[In the following essay, Monroe evaluates MacLeish as a poet of the age with a sensitivity to human suffering, but wonders whether he has the necessary forcefulness to interpret the modern world.]

One morning in late April a modest, melancholy, implacably sincere young man faced an audience of two or three hundred persons in the Arts Club of his native city of Chicago. The modernistic setting of the room—suave, never violent, a faultlessly tempered simplicity—was in harmony with the poet's mood; against it the beauty of his cadences was like the sound of a fountain in a garden, and through the windows the incessant motors slipping along Michigan Avenue struck the bass notes of a perfect chord.

It was manifest that a thinker confronted us, and that he was using his slow quantitative elegiac rhythms to express the break-up and remolding of the world. It was as if he saw some mighty hand crumbling the dried clay of worn-out systems to moisten and reshape it into a form unforeseen and strange. He stood beside the adventurous molder sensitively aware of risk, trembling lest the huge and massive figure of human society, still in the rough, should prove less symmetrical than the one now dissolved to powder, should prove indeed incapable of symmetry, casting upon the new age a gigantic shadow of ugliness.

As the poet read the prologue of his epic-in-the-making, Conquistador, one felt that he was using the fury and splendor, the clash of ideals and civilizations in that old sixteenth-century war, as a symbol of the modern worldwide clash of systems and ideas; that Cortez and Montezuma seemed to him not more different, not more violently opposed in every thought and custom, than the separatist feudal world from which we are emerging and the steel-linked radio-bound international world which already holds us in its enormous grip. One felt that this poet realized the threat of tragedy in the situation of the human atom caught in immensities, and the grotesque heroism of the atom's conquest of gigantic tools, of his puny leap into infinities of knowledge. His imagination seemed to be aware of the modern clash of forces, and one queried his future, wondering how profoundly and prophetically he would be able to symbolize this conflict in Conquistador and later poems.

My mind wandered back over this fellow-citizen's history. Born in a Chicago suburb to a typical well-to-do family childhood and school life; Yale, graduating in 1915; the Harvard law school for two years; marriage; the War, and as he volunteered and left his wife and infant son for service in France, his first book of creditable youthful poems was edited and brought out by a young Yale professor, his friend; service at the Front in the Field Artillery; after a year of it ordered home in August, 1918, to train soldiers to handle big guns; the Armistice, just as he and his troops were about to embark for France; demobilization, followed by three years' practice of law with a firm of repute in Boston; all very like other American boys from well regulated suburban homes; typical, except for the soldiering, of the youth of our fathers and brothers, perhaps of our sons and grandsons. And then a breaking away from tradition at the thrill of a new discovery, a new purpose—that not law but literature was his vocation, not legal oratory but poetry. Then came a burning of bridges, and flight across the sea with his family, this time to a France at peace. And after a few years' sojourn back again to his own country, and the purchase of an old farm in Massachusetts.

Perhaps it was necessary and inevitable that the embryo poet should go abroad to enforce the change—his only way of making a complete break with his conventional and professional past, of escaping the doubts and queries of puzzled and well-meaning friends. Also he needed Paris esthetically at that time more, probably, than he realized; he needed the ferment, the intellectual hostilities and loyalties, the provocative rages against everything conventional or old-fashioned. He needed a thorough stirring-up that his art might be enriched beyond the mild flavor of his first book; and if his enthusiasm for the new contacts carried him too far, tempted him toward derivation and imitation, that was a phase to be easily outgrown, in all probability, as his work developed.

The Happy Marriage (1924) and The Pot of Earth (1925) were the first fruits of the new passion. In reviewing them in Poetry I said in part:

These two books are “tone-poems” played with muted strings; played in the half-light or the half-dark when rapture and anguish, however real, become suspect of dreams. What we all fear, the poet sees come to pass—life blurs and dissolves before his eyes; lovely concords are hushed; beauty that is too beautiful perishes of its own fragility, like a soap-bubble vanishing with its flicker of iridescence.

All this is not expressly said, any more than in music. In the earlier book we have indeed the delicate raptures of a happy marriage—love as fleet as a fawn to tempt and elude, as warm as a bird in the nest to cherish and guard; but the poet, singing the changes of joy, feels always how perishable is joy in this vibrating, swinging, dissolving world. And he knows that the soul can not be bound, but must beat away from the closest contacts. …

In The Pot of Earth we find the poet's instinct for rhythms and tone-values developed almost to virtuosity. A certain relation to The Waste Land is obvious. Mr. MacLeish, either consciously or unconsciously, has set himself to study Mr. Eliot's wavering variable rhythms, his way of neither beginning nor ending, of leaping backward and forward, and somehow reaching his goal by wayward paths no other poet could travel. But if the younger poet has taken a few hints from the elder one, he has shown extraordinary intelligence in recognizing their adaptability to his theme, and in heeding them just so far as they suited his purpose. In other words, The Pot of Earth is beautifully done.

From this book to Streets in the Moon was a long leap. In a year the poet had gained firmer ground to stand on, and though we still hear echoes of Eliot, and both hear and see reminders of the transition experimenters with rhythm and typography, the poet is developing his own style and using it to express his own personality. The book contains such modernistic meditations as Einstein such self-questionings as “L'an trentiesme de mon aege” and the beautiful “Signature for Tempo,” such grotesques as “March” and “Man!”; and everywhere the expert touch, the delicate manipulation of rhythms, the fine, sometimes almost-too-studied phrasing. In the latest book, New Found Land, we find a further development of these qualities: poems of rare and usually melancholy beauty, like “Immortal Autumn” and “Epistle to be Left in the Earth”—a beauty marred only by eccentric typography and troublesome lack of punctuation.

Through all these books the poet's philosophy of life—or perhaps one should say the instinctive feeling about life which becomes the underlying motive of his art—is less hard in texture and brazen in tone than most of the Parisian-American group could sympathize with; there is room for human pity in it, and even for human love—that love of the race which, implying the merging of the individual in the mass, may be the democratic, or at least the communistic, ideal—an ideal difficult, perhaps inaccessible to the poet, who is always by instinct an individualist.

We find this instinct of human pity underlying the self-analysis presented as the artistic motive of The Hamlet of A. MacLeish. Here the Elizabethan doubter shrinks into the modern agonist, and “the King his father's ghost,” revisiting the glimpses of the moon, becomes the symbol of the world's irrevocable past, of dead generations and their dreams:

Where is thy tongue, great spectre? Hast thou not
Answered to others that with hearts like ours
Followed thee, poets, speakers in the earth?
Didst thou not show them? For they were as sure,
Returning, as those men whom the great sea
Chooses for danger. …

The poet is oppressed by human suffering, and exalted by the evidences of human camaraderie, human friendliness and love. Apparently Conquistador is to embody his effort to merge the individual in the mass, and show him moving on with the race to whatever goal of harmony or discord, of freedom or slavery, of beauty or chaos, may lie ahead of us.

I have much faith in the ability of this poet to interpret his age: he has the thinking mind, the creative imagination, the artistic equipment of beautiful words and rhythms. There is perhaps only one fundamental doubt—it would take gusto to express this age, a shout of driving rage and laughter, a rush of god-like or demoniac power. The men of science have it, the engineers, builders, inventors, discoverers; the big men of finance, the bankers and brokers; even, I am told, the bootleggers and bandits. Can Mr. MacLeish, shy, sheltered, melancholy by temperament, compass all this—not of course in experience, but in imagination, in his art? Can he give us the superb power and splendor of this most creative age of the world's history? Or must we wait for some poet of grit and brawn, some prophet of grandeur and laughter, some cross between John Milton and Ogden Nash, to tell us the whole truth and save the world?