The past is a living creature with a talent for seeming stable at particular moments. The use of an old myth today may provide a scaffold for contemporary feelings and ideas. It may offer a form, capable of any degree of solidity, for the most abstract subject. Mr. MacLeish in his play, Nobodaddy, deals with "the dramatic situation which the condition of self-consciousness in an indifferent universe" seems to present. For his scaffold he has arbitrarily employed certain incidents in the myth of Eden. He has made an intense and very "modern" poem out of his theme, even though he has chosen blank verse as his method. There is of course no argument, no discussion, in the play; these are attitudes presented with the force of poetry, not ideas demonstrated by logic.

Nobodaddy was the name Blake used for the god of jealousy and reason, for the god of this world, the devil. Presumably, Nobodaddy is here also the human self-consciousness. (p. 339)

From the entry of Abel to the end of the play amid rain and thunder, the drama is real in the finest sense. The action results from the conditions given, and the words rise out of the action and have themselves the force and density of physical movement. (pp. 340-41)

But Eve was ill-served in this play. She was the source of both Cain and Abel; surely the pattern of the play demanded that Eve at the last should connect, or understand, the terrifying disparateness of her two sons. Their fate would have been the sharper, and her own; the plot would have seemed complete, and the interpretation, within its limits, final. Surely she might have understood her creations, and in her own voice have combined them, giving the play a kind of poetic, even philosophic finality which it now lacks. (p. 341)

The reason for the comparative failure of Nobodaddy is that its subject-matter was not completely exhausted. An attitude, more than an act, has its consequences; and in art they must all be dealt with. If irrelevant to the artist's interests, they may be swept out of sight, their figures excised from the emotional pattern. If relevant they must enter the structure and complete the symbol, and not otherwise than as their particular character demands. More than the popes, poets are the servants of the servants of God. (p. 342)