of embarrassment.”

MacLeish had reached the age when the friends he loved were dying one after another. Mark Van Doren, Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson—his generation of artists, his generation of liberals was disappearing. He eulogized Mrs. Roosevelt in 1962: “To most of us, the world … has become an abstraction … an economic mechanism such as the Marxists still believe they have discovered; the Absurdity which contemporary literary fashion plays with; the hard-headed Reality which only Republicans can ever know; the ultimate Equation which science will someday write. To Mrs. Roosevelt the world was never an abstraction. It was human.” He could just as well have been describing himself.

MacLeish turned seventy in that same year. During the next two decades he carried on much as he had before. He accepted old age with good humor: “Your eyes change. / Your handwriting changes. / You can't read what you once wrote. / Even your own thoughts sound wrong to you, / something some old idiot has misquoted.” The Vietnam War appalled him. Three names were not to be spoken, he wrote in “National Security.” The first was Cambodia, the second Laos, and “The third is Vietnam, / a dried child / mailed to its mother / by B-52s / in a cellophane envelope.” Those names, hidden in a secret room, refuse concealment. They bleed, and their blood runs “under the secret / door and down / the classified stair.” There is so much blood that “the country is steeped in it.”

And corrupted by it, as evidenced alike by Richard Nixon and those who engaged in violent protest against both the government and the war. Like explicit sex in literature, MacLeish complained, revolution in politics had become a cause: “What was once a means—often a noble means—to attain an essential human end has become a fad, an intellectual obsession. Act first and find out later why you acted.” For the counterculture, even individual freedom had become a “cause” and “turned to irresponsibility.” “No society,” MacLeish concluded, still the liberal, “can live without intellectual and moral order, and the fact that order decays with time like everything else merely means that order must be recreated with time. But order cannot be recreated by the pursuit of causes however grandiose and whatever they call themselves. … Only justice and the love of man can produce an order humanity will accept.”

Justice, the love of man, and liberty—these were sacred to MacLeish. His critique of Lippmann and his J. B. constituted two of three late statements of his creed. Fittingly, the third late statement comes in his essay “The Venetian Grave,” a defense of the award of the Bollingen Prize for poetry, the very first award of that prize, to Ezra Pound. Pound was certainly no friend to MacLeish: he had continually criticized MacLeish's poetry and his politics; and he had never thanked MacLeish for leading the successful effort to have him released from the insane asylum in which the federal government had confined him for making radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini during World War II. But Pound had been a great poet. MacLeish agreed that Pound had apparently embraced fascism, but that fascist ranter, he argued, that “fabricated man,” was Pound's own creation. Now, with the Vietnam War, fraud had become a form of government. “Fraud and government may exist together,” MacLeish proposed, “but not fraud and art.” And Pound “was unarguably a poet.” When Pound was tried for treason, his lawyer had chosen not to contest the case on the basis of the First Amendment but instead had entered a plea of guilty by reason of insanity. Though that plea prevailed, MacLeish considered it “wrong in law.” Some twenty years later, he noted, Ramsay Clark, a former attorney general of the United States, had attacked American policy while in Hanoi, the capital of an enemy country. Yet Clark was not tried or even arrested. “And for the good and sufficient reason,” MacLeish went on, “that the right to dissent, the right to criticize, had by then been exercised in time of war by so large a majority of the American people that if wartime criticism was treason, the Republic itself would have had to be indicted.”

Pound, MacLeish continued, had admired the fascist government of Italy and had often been virulently anti-Semitic. But he thought of himself as an oldtime Jeffersonian, “and though his notions … would have astonished Mr. Jefferson, … there is no reason to doubt that he honestly held them.” As MacLeish saw him, Pound was guilty only of “that peculiar naiveté … of intellectuals: that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience.” He was widely read “but his experience of the world was thin,” and therefore he totally misread his own times. Yet he was “the principal inventor of modern poetry,” a poetry “committed to the human world, to the historical world, the moral world,” and also the author of the Cantos, “the nearest thing we have, either in prose or verse, to a moral history of our tragic age … that descent, not into Dante's hell, but into ours.” Pound was deluded but not insane; he was “neither dilettante nor traitor but … a foolish and unhappy man … who was a … master poet.” And so MacLeish stitched together freedom of speech, political dissent, the morality of art, and the significance of all three in his own tragic era.

He had had his say with courage, with compassion, with beauty. Even as death approached his liberalism was undaunted, and the metaphors of his best poetry still informed his verse: “Only the old know time. … It frightens them. / Time to the old is world, is will, / turning world, unswerving will, / interval / until.”

Archibald MacLeish Poetry: American Poets Analysis

MacLeish, Archibald (Vol. 14)