[In the following essay, Waggoner explores the role of scientific thought in MacLeish's poetic representation of infinity and eternity.]

Since the time of Edward Taylor the chief philosophical problem for American poets has been the resolution of their beliefs in relation to the ever swelling current of positivistic naturalism. Responding to the insistent need of man to see himself and his life sub specie aeternitatis, our poets, from Bryant to MacLeish, have sought over and over to fit their intuitions into systems often too narrow or too vague to endure.

But the inadequacy of their metaphysics to make intelligible all the facets of experience and to satisfy all the demands of intuition has not removed the need for a system that would clarify the life of man as seen both in time and in eternity. In an age and a land predominantly secular, practical, and positivistic—an age and a land typified in Franklin, P. T. Barnam, and Edison rather than in Edwards, Emerson, and E. A. Robinson—they have endeavored to make their total experience intelligible by considering ultimate questions and answering them in terms of Calvinism, Nature, or the Divine Average. All our greater poets have wrestled with this problem, but the need of a satisfactory solution based not on fluid faith but on rational comprehension has become more urgent as the tide of positivistic naturalism has swelled; for the old answers have seemed ever less satisfactory, while the old need to see life under the aspect of eternity has, for the sensitive and thoughtful, diminished not at all.

Between Taylor and MacLeish—metaphysicals both—American literature has swung full circle. The Puritan outlook is far less foreign to MacLeish than it was to Whitman, Emerson, or even Franklin, who began life as a Calvinist. Edward Taylor was scarcely more concerned with time and eternity man's feebleness, and the rotting of the flesh than is MacLeish. The difference between the two poets is less in their vision than in their metaphysics: Taylor could accept a system adequate to the needs of his vision, but MacLeish has not yet found one.

I

Critics have made much of the fact that MacLeish has reflected in his poetry, especially in his “middle” period, from about 1925 to about 1933, all the bewilderment, isolation, and despair characteristic of the intellectuals of his generation. They have pointed out that MacLeish, like Joseph Wood Krutch, speaks in “the voice of our time”; that he is, or has been, the poet of the waste land and the lost generation; and that, with Eliot and Aiken, he was one of the first to express the new nihilism. On the other hand, Professor Cargill, in his recent Intellectual America: Ideas on the March, has explained this aspect of MacLeish's poetry by relating it to the ideology of the French Decadents. But may it not be that MacLeish's awe in the face of “the undigested mystery,” his constant, unanswered questioning of “the vacant light, the bright void, the listening, idiot silence,” though closely related to the nihilism of The Modern Temper, suggestive of some aspects of The Waste Land, and no doubt influenced by the ideology of the Decadents, was neither nihilism or the gibberish of hollow men, on the one hand, nor mere literary posturing in imitation of his French masters on the other? After one has recognized the influence of the Symbolists and of the cynicism that is connected with, though not completely accounted for by, the aftereffects of the first World War, one must finally conclude, I think, that it was, after all, the scientific outlook of the twenties that was the principal source of the ideas and points of view in MacLeish's early poetry. But the outlook has not operated as most critics believe.

If we leave out of account the earliest pieces which the poet later excluded from Poems, 1924-1933, pieces written before the poet had really found himself, we may look for the key to MacLeish's early attitude in the opening lines of Hamlet:

From these night fields and waters do men raise,
Sailors from ship, sleepers from their bed,
Born, mortal men and haunted with brief days,
They see the moon walk slowly in her ways
And the grave stars and all the dark outspread.
They raise their mortal eyelids from this ground:
Question it. …
                                                            What art thou. …
                                                                                                                                            And no sound.

The conclusions that the people draw from the vast silence is simply the rather obvious one that the stars do not answer questions. But when the apparition appears “the stench of death, of flesh rot,” chokes and terrifies Hamlet. The dreadful shape, the unknown terror, we are told, haunts all Hamlets, making “sick men of us, haunted fools / Hag-ridden blinking starers at the dark.” Hamlet is disturbed by the reflection that the stars do not darken when we die: “I say there were millions / Died like that and the usual constellations.” The implication of all this is, of course, that we are in an alien universe. But Hamlet is not certain; he continues to search for understanding.

Searching, he gropes to the very borders of the waste land. He hears the “Giggle of the wind along / The empty gutters of the sky. / Snigger of the faint stars. Catcalls.” Questioning, terrified by the cold between the stars, he realizes that there is no answer to our questions because we do not know what to ask. “We have learned all the answers, all the answers: / It is the question that we do not know.”

We do not know what to ask, for what Sorokin calls our “sensate” culture allows us no technique for putting ultimate questions. Having rejected both philosophy and theology as knowledge, we are left with the scientific method only, in terms of which man can neither put final questions nor find answers to them. Hamlet's rejection of the old answers and his inability to frame a proper question remind us of passages in so many well-known works of the last forty years that we seem to be reading a paraphrase of a hundred of them. One of the most widely read of the countless popularizations of science that our scientific age has produced, Sir James Jeans's The Mysterious Universe, began in a similar vein:

Standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand, we attempt to discover the nature and purpose of the universe which surrounds our home in space and time. Our first impression is something akin to terror. We find the universe terrifying because of its vast meaningless distances, terrifying because of its inconceivably long vistas of time which dwarf human history to the twinkling of an eye, terrifying because of our extreme loneliness, and because of the material insignificance of our home in space—a millionth part of a grain of sand out of all the sea-sand in the world. But above all else, we find the universe terrifying because it appears to be indifferent to life like our own; emotion, ambition and achievement, art and religion all seem equally foreign to its plan.

But Sir James invited the scorn of “realists” by turning from science to Platonic philosophy for his questions and his answers. Stimulated by the new discoveries in physics, he plunged into the deep waters of philosophy to conclude that “those inert atoms in the primaeval slime which first began to foreshadow the attributes of life were putting themselves more, and not less, in accord with the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Without his plunge into the deep waters the scientist would have been unable to reach any rational metaphysical conclusion whatever. But MacLeish has been unwilling or unable to go to philosophy or religion for his questions and answers. Hence he has presented the facts of man's position in the physical universe, but he has been unable to find meaning in the resultant picture.

“It is colder now / there are many stars / we are drifting / North by the Great Bear”—these, the opening lines of “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” suggest the outlines of MacLeish's thought on man's place in nature. Reading them, one thinks of the alien universe pictured in Bertrand Russell's “A Free Man's Worship” and since become the basic premise for the thought of many. One thinks, too, of that great stumbling-block in the way of those who would construct optimistic evolutionary philosophies, the concept of a universe that is running down. Certainly the second law of thermodynamics has been one of the most frightful of the specters haunting the modern Hamlet. Although the law is two-edged and may be interpreted as proof of the world's creation by a creator at a definite time, the climate of modern opinion makes such interpretation almost unheard of today among those sufficiently well read to be acquainted with the law at all. So it is that this law, which Sir A. S. Eddington has called “supreme … among the laws of Nature,” serves primarily to call up pictures of a dead universe: “It is very cold / there are strange stars near Arcturus / Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.”

But MacLeish has not been content to appropriate the concepts of astronomy and accept them unquestioningly as the cosmic setting for man. He has probed the meaning of scientific meanings. Attempting to arrive at an evaluation of scientific data without having recourse to metaphysics, he has shown himself exceptionally well acquainted with the epistemology of scientists. In that much but seldom intelligently discussed poem, Einstein, we see the poet pondering the problem of knowledge as it is affected by modern theoretical physics and especially by the theories of relativity. The solid world of matter, Einstein discovers, dissolves before him as he seeks to understand it. Matter, space, and time—all are left mere concepts in the knowing mind:

                                                                                          Still he stands
Watching the vortex widen and involve
In swirling dissolution the whole earth
And circle through the skies till swaying time
Collapses crumpling into dark the stars
And motion ceases and the sifting world
Opens beneath.
                                                                      When he shall feel infuse
His flesh with the rent body of all else
And spin within his opening brain the motes
Of suns and worlds and spaces.

That the poem is not merely a poetic fancy but a serious imaginative treatment of the problem of knowledge in the light of recent science becomes apparent if we compare with it the statements of one of the world's foremost scientists. Eddington has put the matter thus: “Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience. … The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.” Einstein in the poem wrestles with “the world of shadows” that he has created to be symbolic of the world of experience; but he finds that his symbols are too insubstantial to be grasped, too elusive and shadowy to be questioned. He cannot bridge the gap between his flesh and the shadowy world of his symbols. He cannot, to put it simply, see himself—his flesh, his experience, his life in all its felt reality—and the world presented symbolically by his scientific knowledge as one coherent whole. He cannot find a place for himself in the universe he has scientifically constructed—the universe that is in his mind, yet not under his control; that is symbolical only, yet more real than his frustrated desires and not to be bent to their ends:

But still the dark denies him. Still withstands
The dust his penetration and flings back
Himself to answer him.

We cannot, then, be sure of what our scientific knowledge means. The most important two lines in Einstein, the lines that contain the point toward which the whole poem moves, are the last two. (Strangely enough, they are the least often quoted or referred to in discussions of the poem.) The dust which has withstood Einstein's penetration “flings back himself to answer him. / Which seems to keep / Something inviolate. A living something.”

Einstein is left, that is, not a hollow man in a waste land but, in relation to his knowledge, the one reality. Here is an affirmation of the centrality of the knowing mind which, if it approaches solipsism, does so no more closely than interpretations of scientific knowledge that have gained wide currency in the last twenty years. MacLeish's conception of man's place in nature is based on a wide acquaintance with physical science; but his conception of the nature of man repudiates the genetic fallacy in all the varied disguises in which it insinuates itself into our thought. For MacLeish an adequate description of man does not begin with the words, “Man is nothing but.” Man, the “something inviolate,” is the one reality of which we can be certain. And not man as pictured by the behaviorists, not man without a mind, a memory, or a will, not man the biological automaton, but man as we know him because we ourselves are men—this is the man in which MacLeish believes, this is the ultimate reality.

When, in “Epistle To Be Left in the Earth,” the poet attempted to sum up all that man has learned, all that he knows or presumably can know, he emphasized the dichotomy between the knowing mind and the thing known, a dichotomy so great and so apparent that the end of man's quest for ultimate meaning must be acknowledgment of mystery: the knowing mind finds consciousness nowhere but in mind; when it turns to the stuff from which it sprang, it is unable to bridge the gap between “mind” and “matter.” “I will tell you all we have learned … the lights in the sky are stars / We think they do not see / we think also / the trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses.” Again, as in the case of the ideas in Einstein, this is no mere poetic fancy or imitation of a Decadent attitude. The philosopher F. S. C. Northrop has stated the problem succinctly in prose:

In other words, the task which we now face is to reconcile the obvious presence of colors and sounds and pains and pleasures [consciousness] with the equally obvious extensive facts of stuff and change [the world studied by natural science].

Since he has so far been unwilling to go to metaphysics for a solution, MacLeish has had to stop with the statement of the problem. This is the great unanswered question in his poetry which the critics make so much of and interpret so variously. It is because this problem remains unsolved that the modern Hamlet can think of nothing meaningful to ask of the universe. But the formulation of the problem and the emphasis which the poet has given it are not the only effects of science on his poetry. The mere stating of a problem which must be left unsolved can create a mood and determine a perspective. The problem of the place of man and his mind in nature has done so for all of MacLeish's early and for much of his later poetry.

II

It is surely no mere coincidence that Aldous Huxley has developed what one reviewer has called a “religious mania”; that such diverse figures as T. S. Eliot and M. J. Adler have become convinced of the imperative need of our recognizing philosophy and theology as real knowledge, not just opinion or rationalization; that many theologians, convinced of the falsity of the outlook of Protestant modernism, have reaffirmed some of the insights that vitalized the poetry of Edward Taylor—and that all this and more has happened in the last fifteen years. One popular explanation of these phenomena is that, having reached the nadir of belief, we have been forced to turn and clutch at straws in order to make life seem worth living. Such an explanation makes the philosophical developments of the last fifteen years mere rationalizations of human needs. Another explanation runs thus: Since world conditions are now intolerable for sensitive minds to contemplate with equanimity, since hope has been taken out of life on the economic and social levels, we are escaping from an unpleasant situation by carefully constructing otherworldly hopes to compensate for this world's patent failure. This view makes philosophy a by-product of economic and social conditions. Needless to say, in a culture still predominantly positivistic, these two explanations are much in favor.

But I want to propose another. It is that one of the unlooked-for effects of contemporary science has been to make sensitive and imaginative minds ever more conscious of the stature of a man against the sky. This tendency to view man under the aspect of eternity can lead to the transcendental faith of a poet like Robinson or to the intense pessimism of a poet like Jeffers; it can lead to the Catholicism of Eliot or to the mysticism of Huxley. Or, as MacLeish's development testifies, it can lead simply to a new perspective accompanied by no dogmatic faith, supersensate philosophy, or genuinely religious mysticism. Such an explanation suggests that the new outlook so common today is neither a mere swing of the pendulum nor a physically determined by-product of an economic revolution, but a rediscovery of an old truth, a truth known to Taylor and Jonathan Edwards but since too often forgotten: that man's days are few and his powers feeble, that no “religion of humanity” is enough.

MacLeish laid the basis for this point of view in one of his best early poems, “Seafarer”:

And learn O voyager to walk
The roll of earth, the pitch and fall
That swings across these trees those stars:
That swings the sunlight up the wall.
And learn upon these narrow beds
To sleep in spite of sea, in spite
Of sound the rushing planet makes:
And learn to sleep against the ground.

The poet had to learn to walk the roll of earth because, as he said in his “Lines for a Prologue,” “These alternate nights and days, these seasons / Somehow fail to convince me. It seems / I have the sense of infinity!”

It is hardly too much to say that of all the poems written before 1933 the majority are concerned with or grow out of this “sense of infinity.” “Cinema of Man,” “L'An Trent,” “Le Secret,” “Immortal Helix,” “Verses for a Centennial”—all play variations on this theme. Two other short poems may speak for all that I have named. “Signature for Tempo” opens with this stanza:

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

Obviously no prose statement can convey the total meaning of a stanza of poetry, but if one were to attempt to suggest in a phrase or two the concept imaginatively embodied in the opening lines of “Signature for Tempo,” would not the phrases be “a sense of cosmic space,” “the world's position in the galaxy,” and “relativity”? Such concepts derive from astronomy and, particularly, from Einstein. The influence of the latter on MacLeish's thinking and so on his poetry becomes more obvious if we read further in the poem:

These live people,
These more
Than three dimensional
By time protracted edgewise
          into heretofore
People,
How shall we bury all
These queer-shaped people,
In graves that have no more
          than three dimensions?

A poem that would be quite undistinguished but for the sense of infinity that informs it will serve as a last example from the short poems. “Nocturne,” after presenting in symbols the aching incompleteness of modern consciousness, ends with a question and a statement:

What is it we cannot recall?
Tormented by the moon's light
The earth turns wandering through the night.

Much has been written in the last few years about MacLeish's failure in Conquistador to present either a “true” historical narrative or a usable modern interpretation of the historical events dealt with. On the one hand, some critics charge that the actions of the conquerors are shadowy and vague, determined by a dimly understood fate; thus, since this is not the way the conquest must have seemed to the men who took part in it, the poem perverts history. On the other hand is the charge that, since history is always the interpretation of the past in terms of our own concepts and for our own purposes, the poem, in presenting only a riot of sense impressions and unexplained marching and slaughtering, in no sense presents a usable interpretation of the past. It seems to me that two things should be said in answer to these charges. First, and less important, is the fact that the poem purports to be the memories of an old man approaching death; it is remembered experience, and the memory of an old man may cling to sense impressions and forget reasons and military strategy. Second, the poem presents a series of episodes in history as seen under the aspect of eternity. The fact that the narrator in the poem is old and approaching death is the device which makes this perspective plausible; but the reasons for the adoption of the perspective are not merely those of literary effectiveness. Like Pot of Earth, Conquistador is MacLeish's attempt to tell a story of human events in time from the point of view of an observer who is aware of eternity.

One who is, like Bernal Diaz, aware of the imminent approach of death may recall with an unnatural keenness the stream of impressions that were the living reality of a series of events in the past while those events were taking place; but he is likely also to be preternaturally aware of the ephemeral nature of the very sensations that are so vividly recalled. He may be acutely conscious of the dilemma at the heart of modern thought: fleeting, transitory, insubstantial consciousness seems at once the only indisputable reality and a flickering light in the darkness of cosmic space. So it is that a poem that seems chiefly concerned with the sights and sounds and odors, the food and blood and Indian girls that made up the reality for Bernal Diaz of the interminable weeks of marching and fighting, leaves the reader with a curious sense of the unreality of the experiences so vividly described. For even for Bernal Diaz they are in a sense unreal: the living, throbbing reality of them has been replaced by vivid but inconsequent memories, memories that assert the connection between the young man and the old chiefly to satisfy the old man's pride. But in another sense also the events narrated affect the reader as unreal: under the aspect of eternity, marching and eating and making love are seen as insubstantial, unreal even. The sensations, that is, that are the subject matter of the bulk of the verses of Conquistador take place in time but are seen out of time.

It is natural, then, that a blending of sense impressions and intuitions of infinity should be the distinguishing mark of the poem. Such lines as these give us the keynote of the mood of the whole work:

Ah but the mark of man's heel is alone in the
Dust under the whistling of hawks! Companion of
Constellations the trace of his track lies!
Endless is unknown earth before a man. …

The modern sense of the mystery of life and death, of the vastness of space and the physical insignificance of man—the tendency, in short, of many sensitive modern minds once more to concern themselves with eternity as well as with time—all this is read back into the story of the march of the conquerors through Mexico. The reader never is allowed to forget, as he reads the poem, that while the men march the earth turns on its axis and circles the sun, and both speed through the darkness of the galaxy among galaxies. The poem is actually a commentary on the present given through an interpretation of the past, an allegory of the life of man dwarfed in a vast, strange land under foreign stars.

Hence it is that the poem is full of violent sensations without meaning. Hence it is that bewilderment, nostalgia, a sense of the mystery of life, the smell of death, dominate the poem. The gap between conscious experience and an apparently alien universe, left unbridged, precludes the possibility of a rational ordering of the senseless flux of experience. The eerie light of the stars flickers ominously over the figures of the conquerors.

III

But the conquerors remain intensely human. Their hopes, their fears, their vividly remembered sensations are central; they are neither explained away nor ridiculed but are presented for what they are. The question implied throughout the poem, the question that inevitably arises in the mind of the thoughtful reader—how the experience of the conquerors and the external universe in which it takes place can be made to fit into a coherent whole—is left unanswered. The task of conjoining (to use a phrase of Edward Taylor) infinity and finity is not attempted, but the need to do so is clearly implied.

That need MacLeish has frequently expressed in his prose. The reason for the urgency of the need has been so often discussed by both the poet and his critics that it need only be mentioned here. As MacLeish wrote in 1923, ours is a time of great restlessness, bewilderment, confusion, and cynicism. The knowledge and discoveries concerning man and the universe amassed during the nineteenth century have, he felt, so overborne the human mind, so shattered traditional beliefs, that as yet no explanation, no synthesis in terms of a comprehensive understanding of the significance of this knowledge for man, for the future, and for man's relation to nature, has been made. We have knowledge with no explanation of it, no unifying philosophy or interpretation of it, and instead of trying to deal with existing knowledge, we try to gather more. Poetry, then, as MacLeish wrote in 1931, “which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt—an image of mankind in which men can again believe.”

One way, if not of creating such an image, at least of putting off the necessity of doing so, is to turn one's attention from man to men, from the individual as both an individual and a representative sample of mankind, to problems of social organization. Thus to shift one's interest from man to society is, of course, to cease concentrating on ends and turn to means; it is, consequently, a common philosophical phenomenon when the chain of reasoning being pursued promises to lead to unsatisfactory conclusions. Just as the “advanced thinkers” of the eighteenth century, when they began dimly to suspect that the reasoning on which they had built their optimism would lead to something less than the best of all possible worlds, turned their attention from speculative philosophy to practical reform, so many thinkers during the past decade, despairing of finding any satisfactory answer to the problem of man's place in the universe, have turned their attention to social problems. This evolution has been very marked in MacLeish's poetry and has been commented on by many of his critics. As he himself has explained in “Nevertheless One Debt,” society has become more important than the individual. Without rehearsing the reasons which the poet himself gives for this change, without attempting to minimize or oversimplify the factors involved in it, we may re-emphasize one thing: that it is in part at least the product of frustration. It is an emotional answer to logical questions, logical answers to which are either impossible to attain within the self-imposed limitations of thought or else are too unpleasant to be acceptable.

MacLeish is aware that transferring one's interest from philosophy to social security solves no philosophical problem, and he has continued to search for a satisfactory synthesis of individual experience and scientific knowledge. As he recently put it, “no purposed human action is conceivable without an image of the world which is coherent and distinguishable.” It is his hope, apparently, that out of the intellectual chaos of our day a new vision will come. Meanwhile, as he says in his “Dover Beach: A Note to That Poem,” the ebbing of the sea of faith itself provides “a fine and wild smother to vanish in.”

The smother is fine because it is wild. It is fine because it has shocked man out of complacent secularism. In short, it is fine for MacLeish because it has given him “the sense of infinity.” And although he has turned from philosophy to economics and politics, although he has recently turned his attention to the promises inherent in America and has called upon artists and scholars to join in the fight to preserve and extend them, he has, even during the past decade, kept his sense of infinity and attempted, gropingly and without recourse to speculation, to arrive at a more or less intuitive synthesis. No longer does he concentrate on widening the gap between infinity and finity as in “The End of the World.” More typical of his new mood are “America Was Promises,” “The Sunset Piece” and his poetic note on “Dover Beach”—poems which enunciate no answers but imply the faith that an answer will come. And MacLeish has given hints of the sort of image he thinks it may be; though he has not ordered his materials in a rational system, he has presented and implied an outlook.

First, he has always attempted, perhaps less successfully since the 1933 collection of poems than before that date, to achieve what he has called the function of true art: to catch “the flowing away of the world.” The very way he has phrased this statement of the purpose of art—a statement tossed off in debate, it is true, but paralleled by others of his pronouncements—indicates that the image of the world, when it is arrived at, will attempt to conjoin infinity and finity, to make meaningful, in other words, the relation of time to eternity and finite human experience to the cosmic process. The “flowing away” is the chief characteristic of consciousness, but “the world” is the backdrop of comparative stability against which consciousness flows away, a backdrop which is at once a part of consciousness and yet not reducible to it or manageable by it. Evidently it is MacLeish's guess that the image of the world which will become a common faith will be informed by the sense of infinity which is the result of any honest and sensitive attempt to probe the reality of the flowing-away of consciousness.

Second, though he has been much influenced by and has made much use of the knowledge of the physical world gathered by the physical sciences, he has never accepted the conclusions about the nature of man that have usually been drawn from biology and psychology and that are almost universally extended to history and sociology, where they serve as both methodology and philosophy. He has seen clearly and declared often that it is sheer confusion for sociologists to say in one breath that man is totally the product of his inheritance (genes and “folkways”) and his environment and to proclaim, in another, that the purpose of their “science” is intelligent social action and reform. He has seen clearly that to interpret history solely in terms of economic determinism is to be guilty of the confusion of a narrow (although, if understood, serviceable) abstraction with a complex reality; and it is to be guilty, also, of another sort of logical confusion, for the very people who most dogmatically interpret history as “determined” by economic forces most loudly call for reform, thus conveniently forgetting that they have just been saying that acts of will do not count in a world beyond their control. MacLeish has never reflected in his poems or his prose the picture of man presented by the two most influential psychologies of this century, Freudianism and Watsonian behaviorism. It is obvious that the men and women in his poems are not personifications of Freudian complexes; that their experience is not completely explainable in terms of “the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry”; that they are men and women presented as known in experience, not as variously pictured by the various psychologies. Although J. B. Watson has swept away such medieval superstitions as mind, consciousness, will, and memory, it would be clear, I think, even to Watson, if he should ever read the poems, that they are written out of a firm faith in the reality of these medieval superstitions. In short, MacLeish has remained unaffected by the manifold “disillusions” about the nature of man that have emanated from scientific laboratories and studies—the disillusions of the laboratory (glands and bodily mechanisms), of sociology (folkways and Pareto's banishing of mind from society), and of psychology (reflex mechanisms and the “dark, unfeeling, and unloving powers” that are said to govern the human mind, if any). The assertion, in The Irresponsibles, of faith in the reality of “moral law … spiritual authority … intellectual truth” in no sense represents an about-face, as some have supposed; for nothing that MacLeish has written denies the reality or the centrality in man's experience of those values.

Thus, although he has not presented in his poetry the “clear and recognizable” image of man that he calls for, he has held fast at once to concrete experience (refusing to deny its reality in order to be “up with” the latest scientific theories) and to his cosmic sense, which enables him to concentrate on naïve and sensuous experience while yet presenting it against the background of a cosmic setting. While moving, as have so many thinkers and artists recently, toward the “unified sensibility” and unified consciousness of Donne and Taylor, he has accepted the conclusions of science that emphasize again truths long known but often forgotten in the last two centuries and has rejected those conclusions of science that seem to him to contradict experience. The unarticulated question that haunted him when he wrote his Hamlet and that determined the nature of Conquistador remains unanswered. He has indicated that when it is answered it will be in terms that respect both experience and knowledge. Meanwhile, however, the unanswered question has served him well, for it has given universal significance to his poems of romantic emotion, social problems, and history. MacLeish's debt to science is that it has kept him aware of the aspect of eternity.