[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

1. Or to Rapallo.

2. 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.

3. 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”.

4. 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.”

5. 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.’”

6. 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.”

7. 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.