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

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

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

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

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

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

(Men and Technics.)

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MacLeish ends the dumb-show passage with the words:

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

                                                                                                                                            the water
Treading behind us with its ceaseless waves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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