[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.”

II

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.