[In the following excerpt, Smith offers an in-depth survey of MacLeish's poetry from his earliest verse to 1968's The Wild Old Wicked Man, focusing principally on subject and theme.]

… When MacLeish assembled his Collected Poems 1917-1952, he conformed to usual practice in suppressing most of the early work; but as one examines the early poems they are seen to relate, in various and sometimes contradictory ways, to his mature verse. The first volumes, Songs for a Summer's Day (1915) and Tower of Ivory (1917), display a lively interest in verse forms as such. The former contains sonnets only; but the latter includes, as well, a number of stanzaic exercises and one precocious dramatic piece, “Our Lady of Troy” (which, despite a Swinburnean promise in its title, is akin rhetorically to Jonson's humor plays). The sonnets in Tower of Ivory show the inevitable debt to Shakespeare; some of them, the best indeed, could only have derived from the “soldier” sonnets of Rupert Brooke. What is more significant, they imply a taste and probably a need for strict formal boundaries within which to manipulate tone, music, imagery, and argument. A few Keatsian couplets (in “A Library of Law”), examples of ballad measure (notably in “A Sampler”), some regular quatrains (as in “Escape”), a ballade (so entitled), paired sonnets (“Certain Poets”), a Petrarchan sonnet but with two octaves (“Baccalaureate”), and miscellaneous lyrical stanzas fill out this group. The themes are amatory and visionary, mainly in the Aesthetic tradition: there is some superficial paganism, sometimes yoked with Christian symbols, and a great deal of hedonism and a rather Yeatsian preoccupation with an enchanted realm of dream. Antiscientific or at least antipragmatic sentiments, characteristically late Victorian, come out in the dream poems “Jason” and “Realities.” A time-worn motif of mutability, devouring Time, and Death the inexorable recurs abundantly. Yet, even with their intellectual representations, most of these poems seem to achieve more through music than through argument. Often the sound is more interesting than the sense. Imagery appears not to be handled deliberately or for the sake of symbolic possibilities, but to be mainly decorative. (At the same time a few emblematic images strike the attention, as in MacLeish's sonnet “The Altar,” which uses a metaphysical conceit. Here certain carved garlands, intended as symbols of beauty in general, are discovered to have accidentally shaped the letters spelling a particular woman's name. Various baroque analogues may have influenced the poem.)

In his Dialogues with Mark Van Doren (1962; published 1964), MacLeish remarked that when he began writing verse he “took off from Swinburne.” That, certainly, was Swinburne as musician only: Swinburne the sensualist was no model in any of MacLeish's early poetry. The decorous “Realities” is as Swinburnean as you please; in fact, it is quite good, though of low intensity—Swinburne sober. After a few years' fascination with such music, MacLeish reacted against it. It seems that his reaction was a vehement one: his later poetry has, if anything, avoided musicality and has often been downright unmusical. At any rate sense and argument reasserted themselves strongly; an intricate, even devious, rhetoric began to dominate. For a time the sonnet retained his favor, as in the title piece of the volume The Happy Marriage, and Other Poems (1924). That long poem (a sort of nontragical Modern Love) is made up partly of sonnets and partly of other regular forms, and the verbal effects produced with these are very skillful. Two sections of “The Happy Marriage” in rhyming couplets (beginning respectively “The humid air precipitates” and “Beside her in the dark the chime”) have survived into Collected Poems, where they may remind the reader that MacLeish's next important model, after Swinburne, was Eliot. The first of these lyrics was indebted to Eliot in his “Sweeney” period, the second to his “Portrait of a Lady.” Both employ symbolistic imagery in a quasi-dramatic context of emotional confrontation—as Eliot's poems had done.

Between 1917 and 1924 MacLeish's style acquired the features of its maturity—conscious symbolism; witty, almost metaphysical strategies of argument; compressed and intense implications—all of these owing much, though quite certainly not everything, to Eliot's example. MacLeish was usually able to resist the Eliot rhythms. His cadences were to have great diversity and to echo many predecessors. His voice, moreover, did not have much in common with the self-conscious orotundity of Eliot's middle period (it had something in common with the Prufrockian tones), and he seldom undertook vocal productions such as dramatic monologues. Indeed, a lasting mark of MacLeish's work has been the weakness of the persona. At times the diction is remote from speech; at other times it may be close to speech but bare of individuality, diffuse, as though spoken by a chorus. For this reason, despite his partial debt to Eliot, MacLeish belongs not only outside of the Browning-Tennyson traditions of monologue but also outside of the American schools which have stemmed from those, the diverse movements represented by E. A. Robinson and Vachel Lindsay, by Frost and the early Pound. Like stream-of-consciousness fiction, which owes a great deal to it, the dramatic monologue indulges introspection in the safety of a disguise. (Perhaps in fiction, as in the poetry of Yeats, freedom rather than safety is in request—the complexification rather than the disengagement of the writer.) MacLeish's poetry, for the most part, is not introspective, and this is why indeed no persona is wanted. According to its own purposes, its diminution of the persona is a strength: by this means it turns the reader away from the endless labyrinths of subjective illusion and irony, the “echoing vault” of the poetic self, and invites him to contemplate the phenomenal world. It does not vocalize that self: it can and often does fabricate a kind of disembodied speech, or speech whose origin need not be known. It aspires to be, and sometimes becomes, a poetry of spectacle—not always, but especially when, as in the near masterpiece Einstein (1926), it is wholly under the control of an intellectual concept. Then the images arrange themselves as objective counterparts of the progress of an idea—Eliot's “objective correlative” intellectualized.

MacLeish in the 1920s increasingly took pains with the formal structure of his poetry. Only through form could the swelling rhetoric be channeled. After the 1924 volume, the sonnet was neglected for a while, but it was not discarded even in Streets in the Moon (1926), where free verse of a highly regulated type alternates with blank verse and stanzaic patterns. Blank verse, with a few rhyming lyric passages, was used also for his symbolistic poem The Pot of Earth (1925) and his closet drama Nobodaddy (1926).

The theme and scope of Nobodaddy, referred to by MacLeish as a “poem,” are indicated in his preface, which adds that the “emotional experiences” treated there are “not unlike” those dealt with in The Pot of Earth, written after it but published before. Nobodaddy takes its title from Blake's derisory name for the scriptural god of prohibitions. It adapts the Adam-and-Eve, Cain-and-Abel story to dramatize what MacLeish calls “the condition of self-consciousness in an indifferent universe”; it is a poetic essay, of course, not biblical commentary. In it, Adam has emerged into humanity, into consciousness of himself as a being distinct from the rest of creation. In this condition he has two choices, a fact which disquiets him and in itself presumably inclines him to the choice he makes. He can either stand in awe of nature (“the Gardener”), accepting the inferiority implicit in obedience to a system he does not understand, or else assert his will to become a god—that is, a rational being superior to nature. Urged by the Voice of his will (metaphorically the Serpent) and by Eve, who does not fear what she has never experienced, natural harshness, Adam eats the forbidden fruit and thus alienates himself by act as well as by will. The consequence is misery: his daring to break the bond of obedience brings down upon his head a flood of superstitious terrors. The Gardener, far from changing into an Avenger, seems to have vanished; but frantic with guilt Adam flees the garden, and he and Eve seek the desert. It remains for their sons, Abel and Cain, to complete the drama by, in effect, modernizing the situation. Abel, representative of Adam fallen and burdened with guilt, attempts a mystical reconciliation with the supposed Avenger. Longing to return to the garden, to ignorance and servitude, he invents a relationship with an invented god: religion is born. By blood sacrifice he strives to atone. His brother, Cain, realist and rationalist, and similar to Adam as he was when he heard the Voice of his humanity exhorting him to free himself, asserts human values and the will to power. Abel grovels before the voice of thunder and tries to pull Cain down to his knees in humility. Cain, already godlike in mind, kills him.

It is not clear why Adam is so constituted that he cannot profit from his fall, but because he cannot his son Abel cannot either. It is left for Cain to vindicate reason against superstition; that he has to do so by murder is ironic, to say the least. At any rate none of the four characters comprehends the meaning of these actions. It is for the reader to understand in terms, primarily, of acceptance and rejection. So long as man believed himself to be simply part of nature, he lived in a paradise. Death was there already, the biological cycle had begun, but man had not yet taken it personally—it was still objective. When man became self-conscious, his acceptance of nature changed into resistance, and with its normal machinery of death it seemed a threat to him. Not only was he utterly different from nature, but it was indifferent to him—though physically he remained within it. He had imagination; nature was all process. The “Gardener” of Nobodaddy is merely the principle of life viewed as sympathetic harmony. When this view disappears, and reason replaces it with the stark vision of process, the Gardener gives way to the enemy, the unsympathetic. Physical nature converted into the antagonist of man's will is a desert, a region which will not behave as man desires. The harmony of prelapsarian Eden was that of man's acquiescent ignorance; the disharmony of the natural world, to fallen man, is that of its uncontrollability. His selfhood defies nature and battles with it, but at the last must sink defeated. Abel's attempt to return symbolically to the unfallen state takes the form of a conscious imitation of nature's unconscious cruelty; he grafts human motives upon the indifferent. Abel's sacrifice of a ram is wrong because consciousness cannot atone with unconsciousness. Nature's own profuse bloodletting sets no store by covenants and bargaining; apart from man's imagination such “deals” are meaningless. If human ideals estrange man from nature, and if, nevertheless, with the justice of indifference, nature punishes every act not in harmony with its laws, then man is automatically unhappy.

The idea that human feelings meet nothing like themselves, no sympathetic responses, in nature, and that nature governs the life of the body as if the desires of the mind did not occur, is present in The Pot of Earth. But the theme of this poem is the bitterness and pity of those desires so subjected to the Gardener's indifference. Here is the case of the toad beneath the harrow. The poem was published three years after The Waste Land of Eliot. The two works are of roughly the same length. They have much similarity, in technique and symbolism alike. In certain notable ways they are dissimilar. The Waste Land is a first-person monologue to which are subordinated various genre adaptations. The Pot of Earth is mainly a third-person narrative, though with some first-person stream-of-consciousness effects. Stylistically The Waste Land is by far the more experimental and radical. Both poems, however, draw upon Sir James Frazer's work The Golden Bough for vegetation symbolism which, mythologically and ceremonially, represents the death and resurrection of a fertility god (e.g., Adonis) as a type of the seasonal decay and revival of nature. Both also, in applying this symbolism within a modern context of life, emphasize not the victory of life over death but the reverse of this. On the other hand, they again differ most significantly in what they apply such symbolism to. The Waste Land, exploring a gnostic and “spiritualized” sense of death and rebirth, uses a special myth (the Grail legend) concerning an arrest of fertility, whose equivalent in the poem is the male protagonist's state of emotional aridity and despair. The Pot of Earth applies the vegetation symbolism to its female protagonist's organic functions: the biological cycle takes place in her, as if in a plant springing up, flowering, being fertilized, bearing fruit, and dying. Or, more exactly, the girl or woman herself can be regarded as such a “pot of earth,” or Garden of Adonis described by Frazer in the passage which MacLeish prefixed to his poem as a general epigraph. For, like those shallow-rooted plants forced into brief and hectic life under the Syrian sun, only to wither and to be thrown into the sea as symbols of the god bewailed by his sectaries, she leads a transient existence, devoid of any lasting meaning except the biological one. The resurrection of the fertility god means new life for nature, not for the individual. At the conclusion of The Pot of Earth, the woman has borne a child and has died; a chestnut tree is in flower; but she rots in the earth. Here the Adonis myth becomes the vehicle for a realization of the inextricability of life and death. MacLeish's second epigraph to the poem (later transferred to part i) is the “god kissing carrion” passage from Hamlet; and part iii is called “The Carrion Spring.” In Hamlet “carrion” is the prince's coarse designation for Ophelia: evidently the woman in The Pot of Earth has a sacrificial role like that to which the Ophelia personage is doomed in The Waste Land. But she has been sacrificed by the indifference of nature, not the brutality of man.

The 1925 text of The Pot of Earth, several pages longer than the text printed in Poems, 1924-1933 (1933) and thereafter, adopts the Waste Land technique of making the past and present interpenetrate, so that the modern woman's life cycle is depicted in timeless fusion with that of a primitive world: its incidents are abruptly juxtaposed to details from the Adonis ritual. But the three principal passages in which this effect is created have been omitted from the later printings, leaving the poem free of the startling “intertemporal” counterpoint typical of Eliot, and with a contemporary texture purely. Yet, beneath this, continual allusions to the Adonis ritual remain to suggest a theme of unending recurrence. Perhaps recapitulation, rather than recurrence, is the universalizing motif in The Pot of Earth (as for example it is in Joyce's Finnegans Wake): this woman is eternal woman, and eternal woman typifies reproductive nature, whose dream is her life. She, like the Garden of Adonis in antiquity, blossoms as an emblem, a signature, of some omnipresent and all-involving archetype of cyclical life and death. Her anonymity is as profound as that of Tiresias, the Waste Land persona; but whereas he is obscured by Eliot's pretentious legerdemain with literary cross references, she has a constant, though shadowy, identity.

There seems to be a philosophical difference between The Pot of Earth and The Waste Land in the ways they pose their protagonists against the world. Eliot's poem is very much in a “psychological” tradition; that is, starting from an Idealist's assumption that the individual point of view is of paramount importance because it uniquely focuses knowledge of externals, The Waste Land attains form by offering a view from a single point, or through a single narrow peephole. It recalls Bergsonian and stream-of-consciousness fiction. MacLeish's poem seems to start from a Realist's assumption that there is nothing special in point of view as such; that the law of things is common to all. It depicts a typical relation of the natural to the human, indeed choosing to examine the fate of someone quite average. Whatever the resemblance of MacLeish's techniques to those of subjectivists and symbolists, his fond was otherwise. His poem, like Eliot's, uses Aesthetic and symbolist procedures to assist naturalistic statement, but his is closer to a philosophical naturalism which assumes the total subjection of man to time and chance.

There was much of the eighteenth-century rationalist in the MacLeish of the 1920s and in his political character later; much, also, of the scientific observer of life. He had made an almost complete break with his antiscientific and aesthetical beginnings as a poet. He now accepted the scientists' description of reality—only boggling at its falsification of experience. The external world he confronted was the one described by the astronomers, by the biologists, and above all by the mathematical physicists of his own day. Whereas Eliot and Pound and Yeats were ancients, MacLeish was a modern. One may believe that Einstein's space-time-energy continuum receives, in the work of MacLeish, its most important poetic treatment to date—a treatment not through casual allusion for contemporary color, but through exact intellectual integration with the subject matter of felt life. A thematic carry-over takes place from The Pot of Earth to later poems—the conflict between personal hopes and natural law, developed first, perhaps a little less pessimistically, in Nobodaddy.

The volume Streets in the Moon scrutinizes the state of man the conscious animal in the disheartening universe of curved space and irreversible entropy. In his “Prologue” to this collection, MacLeish salutes a hypothetical “crew of Columbus” who are westward bound but, as in nightmare, toward a “surf that breaks upon Nothing”; and he comments, concerning this apparent fate of the whole human race,

Oh, I have the sense of infinity—
But the world, sailors, is round.
They say there is no end to it.

The paradox of infinite aspirations confined in a world closed and therefore without “end” to aspire beyond is a leading theme of Streets in the Moon. The title of the book suggests the double vision: “streets” a symbol of the here and now of consciousness, the “moon” a symbol (defined partly by the counter-romantic use to which Jules Laforgue put it in his poetry) of a myth degraded by science. The volume concludes with the wry humor of “The End of the World,” in which a temporal “end” to the circus of life reveals the nothingness above man's head. The poems in between, several of them conspicuously indebted to Laforgue (“Nocturne,” “Selene Afterwards,” “Hearts' and Flowers'”), to Eliot, or to Pound, and one of them most notably (Einstein) written in a symbolistic manner recalling Mallarmé's “L'Après-midi d'un faune” (but in a rather Miltonic strain!), deal variously with the mystery of existence, with the problem of time (symbolized by the sun, among other things), with death, with love and other relations, and with human character. A few are imagistic; others are elegiac, anecdotal, or narrative and Browningesque. One of the finest poems in this fine collection is the three-part “Signature for Tempo,” a meditation on the relativity of time and movement:

Think that this world against the wind of time
Perpetually falls the way a hawk
Falls at the wind's edge but is motionless;

on fourth-dimensional extension:

How shall we bury all
These time-shaped people,
In graves that have no more
Than three dimensions?

(though why not, one could retort, since in fact the graves have the same number of dimensions as the people); and on death as the point in time where all are united:

Whom time goes over wave by wave, do I lie
Drowned in a crumble of surf at the sea's edge?—
And wonder now what ancient bones are these
That flake on sifting flake
Out of deep time have shelved this narrow ledge
Where the waves break.

“The Too-Late Born,” rhetorically very brilliant, is most meaningful in the context of the time poems (its later title, “The Silent Slain,” constricts its meaning); it, too, is about the community of the dead. The death of Roland at Roncesvalles has been made archetypal: the “silent slain” could belong to any army, and the fact that “we” survive them is an accident of time—an ironic one, for in due time we shall join them in the universal graveyard of the earth. Themes of mortality are further explored in “No Lamp Has Ever Shown Us Where to Look,” “Interrogate the Stones,” and “Le Secret humain,” in terms of speculations on the “answer” that death is supposed to have in reserve for man, an answer that may simply annihilate the questioner. “Raree Show” asks whether the question is within the mind, but ends with a new question, “Where?” “L'An trentiesme de mon Eage” (its title taken from a line by François Villon which was a favorite of Pound's, and which was used by Eliot in an epigraph and by Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”) is somewhat in the mood of Eliot's “Gerontion.” Through a multiplicity of memories its speaker has arrived at his present place; he then asks, “And by what way shall I go back?” One could answer that there is no need of going back, for “place” is temporal as well as spatial, and what belongs to time contains its past. The poem, having reviewed the past, has already returned to it, through art. But this reply would be satisfactory only to a Bergsonian. In any realistic analysis the question is unanswerable, though MacLeish was to continue asking it in later poems.

One of the most often cited anthology pieces from Streets in the Moon is the paradoxical and enigmatic “Ars Poetica.” In spite of its Horatian title, which seems to imply simply a verse essay in legislative criticism, a poem about the art of poetry, its true workings are otherwise. It does not frame an address to poets generally, much less to their critics; it is no essay in criticism. Nor yet does it introspectively comment, like Eliot's poem “La Figlia che Piange,” on the poet's relation to his own creative process. Perhaps some readers, remembering chiefly the distichs “A poem should be equal to: / Not true” and “A poem should not mean / But be,” have interpreted what “Ars Poetica” says (that a poem should be like an object beheld in stasis, not like a message or a paradigm) as what it is for. If so, they have taken it for a critical essay and have violated its supposed counsel! The central paradox of “Ars Poetica” is that it makes sense only when the reader accepts its sense as a function of form. It then survives as the aesthetic object it approves—with the proviso that the approval must be held as an utterance in vacuo, a silence:

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

The real subject of “Ars Poetica” is itself, by a sort of narcissism of the written word as “pure poetry”; this poem exhibits aestheticism circling round, as it were, and returning like the equator upon the round earth. The result contrives a stasis indeed, free or nearly free of time's rotation. The moon of the second part, MacLeish's recurrent symbol of the imaginative world ideally transcending the naturalist's inner and outer landscapes, drifts as poetic subjectivity defying its antithesis, the solar clock. “Ars Poetica,” somewhat Yeatsian like various other short poems in the volume, looks also Keatsian: the whole poem speaks with a voice which, like that of the Grecian urn when it equates beauty and truth, belongs to a realm of ideality and is relevant only to that. Such a realm, proper to poetry, conflicts with nature; MacLeish's long poem Einstein reviews the naturalistic conception that man, at least, cannot quite escape the prison of his time-bound flesh. That, too, is a Keatsian thought.

Einstein in theme recalls Nobodaddy; the resemblance proves useful in the unraveling of its complexities. Not only is the subject difficult (like most subjects) unless one already understands it, but the rhetoric lumbers in obscurity. Nevertheless the poem operates compellingly upon the emotions, and it ought to be one of the best known philosophical poems of the period. The Einstein of the title is modern intellectual man, scientist, represented microcosmically as a sort of Leopold Bloom, atomic and entire (ein Stein, perhaps—a stone, or at least a pebble!), who has inherited the problem and the mission of MacLeish's Cain, the mission of rationality. The Einsteinian universe is rationality triumphant, as indeed it is the triumph of the modern spirit. The poem (a narrative showing the process of “going back,” by reason, to a condition which seems to repeal Adam's alienation from nature and to reunite his posterity with the primal creator—i.e., in effect deifying man) reveals the way back by recapitulating the way forward, from any infancy to full consciousness. First there is Einstein, man secure in his body-sense and self-contained. Then, his awareness of sense impressions. Then, his mental abstraction of these into a coherent world—

A world in reason which is in himself
And has his own dimensions.

Then, his discovery of his ignorance and impotence in the world's vastness and mystery. Then, his attempt to gain mystical identification with this mystery by sensory and aesthetic contemplation, and most through music,

                                        When he a moment occupies
The hollow of himself and like an air
Pervades all other.

Then (in a passage to which Eliot, who seems to owe several points to this poem, suggests a reply in the closing lines of Burnt Norton), his realization that there is no longer a “word” which can translate beauty into thought and thus into himself (the word described as known to the Virgin of Chartres but as now become “three round letters” in a carving was presumably the “ave” which hailed, in effect, the Incarnation). Then, upon his rejection of mysterious access and Abel's quest, his intellectual formulation of Albert Einstein's theories. And finally, the godlike subduing of nature to himself, so that the physical universe is comprehended in his consciousness, which itself becomes all.

Only one stage remains, and this is denied him. His own flesh cannot melt into his thought: he keeps “Something inviolate. A living something.” These phrases return him to the state which was his at the beginning of the poem, where, at minimal definition, the “something inviolate” is the fact “that / His father was an ape.” The original Adam, sprung from nature and subject to it, by it condemned, to die, persists despite this victory. Those critics are surely wrong who see Einstein as antiscientific; rather, the poem, like Nobodaddy, affirms the necessary destiny of man to subdue everything to his knowledge—everything but the stubborn, atavistic ape within, which must refuse to yield. The anecdotal poem “The Tea Party” says all that need be said about man's sense of his primitivism; Einstein says something further, that the animal residuum is man's very life. The tragic fate awaiting this life has already been revealed in The Pot of Earth. Einstein is not tragic; it is not even precisely critical. It is an intellectual celebration of an intellectual triumph, attended by a voice bidding the triumphator remember that he is dust.

MacLeish's tragic sense of the buried life, exposed in the impersonal symbolism of The Pot of Earth, is deeply sounded in The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). An observation by MacLeish more than a decade later, in his essay “Poetry and the Public World,” was made to introduce a kind of renunciation of this poem or at least of the attitudes it expresses: “The Hamlet of Shakespeare was the acceptance of a difficult age and the demonstration of the place, in that age, of poetry. The Hamlet of Laforgue, and after him of Eliot and after him of the contemporary generation, is the rejection of a difficult age and a contemptuous comment upon the hope of poetry to deal with it. … [N]ot until contemporary poetry writes the Hamlet of Laforgue and Eliot out of its veins, will poetry occupy, and reduce to the order of recognition, the public-private world in which we live.” The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is in the tradition of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and of Eliot's Prufrockian and wastelandish poems; and it focuses, certainly, upon the sufferings of the sensitive man, not upon the problems of the age in its “public” bearings. From the point of view of 1939, after a decade of experiment with “public” themes and at a moment of intense uneasiness about the future of civilization, MacLeish saw his Hamlet as too negative, as too much lacking in what the same essay called “acceptance” and “belief.” Yet it was probably just as well that he aimed his criticism expressly against Laforgue and Eliot and only lumped his Hamlet implicitly with theirs; for really there is a difference in kind between their pessimism and his own in that poem. Quite simply, their pessimism is social, whereas his is cosmic. What Laforgue and Eliot (in his early poetry) found fault with was the special uncongeniality of life for the special personae in their poetry. What MacLeish complains of in his Hamlet is the injustice of the universe. Surely a poem which says that life is a fraud is hardly to be criticized for not telling us how to live optimistically.

In Einstein there are marginal notes with the double purpose of punctuating the stages of consciousness and locating these in the mind of one individual. In The Hamlet such notes have a different purpose: they key the psychological action to Shakespeare's Hamlet, from which (being quotations, stage directions, or episode descriptions) they are taken. MacLeish's poem can be thought of as analogous to a transparent overlay which, when superimposed on the map or chart to whose details it is keyed, provides new information or modifies the old. In this case the so-called overlay is fully a map in its own right. It is divided into fourteen sections, corresponding to as many scenes of the Shakespeare play. What it maps with these is the world of consciousness belonging to its protagonist, the modern Hamlet; and this world, like that of the play, shows temporal movement or more properly historical movement, for it is a world common to mankind, whom this Hamlet represents. (As with The Pot of Earth, some resemblance to Finnegans Wake may be seen.) And if Hamlet is mankind, it would appear that the Ghost is the mysterious father-god of creation, the unknown Nobodaddy, maybe to be known in, or as, Death; Hamlet's mother is the Earth; and the Claudius figure, symbolized in the opening section as both Hyperion (the sun) and a satyr, is the tyrant enemy, Time. The characters in this cast do not emerge allegorically, as in a morality play, but symbolistically. That is, as addressed by Hamlet they are persons, but as described and further characterized they become actions, narratives, even landscapes; and the actions take the place of drama. The poem is not dramatic except in that sense in which a speaking voice implies a dramatic situation; nor is that implication a vivid one, Hamlet being mainly a stage-managing consciousness, like Tiresias in The Waste Land. The protagonist's mood and temper, conforming to the “nighted color/choler” of Shakespeare's Hamlet, do, however, determine the tone of anguish throughout the poem.

Two of the episodes or symbolic actions of MacLeish's Hamlet are particularly bold and memorable. Part iii, corresponding to Horatio's description of the Ghost (Hamlet, I, ii), is presented in terms of that portion of a Grail romance (the Bleheris version, freely adapted) which contains the adventure of the Chapel Perilous and the adventure of the Grail Castle, including the disclosure of the Grail talismans. The point of this (and of part iv, answering to the appearance of the Ghost to the prince) is the inscrutability of the death mystery from whose silence there can be no appeal and into whose secret there can be no initiation—such as the initiation supposed by Jessie L. Weston, in her book From Ritual to Romance, to have given rise to the Grail legends. A theme is here restated from Streets in the Moon. Part ix, corresponding to the play within the play, the play of the mousetrap, has a subject recalling St.-John Perse's “migration” poem Anabase, namely the movements of peoples and tribes into new lands, the rise and fall of cultures, the cycle of civilization. And the point of this, in relation to the Shakespearean scene, is that, as the memorial of human aspirations, the whole earth is a blood-stained chronicle of the guilt of nature and time. These episodes of the poem have the profoundest import because they establish the necessity of the cosmic pessimism which is the mainspring of its tragic movement. They furthermore universalize the rage and grief of the protagonist, inviting all mankind to take part in execrating the conditions of life.

The gloom pervading The Hamlet of A. MacLeish is left behind in the next collection, New Found Land: Fourteen Poems (1930). Here the over-all tone is one of acceptance—not the unreflecting acceptance urged but resisted in the closing part of the earlier poem, but something urbanely detached. There is a return to the meditativeness of an even earlier period, in poems about memory and time; along with this there is an advance toward a new theme of affirmation, for which a tone of optimism comes into being. Such poems as “Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments,” “Return,” “Tourist Death,” and “You, Andrew Marvell” are retrospective in two senses: they look back to the years and places of MacLeish's sojourn abroad, and they recall his obsessive concern, in those circumstances, with the erosion of life by time. “You, Andrew Marvell” has been anthologized too often, but it is as nearly perfect a poem as MacLeish has ever written. Yet it is only one of a group (part iv of his Hamlet belongs with these) in which he again used the “cinema” technique of passing across the mind's eye a succession of places and faces, each an objective repository of some emotional association for him. The subject of “You, Andrew Marvell” is the poet's past as lodged in the places named, quite as much as it is the poet's present conceived as a moment in the light which is soon to be covered by the darkness inexorably rising in the east. The specific wit in his highly serious “metaphysical” handling of this subject depends not merely on a paradoxical view of diurnal motions (the night rises in the east) but on his present geographical position in relation to the regions reviewed in his mind. Being now presumably in the middle of the American continent, he, at noon, imagines the eastern world slipping into physical night just as, figuratively, it darkens by receding into his personal past.

The new, affirmative theme, though not fully realized in this poem or perhaps anywhere in the collection before the concluding piece, “American Letter,” seems to grow out of a personal sense of the east-west imagery. At least “American Letter” defines the line of separation between the past, Europe and Asia, old lands of darkness, and the future, America the “new found land,” by declaring that for the American born his life must unfold here: the Old World may enshrine a remembered joy, but the man of the New World is not fulfilled by it. And in “Salute” MacLeish hails the sun, dayspring and midday, as if to assert the preeminence of his symbol of the West. Indeed, he tends now to neglect the moon, which becomes a symbol no longer of that sought realm of myths and dreaming but of a world of stasis, sterility—something praised only in the almost hymnal “Immortal Autumn.” His style tends toward greater impersonality as, following Perse, he cultivates dissociated concrete images of immense but vague significance. One very successful instance of this practice occurs in “Epistle to Be Left in the Earth,” where its gnomic qualities suit the speaker's list of specific phenomena unreduced to abstract classification.

Conquistador (1932) is a long poem but not an epic, though of epic magnitude in theme, nor yet a chronicle, though based on an account of the Spanish rape of Mexico, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernál Díaz del Castillo. Its interest derives neither from the portrayal of heroic character nor from adventurous narrative, but from its rendering of discrete episodes as experiences recollected by its narrator. It can hardly be termed panoramic; it is kaleidoscopic, a fantasia of emotions. Though not primarily a narrative at all but a series of tableaux with subjective coloring, it would perhaps remind one of Dante's Divine Comedy even if, typographically, its verse did not resemble terza rima. Like the Divine Comedy it presents a psychological, if not quite a spiritual, quest. This quest, outlined in fifteen books, has the usual temporal and spatial dimensions—temporal into the past buried within the speaker's self, spatial into the Mexican interior and the death of the Aztec culture. The hallmark of the poem, unfortunately, is an unrelieved sense of enormous confusion. In the memory of the speaker, the successive episodes are crowded with detail; and an effect of “nonlinear” construction is heightened by the frequent use of parataxis. That is, the language depends a good deal on coordinated statements, whether or not with conjunctions. That this device was intentional is evident from the special use of the colon as a divider; it is made to separate phrases of all kinds. The elements which are thus compounded stand in any order: logic seems not to be in question, since free association controls largely.

If the influence of St.-John Perse dominates the larger framework of the poem, affecting the shape of its “grand sweep,” still another influence, that of the Ezra Pound of the Cantos, often prevails at close quarters. The arbitrary juxtaposition of “significant” details is Poundian. So, too, is one ingredient of MacLeish's subject matter, the use of Book XI of the Odyssey in the “Prologue,” where Bernál Díaz is given a role like that of the Homeric Tiresias, summoned from the dead along with fellow ghosts to speak to the living. MacLeish drops this mythological device after the “Prologue,” in favor of Díaz's book narrative; but the latter may be considered a realistic equivalent to ghostly speech. Though more in key with the biblical rhapsodies of Perse than with the social grumblings of Pound, Conquistador lacks optimism. For one thing it is based on one of the bloodiest and most barbarous exploits in history, one which destroys the empire it conquers and which ends in a retreat. Furthermore it is set forth by a spokesman for the dead and disillusioned, himself aware, in his very book, that death hangs over him. At the last he longs for the impossible resurrection of youthful hope:

O day that brings the earth back bring again
That well-swept town those towers and that island. …

In general this poem, far from acclaiming the origin of the New World as the harbinger of American civilization, is negative as well as confessional. Díaz, like MacLeish's Hamlet, is a wastelander, and what he longs for is a lost innocence that in fact was never real at all: certainly it did not dwell in the Aztec priestly slaughterhouse or in the hearts of the Spanish butchers either. In the poem it only tantalizes like a gilded dream of El Dorado.

Whatever its defects—and its failures, for if it succeeds it does so as a sequence of vibrant short poems, not as a big poem—Conquistador brings MacLeish back definitely to American scenes. Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933) restores the affirmative tone. What is affirmed now is the American dream—the wholesome one—not as an abstraction but in its embodiment by the American land and the pioneer past. The first of the six poems, “Landscape as a Nude,” revives an allegorical convention (like Finnegans Wake, by the way) to romanticize the land as a voluptuous woman. “Wildwest” and “Burying Ground by the Ties” pay tribute to defeated energies of a past era, to Crazy Horse and to the laborers dead after laying the tracks of the Union Pacific; and at the same time these poems satirize the millionaire railroaders, as does the opening section of the fifth poem, “Empire Builders.” The longer, second section of the latter invokes for its contrast the unviolated wilderness explored by Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the Northwest—the description being treated as an “underpainting” beneath a supposed series of panels beautifying the robber barons Harriman, Vanderbilt, Morgan, and Mellon, and for anticlimactic good measure the advertising executive Bruce Barton. The fourth poem, “Oil Painting of the Artist as the Artist,” lampoons the anti-American expatriate snob—the T. S. Eliot type, who

… thinks of himself as an exile from all this,
As an émigré from his own time into history
(History being an empty house without owners
A practical man may get in by the privy stones …)

A final poem, “Background with Revolutionaries,” makes a point with regard to the controversy (current at the time MacLeish was writing but now almost forgotten) surrounding the Diego Rivera murals for Radio City in New York. Rivera had depicted Lenin among his inspirational figures; Nelson Rockefeller had demurred; and the painting was expunged, to the accompaniment of howls from the Left, amusingly reinforced with the aesthetical plea that art is sacred beyond politics. MacLeish's point in the concluding poem was that Lenin is irrelevant to the spirit of America, which lives in the communion of land with people; a further point, which involves one's reading the fifth poem, optionally, as a coda to the other four, can be that Lenin in his irrelevance is somehow analogous to J. P. Morgan.

There are not only ideological but functional problems in the Frescoes. Ideologically it is dubious whether MacLeish quite conveyed the absurdity of Leninism with his selected profiles of ignorant, neurotic, or simply enthusiastic believers in it; a suggestion emerges from “Background with Revolutionaries” that the fault with these communists may lie in their intellectual pretensions, which do not suit the nonintellectual mystique urged in the poem. And by the same token, earlier in the series, that mystique has been manipulated in order to pillory the railroad magnates, who were not “men of the people” and who ravaged the land for their money making. Crazy Horse was admirable, apparently, and the virgin wilderness was good and so were the track gangs; but beyond this mystique of the primitive and the peasant the Frescoes offered little to a people who owed their power to the railroads and who, in distinction of achievement, had long since outdone the spike-drivers. Obviously the Frescoes laud a homegrown radicalism; they reject Leninism as sophisticated (and foreign); but they ignore the complex life of a modern people. Calling themselves frescoes and claiming a pictorial function, they fail to cover, as it were, the wall. They say almost nothing about what Americans do, or why. Given pictorial form, they would pose as great an irrelevance—to Mr. Rockefeller's or anyone's city—as Diego Rivera with his intrusive Lenin.

MacLeish's next volume, Poems, 1924-1933, not only reprinted the best of his work up to 1933 but arranged it in nonchronological order. This order could form the subject of a separate study: it seems to indicate many of the relations which MacLeish intended to hold in balance between separate poems. The volume begins with the Hamlet and ends with Conquistador, the long poems most antithetical to each other as “private” and “public” documents. Scattered through it are previously uncollected pieces; at least six of these rank among the finest of his middle period, namely “The Night Dream,” “Broken Promise,” “Before March,” “Epistle to Léon-Paul Fargue,” “Invocation to the Social Muse,” and “Lines for an Interment.” A sardonic note recalling a few of the poems in Streets in the Moon comes up occasionally; of these six, “Invocation to the Social Muse” is the poem most ruled by it. In “Lines for an Interment” a similar note heard before in “Memorial Rain” is intensified into a savage agony. Elsewhere the tone is dispassionate, conveyed through imagery and syntax of a crystal precision reminiscent, almost, of Dryden's noble renderings of Horace and worthy of Landor or Housman at their most painstaking. Of this character are “Before March” and a slighter poem, “Voyage”:

Heap we these coppered hulls
With headed poppies
And garlic longed-for by the eager dead …

Such effects are concentrated in the poems having great intimacy of theme and voice.

The short volume Public Speech: Poems (1936) is strong in social implication, like MacLeish's plays in the same decade; but for part of its length it is different in manner from the usual “public” poetry. It ends with a series of ten poems in various lyric forms, assembled under the general title “The Woman on the Stair”; this, more than anything else in the volume, harks back to an earlier period. One thinks especially of “The Happy Marriage,” which also is a series of this type: “The Woman on the Stair,” too, is made up of meditative descriptions which chart an emotional relationship. Why should this sequence have been inserted in a book whose very title points to MacLeish's new preoccupation with what poetry can deliver to the public concerning themselves? The answer is that the adjective public is not synonymous with national or with political or with cultural in a social scientist's sense; it connotes all that is common, all that touches everyman. Those of MacLeish's poems that treat of the individual in society, or of society in history, do seem public in a more “communal” sense than is possible to a lyric commemoration of love; but this subject, too, can be so treated that its private values become general meanings. Moreover, the first poem in the volume, “Pole Star,” celebrates social love, the observance of charity for all, as a guiding principle in an age of misdirections; almost the whole collection is about human bonds of feeling. What public meant to MacLeish at this juncture seems to have been dual: in one aspect it came close to our recent slack sense of relevant; in another it rather implied impersonal in something like Eliot's sense, that is, marked by avoidance of self-absorption. In “The Woman on the Stair,” personal subject matter becomes archetypal.

“The Woman on the Stair” is really about the psychology of love. The Eros who rules here is the god of maturity; it would be instructive to set beside this another group of lyrics, also a sequence and also a chronicle of love's progress, but focusing on youthful love—Joyce's Chamber Music. There the intensities of feeling wear romantic disguises which in turn undergo transformations into fabrics of symbol. Here, viewed alike from the masculine and the feminine sides, are the great intensities—need, selfishness, shame, jealousy, fickleness, boredom—and time's deadly gift, detachment, all of them functions of a pragmatism that often governs human relations in the mask of the romantic spirit. This sobering vision culminates in the remarkable closing poem, “The Release,” a meditation on past time as stasis. What “The Woman on the Stair” projects as a “cinema” sequence, a passional affair involving two people only, becomes in projection a far-reaching commentary on behavior and motivation.

Not only “Pole Star,” concerning love, but several other poems at the beginning of Public Speech meditate contemporary bearings for traditional wisdom. “Speech to Those Who Say Comrade” defines true as against specious brotherhood. “Speech to the Detractors” rebukes debunkers and petty journalists and acclaims the love of excellence, arguing that a people unwilling to honor its outstanding men is a self-degrading people. “Speech to a Crowd” exhorts men to be self-reliant, not to wait on leadership, not to be a crowd. These poems, along with a few in the middle of the volume, may be too inspirational to appeal to readers who are moved by the psychological shrewdness of “The Woman on the Stair.” One poem, “The German Girls! The German Girls!” (its title to be understood as a sardonic toast?), takes the form of a quasi-choric exchange and is therefore dramatic in structure though not in form. It damns the militaristic spirit by cataloguing the coarse, brutal, and perverted types that abound among the Nazis. Propaganda though this is, the poem remains fresh because it is dramatic and also because it escapes “pulpit diction.”

Two separately published poems on social themes, Land of the Free—U.S.A. (1938) and America Was Promises (1939), both with topical bearing, relate to diverse areas of concern. The first is hard to judge as poetry because, as published, it was tied to a series of eighty-eight contemporary photographs in order that (according to a note by MacLeish) it might illustrate them. The photographs were already collected before the poem was written. The letterpress still makes a poem, but is at some disadvantage in proximity to the pictures. The two arts combine to tell a horrifying before-and-after story of the pioneer settlers in a rich land who, after many generations, have sunk into poverty and squalor through disease, overcrowding, economic exploitation, soil deterioration, industrialization, and all the rest. The horror is conveyed mainly by the impact of the photographs as a set, which embraces many contrasts; but the most distressing, i.e., pathetic, are far beyond the power of the poem to annotate. The pictures are violent, shocking; the poem is “cool,” relying on irony. Certainly the contrasts are intrinsic to the two modes: photography is presentational, ruminative poetry representational. The style is itself cool, in form a kind of collective monologue; but the pronoun we serves also to make the voice impersonal, as if the speaker were radiobroadcasting the report of a disaster. MacLeish's use of a “broadcast announcer” voice was frequent in the 1930s. Whether radio was responsible directly (other poets having experimented with the same device—Auden, for example, and Eliot in “Triumphal March”), the fact that MacLeish had written radio plays, in which such a voice was normally essential, suggests that the medium exerted some influence. One problem with having this voice accompany a photographic series is that, ex hypothesi, it belongs to a subject confronting human objects seen by the camera, yet it purports to speak in the character of those objects, and this without so much as adopting their dialect.

America Was Promises is indisputably the most eloquent of the “public” poems. It contrives an absolute alliance between theme and voice; actually the theme helps to flesh the voice so that it surmounts its usual anonymity and acquires the solidity of a persona. Who the persona is, is unclear, but what he is, is obvious, a prophet but contemporary, a liberator but traditionalist, a revolutionary but sage. The working question asked is “America was promises to whom?”—one answered in several ways, by Jefferson, by John Adams (philosopher of usury for Pound's Cantos), by Thomas Paine, and finally in the oracular formula “The promises are theirs who take them.” The rest of the poem beseeches the vast community of America to believe that unless they “take the promises” others will; but there is something inconclusive about this, for a rhetoric capable of sounding a call to arms seems to have been expended on a plea for faith. References to nations made captive by the Falange, the Germans, or the Japanese might imply something like a war message (the year being 1939); on the other hand, the historical material is of the sort that, unlike MacLeish, a Marxist would have exploited seditiously. In its intellectual ambiguity America Was Promises had much in common with the philosophy of the national administration at that period. So seen, of course, the poem is milder than the rhetoric of its conclusion: it is simply urging people to remain loyal to New Deal doctrines at home and American policy abroad. Really it is much better as a poem than as a message: for once, MacLeish's adaptation of St.-John Perse's geographic evocations seems precisely right.

The long lapse before the appearance of Actfive and Other Poems (1948) would itself suffice to set this volume apart. But the double circumstance of the war and MacLeish's public service, along with the new personal vitality he seems to have experienced at this time, may account for its energies. In spirit this book is fully postwar, and it contains the perceptions of a man who had worked within government and who now had a far more exact idea of the gulf between political dreams and reality. It is the book of his second renaissance. A number of the poems, quite apart from the title piece, are of immense interest technically. They range from “Excavation of Troy,” an amusing metaphysical exercise in the slow manipulation of imagery and simile (in the mind of a drowsing girl her lover of many nights gone is like Troy buried under many intervening “layers”), to “What Must,” a quick medley of narrative, dialogue, and meditation (telling virtually in a cataract of rhymes the events of a brief love idyl). Several of the poems are ideological: thus “Brave New World,” a ballad to Jefferson in his grave (in the tradition of Yeats's “To a Shade”) taunts postwar America for its indifference to the plight of nations still unliberated.

The title piece, “Actfive,” was the most significant poem by MacLeish since the publication of his Hamlet. It does what a major work by a developing poet has to do: it clarifies the meaning of his previous major works in relation to one another, and it subjects to new form the world which his art is trying now to deal with. This poem relates to The Pot of Earth, to Einstein and to The Hamlet of A. MacLeish; and though quite intelligible independently of those, it gains depth and complexity by the relation. The general title, with the ranting manner of part i (“The Stage All Blood …”), brings the Hamlet to mind; “Actfive” continues, in a manner of speaking, the actions of that nightmarish poem, advancing them beyond the circle of a single protagonist's mind and showing that they involve all men.

Part i proclaims the death of God, of Kingship, and of Man deified—the last murdered by tyrants; and it appeals for one who can become in their stead “the hero in the play,” a hero to restore not only peace but Eternity, the principle of very reason. Implicitly both The Pot of Earth and, at some distance, Nobodaddy are drawn upon here, the one for the indifference of the Absolute, the other for, as well, the human alienation from it. In turn both are implicitly criticized: they have too palely depicted the stark loathsomeness of the death which proud man has inherited. Part ii, “The Masque of Mummers,” parades before the reader an absurd train of expressionistic figures, nonheroes yet “each the Hero of the Age”; it is an age whose inhabitants, stripped of privacy and individuality, cling together as in a public amphitheater and witness a charade of social lies—those of the Science Hero, of the Boyo of Industry, of the Revolutionary Hero with the Book, of the Great Man, of the Victim Hero or “pimp of death,” of the Visitor or dreamer of millennium, of the State or utopia, of the I or egotist-introspectionist, of the lonely Crowd. Part iii, “The Shape of Flesh and Bone,” identifies the sought hero at last; it is flesh and bone, unidealized, existential man, instinctive, physical, able to define the meaning of his universe to himself—man the transitory but in spirit indomitable. Archetypes present themselves: “The blinded gunner at the ford,” an image borrowed presumably from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls; a profile of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The responsible man … / [who] dies in his chair … / The war won, the victory assured”; and other images, of an invalid and a hostage. These exemplify the unposturing, unselfish performance of duty,

Some duty to be beautiful and brave
Owed neither to the world nor to the grave
.....But only to the flesh the bone.

The closing lines reaffirm the unutterable loneliness of man in his universe of death, but, like Einstein leave him with his inviolate creaturehood. It is ironic that “Actfive” should so circuitously return to the point insisted upon in Einstein; for it steers by the opposite pole, assuming that man's lordly reason, far from having subdued nature to its understanding, has been dethroned utterly. Equally, the animal self here, which can still “endure and love,” is all that preserves man from destruction; whereas in Einstein it is the only thing that debars him from godhead.

Collected Poems 1917-1952 incorporates a section of “New Poems” which might have made a book by themselves. They protract the Actfive renaissance (indeed it has lasted MacLeish into old age). Some half-dozen of them are modern “emblem” poems, being dominated by single images (often elaborated) with connotative value. Blake's “Ah! Sun-flower” is analogous; in MacLeish's “Thunderhead” the physics of lightning symbolizes an aspect of conjugal behavior; in “Starved Lovers” chrysanthemums symbolize sensuality; in “The Linden Branch” a green bough is metaphorically a musical instrument playing silent music. The newness of this effect consists in the way whole poems are now built round it, as Emily Dickinson's or (using symbol rather than metaphor) Yeats's often are. Yeats, who was to become a major inspiration for MacLeish, must have influenced the style of the end poem of “New Poems,” the meditation on metaphor “Hypocrite Auteur,” which essentially offers a justification for the effect.

Songs for Eve (1954) really consists of two collections joined together: first the twenty-eight tight, riddling poems (corresponding to the days of the month?) called “Songs for Eve”; then “Twenty-One Poems” of miscellaneous kinds. Despite the general title of the initial set, some of its pieces are for Eve but others are for Adam, the Serpent, the Green Tree, Eve's children, and so on. Perhaps in some sense all indeed are “for” Eve, she being central in the mythic context. Like Yeats's Crazy Jane, Eve is carnal and vicariously creative—in short, Blakean. Through her, Adam is enabled to wake from animality into consciousness; with her, he falls upward “from earth to God,” his soul growing as the awareness within his body, his children succeeding him as rebels and creators destined to rear, in place of the Green Tree of consciousness, the Dry Tree (the Cross) of godlike knowledge. The theme is that of Nobodaddy enriched with that of Einstein. The twenty-eighth poem ends the sequence by lauding “man / That immortal order can”; and in like manner the last of the “Twenty-One Poems,” entitled “Reasons for Music” and dedicated to Wallace Stevens, defines the poet's task as the imposition of form upon the fluid world (a theme of Stevens's own; MacLeish would ordinarily refer to the discovery of natural, intrinsic order, except probably in the aesthetic or the moral sphere). The fine keynote poem “The Infinite Reason” paraphrases “Songs for Eve” in effect by speaking of the human mission to read meaning in external reality:

Our human part is to redeem the god
Drowned in this time of space, this space
That time encloses.

Clearly the leading theme of Songs for Eve, the whole book, is man's ordering function; the collection is closer to Einstein and the other space-time poems of Streets in the Moon than are the works in between. Here much is made of the origin of the human soul within space-time, particularly in “Reply to Mr. Wordsworth,” where the proposition that the soul “cometh from afar” is refuted by an appeal to Einsteinian physics and—paradoxically—to the felt life of the emotions. The poems “Infiltration of the Universe,” “The Wood Dove at Sandy Spring,” “The Wave,” “Captivity of the Fly,” and “The Genius” are emblematic, and they happen also to compose a miniature bestiary. The volume pays tribute impartially to matters of intellect and of feeling; these compressed parables divide between them.

The Wild Old Wicked Man (1968) explores the whole scale of MacLeish's concerns, still optimistically. Old age and youth, time, domesticity, contemporary manners, love, death—these predominate. Introspection is not overworked, but two of the most arresting poems in the volume are “Autobiography,” on childhood vision, and “Tyrant of Syracuse,” on the subliminal self. In a memorable group of elegies, MacLeish bids farewell to Sandburg, Cummings, Hemingway, and Edwin Muir. The Hemingway poem, only eleven lines long, is one of numerous tributes paid by MacLeish to that one-time friend; it adapts Yeats's concept of “the dreaming back” for a skillful and moving analysis of the unity of the man Hemingway in his life and death. The Muir poem quotes “The Linden Branch,” applying to a green memory the graceful conceit of the green bough as a musical staff with leaves for notes. Yeats furnished the title of the volume; and the title poem, placed at the end, closes on the theme of

… the old man's triumph, to pursue
impossibility—and take it, too,

which is a signature for MacLeish's poetry, restating the theme of Adam victorious, fallen upwards into a stasis of art and eternity. …