Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish Poetry: American Poets Analysis

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Public and private man, humanist, social critic, poet, Archibald MacLeish presents a rare wholeness of vision throughout his long career as a writer. This is not to say that his poetry remains static, that he wrote the same poem over and over again for more than fifty years. Indeed, his focus and style shift at two major points, dividing his corpus roughly into three stages: the 1920’s, the 1930’s, and the postwar period. As Waggoner points out, MacLeish was the first among a very few twentieth century poets who have recognized, grasped, and used in their work the discoveries of post-Newtonian physics. He refused to polarize poetry and science because to do so would be escapism. It is the poet’s role to express the mysteries of existence and experience. To oppose poetry to the contemporary understanding of nature and the universe, of origins and time and space, is to rob the poet of his subject and his mission.Throughout his works, MacLeish reiterates the value of the real, the concrete experience of the senses and feelings. Philosophically, he resembles the British empiricists of the eighteenth century, though without being reductive about experience. He distrusts abstractions, in the political arena no less than in the aesthetic. MacLeish is always in agreement with William Wordsworth’s concept of the poet, “a man speaking to men.” Unlike Eliot and Pound, he did not write for posterity nor for an elite group of preservers of western culture. He sought a metaphor for contemporary humans, particularly Americans. Like the eighteenth century English Augustans, he wrote social criticism with a public voice, with a sense of civic responsibility. Unlike neoclassicists of all periods, however, from Alexander Pope to Eliot, MacLeish refused the temptation to look back with nostalgia to a golden past. Rather, he sought to remind his readers of the true American dream. In A Continuing Journey (1968), he defines this dream as a reverence for humankind’s dignity, self-determination, and possibilities for unbounded knowledge.

If MacLeish were only a public poet, addressing only contemporary social issues, he would soon lose his audience. His genius inheres in his synthesis of the “public-private world in which we live.” He is always a poet, a superb craftsperson meditating on the exigencies of human experience. The main fact of human experience for MacLeish is people’s finiteness, the inevitability of death. In fact, the three stages of his poetic development can be understood according to their attitude toward death. Early in his career, MacLeish lost his brother in World War I; he also suffered the death of a child. In the first period, there is an outcry against meaningless death. Humankind’s transient existence in the vast universe of twentieth century physics offers a temptation to deep bitterness, but MacLeish refuses to yield to it. In later prose essays and poems, he criticizes the existentialists, who reduce the human lot to absurdity. The poetry of the second stage, written in the 1930’s, turns away from the search for the relationship between humans and the universe, focusing instead on death in its more political and historical context: death from war, oppression, and hunger. In the final period, MacLeish returns to death as a topic, but now as a concrete, highly personal event. He writes elegies for his friends, for other writers. He dwells on growing old, on his own inevitable death. These later poems invite comparison with the last poems of William Butler Yeats. They are affirmative, yet also ironic and sometimes tragic. In terms of the paradox presented in John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” these poems choose the death that results...

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from living rather than the immortality of stasis.

New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976

In New and Collected Poems, 1917-1976, MacLeish included the poems he published in the 1920’s, together with three earlier poems published in 1917 in Tower of Ivory. The poetry of this early period reflects to some degree the influences MacLeish encountered during his five years in France. These poems had elicited critical comments that tended to denigrate them by stressing their derivative nature, though, in general, such evaluations are unfair. It is true that influences tend to be obvious, but the poems also embody MacLeish’s personal synthesis of technique and vision. These works develop a core of personal symbols, using the techniques of the French Symbolists as well as the Poundian juxtaposition of concrete images and the fusion of ancient myth and modern life used so successfully by Eliot in The Waste Land (1922). The early poems show an almost Metaphysical wit in their use of paradox and irony, also revealing traces of William Shakespeare, Blake, Keats, and Yeats, to name a few. Hemingway, his close friend during the expatriate period, seems, surprisingly, to have influenced MacLeish’s style in a very lasting way. Throughout his career, MacLeish tends to use short concrete words grouped into coordinate clauses, with relatively little subordination. He seems to want to state the “bare facts,” not to embellish them. However, the poems of the 1920’s reveal highly successful experiments with music and sound. Critics agree that MacLeish was a technical master of the musical aspect of lyric poetry.

The Happy Marriage

The Happy Marriage is a sequence of sonnets about love, paradoxical in the manner of John Donne, using plain language yet with striking musical effects. The poems are not allusive; they dwell on real life as opposed to books, on great moments of sense perception as opposed to ideas and abstractions. Not “love” or the “lover,” but particular, concrete visual and tactile moments of sensation compose human reality. In The Dialogues of Archibald MacLeish and Mark Van Doren (1964), MacLeish states that Algernon Charles Swinburne was his initial source, and intense sensibility is evident in these poems, as in the earlier Tower of Ivory, though they are never decadent.

The Pot of Earth

The Pot of Earth is a long narrative poem using a ritual taken from Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915) as an epigraph; it works through allusion as an ordering structural and thematic principle in the story of a girl’s reproductive cycle. The fertility ritual, part of the cult of Adonis, describes women cultivating plants in pots of earth. The plants grow rapidly under the sunlight but wither for lack of roots. After eight days, the plants, along with images of the dead Adonis, are thrown into the sea or springs. This use of Frazer invites comparison with The Waste Land; the two works utilize the lore from Frazer in a parallel manner. The resulting poems, however, are very different in subject matter, mode, and tone. Whereas Eliot reflects on the sterility of Western culture after World War I, associating it with abortive fertility rites and degraded or impotent lovers, MacLeish expresses the age-old rhythms of the female cycle, its inescapable connection with nature and death. While the species lives on, the individual, who rebels against her unwilled participation in the cycle, dies. The Pot of Earth itself is “pregnant” with the techniques and symbols that MacLeish developed in succeeding works. Images of the moon, sun, sea, and leafy trees shadowed against the moon or sun recur throughout MacLeish’s works, sometimes as opaque images or details and sometimes as symbols fraught with almost allegorical significance. The themes born here are meditation on death; humans’ relationships to time, nature, and the revolving planets; and the flesh as intractable reality, somehow mysteriously connected with “self.”

In this poem, sensuous, concrete images of nature work together with the narrative structure to communicate the tension between the individual heroine (or victim) of the poem and the inexorable rhythms of nature in which she participates by maturing, making love, conceiving, bearing a child, and dying as a result. The epigraph of the poem, from Hamlet’s “mad” talk with Polonius about Ophelia, establishes the sun as a symbol of the male fertilizing principle. Hamlet’s “let her not walk i’ the sun” puns on the word “sun,” meaning that his (the son’s) love for her is threatening. In the same way, MacLeish uses the sun as both a death-bearing fertilizing principle and beckoning romantic love. The moon is a relatively clear symbol, in its influence on the tides, of the inevitable cyclical processes of nature: birth, maturity, death, and rebirth. The individual, however, is not reborn; the species is. The tragedy of the individual thus inheres in a conflict with nature’s preservation of the species. MacLeish plays with point of view in the poem to bring out this conflict. Part 1, “The Sowing of the Dead Corn,” begins with an objective third-person description of nature’s “death,” winter, shifting to a limited third-person perspective with insight into the young girl’s fear of menstruation. This is carried further into a first-person interior monologue, jumping from the thirteen-year-old to the seventeen-year-old girl. The loss of virginity on Easter Sunday is told in the third person through juxtaposed natural images of sowing, together with brief explanatory statements.

Part 2, “The Shallow Grass,” begins with the marriage of the young woman, juxtaposing her behavior with the sensuously depicted newly plowed fields that function typically as an objective correlative for the body of the bride. The poem moves back and forth from nature, in the context of the Adonis ritual, to the particular woman, now pregnant, just beginning to try to separate her identity from her uncontrollable body. Part 3, “Carrion Spring,” reveals her as a “reaped meadow,” dead. In parts 2 and 3, the poet turns to the reader and comments cryptically on the mystery of the process. In tone, The Pot of Earth is not optimistic; its insistence on the absolute presence of flesh and bone, on their mysterious inviolability, is present in The Happy Marriage and ties in with the conclusion to Einstein, another long poem of the 1920’s.

Einstein and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish

MacLeish’s technique of structuring in The Pot of Earth—allusion to the Adonis ritual—is similar to his use of marginal glosses in both Einstein and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. Both long poems rely on marginal glosses to provide order and context for their verses; the latter is similar in tone to The Waste Land, and similar in conception to the “Hamlet” of Jules Laforgue. The speaker is a poet beating his breast in the void, bewailing the inadequacies of words and knowledge. The ghost of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (pr. c. 1600-1601) represents the mystery of meaning that humans assume to be at the center of experience. There is a sense of the moon as the boundary of the human corner of the vast indifferent universe. The poet-speaker bemoans the pain of mortal existence, without any illusion of a responsive chord in the universe. The Hamlet of A. MacLeish typifies MacLeish’s more personal poems in that it is both autobiographical and universal. He mentions the loss of his brother and child, while always remaining a representative figure, the poet-man facing the exigencies of life in a universe without meaning. Along with Einstein, this poem is among MacLeish’s most pessimistic, and he rejected its self-pitying aspects in the following decade.

Streets in the Moon

Streets in the Moon, like Einstein, grapples with the image-defeating concepts of modern physics such as the time-space continuum and the fourth dimension. Whereas Einstein suggests a laboratory notebook, being a factual description of humans’ felt disjunction with a vast, yet closed and indifferent universe, Streets in the Moon is a series of more “poetic” lyrics. These poems on various topics, such as death, technological humans, and poetics, range from the playful to the nostalgic. Their language tends to be plainer, more abstract and conversational than that of earlier poems. They are united, however, by their uses of the moon as a symbol and the Einsteinian universe as setting. Many of the poems are ironic in the disparity between their titles and their contents. The moon, always haunting MacLeish’s poems, seems to be a Janus-faced symbol, with contradictory meanings. It is a traditional beacon of imagination, of the dream world of myth and symbol, but it is also a satellite in the indifferent universe, representing a time-space continuum that mutely destroys human aspirations toward meaning. Even MacLeish’s most famous lyric, taken from Streets in the Moon, “Ars Poetica,” is permeated by the symbolic moon.

“Ars Poetica”

“Ars Poetica,” a twenty-four-line poem with a Horatian title implying high seriousness, is perhaps the single poem for which MacLeish is best known and the one most often anthologized. It has been taken both too seriously and not seriously enough by some critics. The title suggests a disquisition on the true nature of poetry. Companion poems such as “Some Aspects of Immortality,” “Man!,” and “Hearts’ and Flowers,’” however, reveal a technique of ironically deceptive titles. The titles do relate to the subject at hand, but not in the imposing or sentimental way the reader expects. For example, “Hearts’ and Flowers’” sounds like a sentimental valentine, but it is a musical compilation of scientific descriptions of sea anemones. The further irony results from the erotic rhythms and connotations of the scientific words. Thus the reader comes full circle from romantic expectations, through surprise at the scientific terminology, and back to erotic and romantic response on an intuitive level.

“Ars Poetica” operates analogously. At first reading it appears to be, not a treatise on poetics, but a paradoxical, anti-intellectual riddle. It has been rejected by some readers (and with some justification) as the epitome of art for art’s sake. In the 1920’s, MacLeish’s poetry was much more attuned to aestheticism than it was later. The first section of “Ars Poetica” states that a poem should be a concrete object, using four similes to suggest the desired qualities of muteness and palpability: a“globed fruit,” “old medallions,” stone casement ledges, and the “flight of birds.” In other words, a poem should be felt and experienced, not rationally analyzed. It should be a “real” and immediate experience, like the inviolate life of the flesh referred to in earlier poems. Certainly it is paradoxical to ask that a poem, a collection of words, be silent and wordless.

The second eight lines of “Ars Poetica” begin and end with the same two lines comparing the poem’s motionlessness in time to the moon’s climbing. The first uses a kind of philosophical synesthesia to communicate the time-space continuum that informs Einstein and Streets in the Moon. The moon, of course, does not climb; only from the perspective of an earthly observer, a human, does it appear to do so. The earth turns (and humans with it) and the moon circles the earth, but all the person sees is an apparently static moon that yet moves higher and higher. Thus the poem seems to have deceptive qualities. The poem, like the moon rising behind the branches of a tree that serve as a standard to gauge its movement, passes through the memories and experiences of the mind.

Whether these mental events are the poet’s or the reader’s is not clear. Possibly MacLeish refers to the creative process, the relationship between the poet’s personal experiences and the impersonal work he forges from them. Most often quoted are the final eight lines, which argue that a poem should not be read as a statement of some idea or external meaning. Rather, a poem is a created object, a whole self-contained experience. Here there is a suggestion of Eliot’s objective correlative, which MacLeish had also frequently used in the poems of the 1920’s. An image is offered for the reader to experience directly, to feel the emotion that the poet wants to express. Metonymy rather than metaphor is the appropriate figure of speech. The image or poem is an instance of the emotional complex rather than an analogue of it. The obvious trap in “Ars Poetica” is to extort “meaning” in the sense of a general theory of poetics from a poem that warns against interpreting poems as vehicles of meaning. Thus it sets the reader up to expect a theory of poetry, thwarts that expectation by its content, yet does fulfill the title’s promise in a negative way.

New Found Land

The final volume of MacLeish’s initial stage, New Found Land, is a transitional work. Like his other collections, it offers a variety of lyrics on death, time and space, travel and migration, and it uses various experimental styles in combination with the recurrent symbols of sun, moon, sea, and leafy branches. Many of MacLeish’s best-known lyrics are to be found here; but they are nostalgic, looking back to the Old World and the preoccupations of MacLeish’s expatriate years. Only with “American Letter,” at the end of the volume, is the promise of the collection’s title fulfilled. “American Letter” shows the poet reluctantly turning from the sirens of Old World culture, the tempting foreign olive and palm trees. This poem is often described as an affirmation of America, but it is a difficult, painful affirmation. America is strange because it is neither a land nor a race. It is only a promise of a New World. MacLeish is in a sense a “reborn” American, avowing his kinship with the land and the mixed blood of America.

Conquistador

MacLeish’s return to the United States in 1928 and his tramp through Mexico following the path of Cortés marked a rather dramatic change in the purpose and preoccupations of his poems. His research for Fortune magazine plunged the poet into awareness of social problems caused by the Great Depression. His poetry became oriented toward the New World, the present time, and the immediate future; he criticized society, but with an affirmative faith in the possibilities for freedom’s triumph. The first poem of this period, Conquistador, builds on the narrative techniques used in his earlier works but with a new kind of subject matter. Conquistador is closer to a true American epic than most other attempts, such as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958) or Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930). It explores the historical, cultural, and ideological origins of the New World, and what it finds is violence and the rape of the land, a theme shared by the subsequent volume, Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City.

Conquistador makes no explicit value judgments; it merely presents the story of Cortés’s discovery and violent capture of Mexico. The facts are presented, however, in the context of Dante’s Inferno (in La divina commedia, c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The dedication is from the deepest pit of hell, from Ulysses’ speech to his sailors as he leads them out of the world of humans toward their death. Ulysses’ sin is his driven, unprincipled search for new realms to explore and conquer; he is severely punished for venturing out of his appropriate realm, using deception to inspire his followers. A persistent motif of MacLeish’s poetry is humanity’s insistent drive to push westward, to explore, but mostly to discover the “land’s end.” This drive is neither praiseworthy nor evil in itself, but it has often led to trouble. In addition to the framing quotation from Dante, Conquistador uses a kind of modified terza rima, based not on rhyme but on other techniques of sound repetition, predominantly assonance and consonance. A further echo of the Inferno is the prologue, which is reminiscent of book 6 of Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 29-19 b.c.e.; English translation, 1553), the descent to the underworld, and the context for The Divine Comedy. The speaker of the poem descends to find the dead followers of Cortés to obtain the story of Bernál Díaz, one of the soldiers whose actual record of the journey MacLeish had read. It is Díaz’s somewhat disjointed memories, difficult to recover, that form the substance of the poem. Because it is made up of somewhat harshly juxtaposed concrete images, Conquistador resembles Pound’s Cantos (1925-1972), yet it is unified by a single plot, the conquest of Tenochtitlan, and a single narrative consciousness, that of Díaz.

Conquistador picks up one of MacLeish’s earliest themes, applying it to the writing of history. In The Happy Marriage and even in “Baccalaureate,” one of his very first poems, MacLeish contrasts book learning and abstract ideas with felt concrete experience. In the preface to Conquistador, Díaz protests against the “official” historical accounts of the conquest of Mexico, especially the one written by a priest named Gómara. Such records falsify reality by labeling it with dates and neat words. For Díaz and the other soldiers, the conquest was a matter of blood and terror and guilt and finally death. It was a collection of acutely felt sense impressions and emotions. The style of the poem, written in fifteen books, embodies the confusion of Díaz’s ghost as he summons his long-submerged memories. They are hazy and missing links, but acute when they surface. Clauses are repeatedly strung together with “and,” as a child would speak.

Critics have read Conquistador as a poem more about the consciousness of the narrator than about the conquest of Tenochtitlan. MacLeish, however, seems to aim at objectivity by finding the most real, most accurate account available, the story of a participant in the action. The unglorious, unheroic attitude of the soldier lends realism to a story that might be idealized by a more distanced third-person narrative. MacLeish is essentially an empiricist; thus the sense impressions of one subject are the only accurate matter of knowledge. As always with a first-person point of view, the reader is left to evaluate the narrator and his reliability, to weigh the facts for himself. The ironic distance between author and narrator becomes greatest in the final book, in which Díaz describes the “beautiful victory,” meaning the utter destruction of a highly developed culture that would never again live. Díaz calls it a “Christian siege,” words that are oxymoronic in themselves. The ethnocentric attitudes of the Spaniards follow MacLeish’s interesting attempt in book 2 to represent the alien yet beautiful culture of the Aztecs through the speech of Montezuma on death. It is almost impossible to make rational sense out of the words because they seek to transcend Greek-Judeo-Christian categories of thought.

Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City

Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller’s City, published a year after Conquistador, weaves its implicit criticisms of the rape of the land and its natives into a more explicitly North American tapestry. These lyrical poems are a series of written paintings metaphorically intended to adorn New York City. Many of them attack the major capitalists, such as Andrew Mellon, J. P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, who built the railroads and controlled the stock market. MacLeish seems to blame them not only for massacring the Indians and alienating the earth with technology, but also, more immediately, for causing the Depression. In “Oil Painting of the Artist as Artist,” MacLeish clearly criticizes the expatriate artists with whom he lived and learned during the 1920’s. While his criticism of exploitative capitalists might suggest that MacLeish became a communist during the 1930’s, his poem “Background with Revolutionaries,” a sarcastic critique of Vladimir Ilich Lenin, actually earned him the venomous wrath of his communist contemporaries. From 1928 on, MacLeish had a clear conception of Jeffersonian democracy as a standard for American government. He did not fall into the political extremes of communism in the 1930’s or of McCarthyism in the 1950’s.

Public Speech and America Was Promises

Two other volumes of the 1930’s, Public Speech and America Was Promises, while also criticizing the abusers of democracy, are both powerfully affirmative in their overall impressions. Public Speech sets forth brotherly love as the means for healing. America Was Promises juxtaposes the ideals of the Founding Fathers with the exploitations of capitalists, but it ends on the idea that America’s promise is still intact for those who wish to seize it by preserving freedom.

The long final stage of MacLeish’s career synthesized the poles of the two earlier, formative stages. In the 1920’s, he studied poetic techniques, both traditional and modern, dwelling in the realm of art for art’s sake, expressing fine shades of sensibility and railing against the fact that humans must live and die in a vast mathematical universe without inherent meaning. In the 1930’s, on the other hand, MacLeish faced his homeland squarely, shouldering his heavy social responsibilities as a poet in a suffering and disillusioned republic. The 1940’s were another transitional phase, in which MacLeish was still dwelling on public issues, but returning as well to earlier preoccupations, such as the Einsteinian universe and humanity’s place in it.

Actfive, and Other Poems

The poems of Actfive, and Other Poems are lyrics that look back to the “Metaphysical” wit of the 1920’s and forward to the more Yeatsian poems of the later years. They are paradoxical and meditative, seeking a new reconciliation of private and public voice. “Actfive,” the title poem, is a successful synthesis of many of MacLeish’s earlier techniques and themes, a poem in which he asks what the nature of the world will be after the attempted genocide and atomic bombs of World War II. The context is Shakespeare’s metaphor that “All the world’s a stage.” The poem is essentially an allegory, a technique that MacLeish uses often in the short, Blakean lyrics of his later period. God has departed, the king is unthroned, and man is murdered. “Actfive” seeks a hero, surveying the ineffectual types proposed in the modern era: the scientist, the magnate of industry, the revolutionary, the Nietzschean great man, the victim, the state, the narcissistic ego, and the masses. The poem is as negative as a realistic understanding of World War II requires, yet it ends on a note shared by Einstein and by William Faulkner’s speech accepting the Nobel Prize. The “something inviolate” of Einstein, the mysterious, concrete life force inherent in flesh and bone will survive. Faulkner’s belief that humanity will not merely endure but will prevail is anticipated in MacLeish’s hope that humans will dare to endure and love.

The lyrics of the 1950’s through the 1970’s are studded with gems. Nature is no longer the vast universe of contemporary physics, but the age-old habitat of humanity. MacLeish’s style becomes markedly plain, the syntax often blunt. Many of the poems deal with death as a very concrete event, adopting the accepting attitude of Keats’s “To Autumn.” The majority of the lyrics use a technique new for MacLeish. They hinge, sometimes ironically, on a single correspondence between a natural image and a human idea or feeling. The correspondences range from emblems to metaphor to allegory. The natural images tend not to be static but rather brief processes or structures of experience, such as the sudden flight of birds from a tree. There may be a strong Japanese influence in MacLeish’s new technique and simplicity. Related to the use of analogy is a strong thematic concern with the ordering of experience, as captured in Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of a Jar.” Thus, MacLeish becomes simultaneously more intellectual and more concrete. He becomes far more personal in his subject matter and voice, while at the same time appealing to a wider audience. Not everyone shares his concern over the abuses of capitalism, but most readers do share a concern about death’s imminence. Many of the later poems are topical, but in a more personal way than the poems of the 1930’s. They are elegies for MacLeish’s friends and comments on the sickness of the McCarthy era. “National Security” presents the political sickness of the 1970’s by dealing with Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam as three names locked in a classified file. Two juxtaposed metaphors produce the bitter irony of the lyric: the names as classified files and the names as bodies whose blood oozes from the file drawer, through the Capital, and into the continent.

“Old Man’s Journey”

The lyric “Old Man’s Journey,” published in 1968, is typical of the later poems. It is a sixteen-line poem, in rhyme scheme identical to a Shakespearean sonnet except for the extra couplet at the end. To accentuate the pattern, the poem is spaced as three quatrains followed by two couplets. Unlike traditional sonnets, the poem is not iambic pentameter. It is predominantly tetrameter, although the rhythms and lengths of the lines vary to suit the sense of the poem, as in free verse. Thus technically the poem typifies MacLeish’s synthesis of constrictive, traditional poetic forms with contemporary innovations, especially in free verse. Using musical sound repetitions, thirteen of the poem’s lines describe the salmon’s relentless return upstream to its birthplace to die. Only the title, line 4, and the appended couplet reveal the analogical nature of the natural description. The salmon is somewhat anthropomorphized with the goal of eternity and the idea of memory. Line 4 explains that return to the nostalgic past is a human compulsion, a fault.

As in most of his later lyrics, MacLeish does not expound on the human significance of the poem. The emblem or analogy, the image drawn from nature, receives the emphasis, the reader being forced to draw his own conclusions. The poems speak by implication. The salmon becomes infected with restlessness at the memory of its birthplace, so it halts its journey and swims upstream to die. In human terms, this suggests the way old people’s minds often dwell on their earliest experiences, but it could also imply a return to a geographical place or to earlier values. The final couplet broadens the context of the poem through literary allusion even as the earlier long poems use marginal glosses and epigraphs from The Golden Bough, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and the Inferno. Here, as in Conquistador, the reference is to Dante’s version of Ulysses as a wanderer compelled to explore ever farther from home. “Old Man’s Journey” thus implies that just as a salmon’s nature drives it to return at last to the stream where it was spawned, so human nature drives people to remembrance or literal return to their earliest experiences on the way to death.

Such lyrics as these, however, are best read for their concrete images of nature, allowing their human implications to unfold on an intuitive level. While MacLeish clearly rejected any hint of art for art’s sake by 1930, his best poems live up to the injunctions of “Ars Poetica”: that a poem is not an abstract exposition but rather a self-contained object.

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