SOURCE: Blum, John Morton. “Archibald MacLeish: Art for Action.” Yale Review 81, no. 2 (April 1993): 106-33.

[In the following essay, Blum recounts MacLeish's literary and political career, stressing the poet's liberalism and belief in democracy.]

Art encompassed experience: so believed Archibald MacLeish; and since politics was part of experience, art encompassed politics. On the contrary, politics encompassed art: so contended the Fascists and Communists of the 1930s and their spiritual successors who used the power of the state to brutalize art and artists. MacLeish condemned them for what they thought and what they did. He also exhorted his fellow American artists to abandon their posture of political neutrality and accept the responsibility of art for action. Only action would protect the freedom of the individual and of the states that nurtured that freedom from the attacks of the new barbarians ravaging Europe in 1940. Later MacLeish again exhorted Americans, artists not the least, to protect their tradition of freedom from the barbarians among their countrymen who were ravaging the politics of democracy in the postwar decades. As MacLeish saw it, a poet had no other choice. A responsible artist, a man or a woman of letters, had to be a man or a woman of action.

MacLeish, who was born in 1892 and lived to be ninety, reached that conclusion before his fortieth year. Then and later it gave unity to his life. Though he arrived at it in stages, it inhered in the restless and precocious versatility of his youth, even in the influence of his parents. Beginning with those parents, Scott Donaldson in his new biography of MacLeish [Archibald MacLeish: An American Life] describes in copious detail his subject's long private and public life. Donaldson continually takes his clues from his protagonist, from observations in MacLeish's private notebooks as well as from MacLeish's poetry, some of it previously unpublished, which he weaves into his text. In assessing MacLeish's poetry, Donaldson refers to negative as well as positive reviews, although he usually agrees with the latter. He is largely nonjudgmental about MacLeish's private life—his marriage, his relations with his children, his several love affairs. MacLeish, too, was “circumspect” about those matters. All in all, Donaldson finds MacLeish a sympathetic figure, as did R. H. Winnick, whose earlier research informs Donaldson's work. A talented, vigorous, articulate man, MacLeish evoked that kind of treatment.

But Donaldson's biography has about it the touch of an authorized life, which Winnick had set out to write. In places mechanical, the book lacks passion—especially the passion of committed liberalism, which MacLeish exuded. Donaldson, who is primarily a literary critic, seems less comfortable with MacLeish's politics than with his poetry. He shares the almost universal literary judgment that MacLeish wrote better lyrical than political verse—an assessment hard to avoid—but he does not much inquire into the ways that MacLeish's politics and poetry penetrated each other. Yet the passion explicit in MacLeish's politics was explicit also in his verse dramas (though not always gracefully), as well as internalized in his lyric poetry. Donaldson's instructive book supplies the information from which such a comment can be drawn. But a historian working with many of the materials he used—MacLeish's published poetry and letters, his plays and speeches—could properly conclude that MacLeish's contribution to American literature was no greater than his contribution to American politics.

Each in a different way, MacLeish's parents had towering expectations for him. His father, a wealthy Chicago merchant fifty years his senior, brought a stiff Calvinism with him from his native Scotland. Archibald, the second child of his third marriage, found him as remote and formidable as Jehovah. (“If God is God he is not good.”) MacLeish had his father's financial support for his extensive education and years of apprenticeship in Paris but never his father's love or even praise. That deprivation may have accounted for MacLeish's lifelong striving for approval from the poets and critics he most admired. But MacLeish's mother, the descendant of Puritans, believed in striving, too. Before her marriage, Martha Hillard MacLeish, a devout Christian, had been the principal of Rockford Seminary; as a wife and mother, she dedicated herself to good causes, social and religious as well as educational, and expected her children to follow her example. Her earnest liberalism marked her son more deeply than did the patrician smugness he encountered at the Hotchkiss School, which he hated, and at Yale College, which he loved.

At Yale, then “deep in the blue sweater era,” MacLeish excelled at everything he undertook. He made the varsity football team and Phi Beta Kappa, was editor of the Yale Literary Magazine, and was elected to the most prestigious of senior societies, Skull and Bones, whose initiates considered themselves the most accomplished and respected sons of Eli. Then and thereafter, MacLeish was socially most comfortable with such men and women. Yet he was a democrat. In his own mind he invested Yale, as he did his country, with an ideal democratic spirit. And as R. W. B. Lewis observed, though no one seemed to know him intimately, almost every one he met quickly called him Archie.

In 1917, with America's entry into World War I, MacLeish, who led his class at the Harvard Law School, interrupted his studies to volunteer for the Yale Mobile Hospital Unit. After arriving in France, he moved to the field artillery, where he saw action as a captain. In 1917 he also published Tower of Ivory, his first book of poetry. That early verse displayed a sentimentality that enveloped many aspects of his life—his romantic attachments, his own (and his mother's) vision of America, and his Wilsonian belief that World War I would be the war to end all wars and save democracy. MacLeish's poetry at that time dwelt on memories of love, thoughts of death, and collegiate landscapes. He believed, he wrote, “that beauty is attainable, that the world of the mind is real, that men are in nature seekers of the true God” and that the war was being fought to preserve those verities from destruction by the Germans.

Those sentiments made MacLeish especially vulnerable to the general disillusionment that grew out of the brutality of the war and the selfishness of the terms for peace. He was unsettled even more by the accidental death in Belgium of his younger brother Kenneth, a naval aviator. As so often with MacLeish, the particular merged with the general. “Men become the symbols of ideas by losing their familiar and personal qualities,” he wrote his mother in 1920, two years after Kenneth's death. “And Kenny as the symbol of brave youth content to die for the battle's sake will really exist when Kenny … has a little paled and faded into oblivion.” Then, on a visit to Kenneth's grave in 1924, the particular—and, with it, the general—changed: “It seems to me grotesque … that that beautiful boy should be lying under the sand in a field he never saw—for nothing. … It is horrible. … It is very still. The sky has become black and threatening. I feel nothing except the numbness of the earth, its silentness. … It is absurd to die anyhow. What difference does it make when you die. It is ridiculous to lie quite still. … Perhaps you will understand my feeling about the war that creates my feeling about Kenny. It was an awful, awful, failure. A hideous joke.”

MacLeish realized that his emotions had “a way of crystallizing around some sensuous object.” Kenny's grave affected him, but so did the funeral of Woodrow Wilson. “Does it strike you,” he wrote Dean Acheson, his Yale classmate and lifelong friend, “as whimsical that a man who spent most of his public life, all his popularity and the greater part of his health in the fight for peace should be loaded onto a gun carriage as soon as he is past resistance and put away to a tune of gun fire and brass? But they can't get rid of him that way. Hot air through a bugle will do for H. C. Lodge.” MacLeish's feelings about the war, then, did not damp his belief in Wilsonian ideals, in a “peace without victory.” Like other liberals of the 1920s, he blamed Lodge and the Republicans for the American rejection of the League of Nations. He was disillusioned with the outcome of the war, not with Wilson's avowed purpose. And not wholly with the fighting itself, for he never forgot the experience of a brotherhood of arms: “Those are as brothers whose bodies have shared fear / Or shared harm or shared hurt or indignity. / Why are the old soldiers brothers and nearest? / For this: with their minds they go over the sea a little / And find themselves in their youth again.”

After the war, back at the Harvard Law School, where he said he received his education, MacLeish went on to practice law, teach political science to undergraduates, worry about the state of the world, join the campaign for justice for Sacco and Vanzetti, and dither about his future. He had always had doubts about the law as a career; it was at best a “compromise” that allowed some leisure for writing. Law had its fascinations, though; he greatly admired the dissent of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the Abrams case, a majestic plea for liberty of speech and opinion. As he wrote Acheson, MacLeish had a large regard for “the law as a social instrument” and for “the infinite capacity of the human brain to shape that instrument.” And, like his mother, he also believed a man “must … act upon the world.” But poetry still attracted him. Unlike the law, poetry “must not prove, must not explain,” though the poet had to have an expressible idea. “The high function of the human mind,” MacLeish wrote Acheson, was “its own expression … the expression of its ideal of life” which was “not important as a reforming agency” but as “an act of creation.” Obviously MacLeish was torn. “The question,” he proposed, “is how to work at reality. … We can be amateur philosophers … but that won't do. What you and I are fitted for is the serious … study of political and social science … as the means of salvation.” Though law and poetry were “eternal irritants,” political science “and such poetry as I really wish to write will fuse.” In that sense, he could have it both ways.

Declining a partnership in a prestigious Boston law firm in 1923, the thirty-one-year-old MacLeish took his family to Paris in order to read and write poetry and to find his own personal and artistic world. Once there, he realized he shared the estrangement of other literary exiles, his contemporaries and soon his friends, who had preceded him. “The arts,” as he put it later, “were discovering … that an age ended with the First World War … that the city of man was now a heap of stones. … A generation born in the century of stability and order … could still … see the old safe world behind the war. … It was not the Lost Generation which was lost: It was the world out of which that generation came.” That understanding, MacLeish maintained, produced the great art of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and other Americans who were expatriates because their patria was “no longer waiting for them anywhere.”

In Paris MacLeish developed the poetic voice that characterized his best work then and thereafter. He put himself through a course of readings modeled upon Pound's and Eliot's personal curricula. He made friends with the foremost artists of the glittering Parisian scene. And he explored his inner self without fully revealing it. He had been “remiss in the practice … of religion,” he admitted to his mother, but he retained “that gravitation of the spirit which is properly called faith.” Partly to find himself “in that direction” he needed “this time for real work.” His work, his religious work, was poetry. He concluded, not surprisingly, that the proper techniques of poetry were consonant with those of Pound and Eliot: “To create an emotion by the imperfect representation in words of objects which are imperfectly associated with the emotion desired. That is … the problem. … Grammatical construction beyond the absolute minimum is not desirable. The effort is the direction of attention. … But beauty of rhythm and sound are tremendously desirable because they are the greatest possible aids in the creation of the emotion desired.” He admired “a compact, precise edged poetry which could be terribly poignant.” He wanted to “arrive at a direct statement,” to achieve “lucidity and concreteness.”

Those qualities made memorable the poems collected in New Found Land (1930). Fusing thought and emotion, they received glowing reviews. They brought a sensuous musicality to themes which had occupied poets for centuries. “Immortal Autumn” and “You, Andrew Marvell” became and remained standard choices for anthologists. The collection in itself validated MacLeish's decision to make poetry his calling. Supplemented by the best of his later work, the book provided impressive evidence for the view of perceptive critics—among others, R. W. B. Lewis, Louis Martz, Howard Nemerov, and Richard Wilbur—that of all the things MacLeish was, he was first a poet.

Self-consciously he hewed to the conventions of his art. Though he knew that the world of his youth, the world of stability and order, had vanished, his poetry spoke of the order inherent in nature as he observed it. Joyce and Proust and others he read wrote with a revolutionary sense of time and space. Not so MacLeish. He found inspiration in the rhythms of the day and of the year. “Immortal Autumn” was one of many poems that used the seasons to evoke the emotions he wanted to express: “I praise the fall: it is the human season.” To the same end, “You, Andrew Marvell” used the diurnal: “To feel the always coming on / The always rising of the night.” MacLeish knew what he was doing. “Why should the time conception so move our generation?” he asked Wyndham Lewis. “Why do I … respond to images of the turning world as to nothing else? … When the posts of religion are knocked out does the whole flood come down of necessity?” Since MacLeish made a religion of nature as he made a religion of poetry, the last question answered its predecessors. But great poetry, after all, had always explored the connectedness of mood and time.

Though he wrote some beautiful poetry, MacLeish was not a great poet—particularly in his longer works. In both Nobodaddy (1925), a play in verse, and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), he went about “the business of poetry … to make sense of the chaos of our lives. … To compose an order which the bewildered … heart can recognize. To imagine man.” Nobodaddy, his contorted version of the Fall, put Cain and God's curse upon him at center stage. Burdened by his knowledge of good and evil, Cain, “a fugitive and a vagabond,” had to survive outside the Garden of Eden. That was also the burden of mankind—to endure in spite of the knowledge of human depravity, a lesson imparted to MacLeish by World War I. But MacLeish did not mention the war even by implication, and he did not express in any way what he meant by evil. The play anticipated his responses to later demonstrations of a lost past of “golden innocence” but it did not succeed either as drama or as blank verse.

The Hamlet also failed. Here MacLeish exposed his own bewildered heart, blamed himself for seeking fame, and urged himself to set more selfless goals. He bared his grief over the deaths of his son, his brother, and several friends; he also lamented his fear in times of danger. But there was a shallowness about his lamentations: he seemed to bewail his sins without recognizing the possibility of evil within the human heart. Critics, many of whom had found MacLeish's lyric poetry derivative, repeated and expanded that charge in their reviews of The Hamlet. Conrad Aiken, a major poet himself, considered MacLeish enslaved to Eliot and other modernists. Edmund Wilson wrote his savage parody, “The Omelette of A. MacLeish.” MacLeish acknowledged the influence of Pound and Eliot but defended himself from Aiken's charges. “The experience … was mine,” he wrote, “the emotion mine, the poetry mine.” But for a long season the negative voices damaged MacLeish's reputation, as did The Hamlet itself. In that work, he did not make poetic order of the chaos in his or any life.

Between 1929 and 1932, both MacLeish's life and his poetry were changing. The collapse of the stock market and the ensuing depression cut off the income from his father's estate that had supported his residence in Paris. That loss precipitated his departure from Europe. Even before returning to the United States, MacLeish began to plan a celebration of America that turned away from Europe and rested on a poetry neither lyrical nor internalized. Valuing his privacy as he did, he believed that the subject matter of poetry did not have to involve the poet's personality. The poignancy and beauty of a poem, he proposed, depended “in very large part upon its faithfulness to the earth and to moral life.” Nature and human nature provided essential ingredients for his next major venture, a poem in fifteen books entitled Conquistador (1932). That poem retold the story of Cortés's conquest of Mexico through the voice of a common Spanish soldier who spoke for all of his compatriots and with them “looked to the west.” The long poem read as an artistically stated saga of brutal heroism. The march westward across Mexico moved over terrain MacLeish had explored in 1929, land he now described with affection and precision. Their journey took Cortés and his men away from the old world toward a new world of imagined riches. Cruel conquerors though they clearly were, they were also adventurers who followed the sun and were freed from the confining civilization of Spain. Then European civilization followed them: “And the west is gone now: the west is the ocean sky.”

A critical success, Conquistador won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Delighted by that recognition, MacLeish nevertheless complained that critics had missed the point of his long poem. The text prompted most of them to see it as a drama of brave men and brave, albeit horrid, deeds. MacLeish meant it otherwise, as a metaphor: “it is a lot more about our time than most of the daily papers.” The content of the poem did make a metaphor of westering, of America as westering; and westering had been an experience of high expectations, of hope as well as adventure and danger and despoliation. MacLeish had wanted to suggest more. Still, hope and courage did have special connotations for the daily papers in 1932 and for the political campaign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in that desperate year. And in the 1930s a poetry faithful to life, MacLeish decided, could properly be a political poetry.

In order to support himself and his family, MacLeish went to work in 1932 for his Yale contemporary, Henry Luce, as an editor of Fortune, then a new monthly magazine. He wrote most of the text for many issues and all of several series later published as books by “the Editors of Fortune.” An able journalist, MacLeish gave most of his time to his new responsibilities. Nevertheless he continued to write poetry and drama. Further, his position with Fortune gave him access to men in positions of authority in government, and his assignments took him on journeys through the nation so he could see for himself the traumatic social effects of the Great Depression. His experience as a journalist reinforced his liberal views, and both his observations and his politics continually informed his poetry.

Toward the end of the presidential contest of 1932 the New Republic published MacLeish's “Invocation to the Social Muse,” a poem soaked in irony that rejected both the avid capitalism of Herbert Hoover and J. P. Morgan and the communist doctrines then gaining converts in the United States. MacLeish had earlier warned his banker friends that communism appealed to the emotions of working men and women; capitalism had therefore to identify itself with hope, or lose the world. But in this poem about the calling of the poet he refused to take sides. Here in America technological development is a mixed blessing; we have “progress and science and tractors and revolutions and / Marx and the wars more antiseptic and murderous / And music in every home: there is also Hoover.” He lampooned both capitalism (among the “handful of things a man likes … Mister Morgan is not one”) and communism (“Besides, Tovarishch, how to embrace an army?”) and concluded that for poets “There is nothing worse … than to be in style.” The poem antagonized the New Masses and other literary arbiters in the Communist Party of the United States. It would have had the same effect on many of Fortune's subscribers had they read and understood it.

So, too, with Elpenor (1933), MacLeish's Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, which took its title from the name of a companion of Odysseus whose spirit, after his death, had descended “into the gloomy shades” of Hell. Visiting Elpenor, Odysseus found Hell to be like the America of 1933, with “Millions starving for corn with / Mountains of waste corn and / Millions cold for a house with / Cities of empty houses.” In Hell were “fools booming like oracles, / Philosophers promising more / And worse to come,” and also “Kings, dukes, dictators … ranting orations from balconies,” but Elpenor had not lost his head. When Odysseus asked for directions home, Elpenor urged him not to return but to adventure further: “For myself—if you ask me—there's no way back. … There is only the way on.” The “home” that Odysseus seeks can only be found in “a new land.” That was the New Deal's way, MacLeish believed—the way of social experimentation that would reject the failed capitalism of the 1920s to build a new and more equitable nation. He had learned about the New Dealers' many plans and he praised their enactment in months to come.

Later in the year MacLeish pilloried the New Deal's enemies on the right and on the left in his Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City (1933). The title for the poem grew out of the public controversy over the Rockefellers' decision to fire Diego Rivera, the talented Communist artist whom they had hired to paint murals for their new buildings. MacLeish's poem had six parts, each separately entitled, each a fresco in words, each describing the kind of relationship that different groups of Americans had to the land. He began with “Landscape as a Nude,” praising the American land—so often the vehicle by which he expressed his feelings about democracy—as if it were a lover's body or a work of art: “She lies on her left side her flank golden: / Her hair is burned black with the strong sun. / The scent of her hair is of rain in the dust on her shoulders: / She has brown breasts and the mouth of no other country.” Then he went on to Crazy Horse, the victor over General Custer: “Do you ask why he should fight? It was his country.” In contrast to Crazy Horse and the Sioux, whose hearts were “big with the love [they] had for that country,” stood the railroad barons: “It was all prices to them: they never looked at it: / why should they look at the land? they were Empire Builders.” The true builders were not the bosses but the laborers, “all foreign-born men,” who died on the job and whose bodies have become part of the land they worked. The poem continued with scorn for Commodore Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, and Bruce Barton, the symbols of high finance and deluding advertising whom he called “the Makers Making America”: “They screwed her scrawny and gaunt with their seven-year panics: / They bought her back on their mortgages old-whore-cheap: / They fattened their bonds at her breasts till the thin blood ran from them.”

Like FDR, MacLeish welcomed the hatred of the economic royalists without hating capitalism as a system. He also scorned the “Marxian” left and its doctrines. “Background with Revolutionaries,” the last part of Frescoes, satirized those who embraced the Communist Party: “For Marx has said to us, Workers what do you need? / And Stalin has said to us, Starvers what do you need? / You need the Dialectical Materialism!” Americans were too tough for those deceptions, MacLeish concluded, as their land was tough—and anyway, “There is too much sun on the lids of my eyes to be listening.” Communist critics such as Mike Gold retaliated, calling MacLeish “an unconscious Fascist” and a bad poet. “Those Frescoes,” MacLeish wrote a friend, “seem to have gotten way under the Marxian hide.”

Distressed as he was by the wretchedness of the poor, MacLeish was tempted now and then by the Communist Party's claim to be the sole agency for social justice. For several reasons he was able to resist that temptation. As Frescoes suggested, he rejected both dialectical materialism as a theory and Stalin as a leader. The economic determinism of dialectical materialism made no allowance for the significance in history, as in life, of the individual, a significance in which MacLeish believed deeply. And Stalin, as totalitarian a dictator as were Mussolini and Hitler, had starved millions of peasants in order to advance industrialization in the Soviet Union. Like all Communist parties, the Communist Party of the United States took its orders directly from Moscow, from Stalin. That dependency was far more than MacLeish could tolerate. Answering the criticisms of the poet Rolfe Humphries, a Communist, MacLeish wrote: “I am not a Fascist. … I am as strongly opposed to a dictatorship of the Right as of the Left—more strongly in fact since a dictatorship of the Right is an actual possibility in America. … My warm distaste for fascism does not in the least cancel my equally warm distaste for those spiritually insufficient members of our society who join (or do not quite join) The Party as their prototypes joined (or did not quite join) the Masons or the Elks or the Church. And for the same reasons.”

One of those reasons was fear—fear of loneliness, fear of freedom, fear of individual life in a difficult world. That kind of fear had characterized American industrial leaders in their response to the early years of the Great Depression. “They have been fearful … bewildered and void,” MacLeish wrote Henry Luce. “They are sterile.” Like the Communists captives of their own theories, they lacked the imagination to meet the economic crisis. Those ideas provided the theme for Panic (1935), a play in verse, in which MacLeish created a protagonist, J. P. McGafferty, a businessman who had the courage to act until he lost confidence in himself and then, like others, yielded to the grip of financial ruin and committed suicide. He should have fought on, as his wife and a friend urged him to: “Trouble's no unexpected guest in these parts. The new thing's not the trouble. … It's you. It's your kind waiting for the great disaster.” The real hero of the play was “the free man's choosing of the free man's journey,” for “it's always one man makes a world.”

When MacLeish later rewrote Panic as a radio play, he identified his message of courage explicitly with Franklin Roosevelt. But when Panic played in New York in 1935, that meaning was lost on an audience irritated by MacLeish's criticism of big business. The play was to run only two nights, but the Communist Party sponsored a third performance followed by a symposium in which three party intellectuals berated MacLeish for not taking as his theme the inevitable doom of capitalism. But he never intended to write a Communist tract. His real failure was literary. The characters in the play lacked definition either as people or as symbols, and the plot lacked drama.

In Public Speech (1936) his poetry reached the level of excellence he wanted to get across the political truths he cherished. The poem “Pole Star” defined love as the only remaining light guiding men and women, for “Liberty and pride and hope— / Every guide-mark of the mind / That led our blindness once has vanished.” There was no justice where tyrants ruled; the lamp of liberty had burned out. “The German Girls! The German Girls!” uses irony to single out the Nazis as the bringers of darkness:

Are we familiar with the mounted men!—
The grocery lot with the loud talk in restaurants,
Smellers of delicatessen, ex-cops,
Barbers, fruit-sellers, sewers of underwear, shop-keepers,
Those with fat rumps foolish in uniforms. …

Both the Nazis and the Communists threatened democracy. “The real issue,” MacLeish wrote Carl Sandburg in 1936, “is whether or not we believe in the people.” Both poets did. “No revolution,” MacLeish continued, “will succeed in America which professes to take the government away from the people and create the kind of cabinet tyranny which we see now in its intrigues and its jealousies in Russia in this fantastic trial”—a reference to Stalin's rigged trials of his Trotskyite opponents, so recently his collaborators, within the Communist Party. “You and I,” MacLeish went on, “have a considerable responsibility. We are poets but we are also men able to live in the world. We cannot escape our duties as political animals.” Sandburg had fulfilled his duty with his recent poetry and the first volumes of his adoring biography of Abraham Lincoln. Sandburg's work, a “basis for political action,” made the issue of democracy clear. Both poets had now to act “politically to drive this issue into the forefront of the sensitive minds of all men. … We must now become pamphleteers, propagandists.”

In referring to “the people” and “democracy,” MacLeish was using the vocabulary of the liberalism of the time. Those abstractions informed his political actions, poetry, and speeches. Then and later his letters and publications would refer to things that stirred his democratic feelings, but they suggested not so much a program as a political position and its surrounding state of mind. MacLeish believed in Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He praised some New Deal programs, especially those that involved refinancing farmers' mortgages, providing federal support for needy artists, and devising national codes for industrial cooperation between management and labor. He shared the view of those New Dealers who recognized the economic interdependence of capital, labor, and agriculture, and of all industrialized nations. But those specific matters did not inspire his poetry or provide it with useful metaphors. In his poetry, he embodied his beliefs in individuals, especially Jefferson and Lincoln, not as they may really have been in history but as their names evoked American democratic values. In MacLeish's usage Jefferson represents the western reach of free land, the individual liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, and representative democracy. Lincoln stands for the universal freedom of men and women and of their labor, the mystical meaning of the United States as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and the identification of America with opportunity and brotherhood. By implication, the New Deal contained those values. Nazism and communism explicitly denied them.

In 1937 fascism and communism clashed in the civil war in Spain. As MacLeish saw it, that war arose from “an inexcusable and unjustifiable act of aggression by reactionary forces against a popular government.” Franco and his fellow fascists, the aggressors, received vital material assistance from Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy. In retaliation, the Soviet Union provided aid to the Spanish Loyalists. Like many of the Loyalists themselves, MacLeish underestimated the subversive intentions of both the Spanish and Soviet communists. He cared more about the Loyalist cause than about the company he kept in supporting it. As part of that support, he helped to found Contemporary Historians, Inc., a corporation that raised funds to make and distribute The Spanish Earth, a film about the war as seen from a Loyalist perspective.

But MacLeish was not fooled by the revised Communist Party doctrine that called for a “popular front” of cooperation with socialists and liberals to fight fascism. To be sure, he contributed to the New Masses, a Communist journal, but on his own terms which included forthright criticism of both the magazine and the party. He also joined the pro-Loyalist League of American Writers, a group of prominent literary folk that included some members of the Communist Party. “The man who refuses to defend his convictions,” he told a congress of the League, “for fear that he may defend them in the wrong company, has no convictions.” That statement began his reply to those, the FBI included, who considered him a “fellow traveller.” He continued to urge others to fight for their beliefs in the poem “Speech to the Scholars,” delivered at the Columbia Phi Beta Kappa exercises. Like the artists who held that the search for beauty and for truth precluded politics in art, many scholars believed in a deliberate political neutrality. “I say the guns are in your house,” MacLeish told them. “Arise O scholars from your peace! Arise! Enlist! Take arms and fight!”

In writing as he did, MacLeish explained to Walter Lippmann, he interpreted the conflict between fascism and communism as “superficial and temporary in comparison with the profound conflict between the conception of intellectual and moral freedom on the one side and on the other, the conception of the totalitarian state.” That insight positioned MacLeish far in advance of most American intellectuals. He and his like-minded literary friends also displayed extraordinary courage in openly opposing fascism at a time when the establishment in the United States and much of western Europe, fearful of communism and anxious to preserve even a superficial and uneasy peace, refused to acknowledge the danger and the barbarity of Hitler. MacLeish risked offending not only his Ivy League acquaintances but some of the poets—Yeats and Frost, for example—whose approbation he craved.

In 1937 MacLeish completed The Fall of the City, the first play in verse ever produced for radio; it was a work of propaganda in the service of freedom. “The city of masterless men,” said the prophecy at the start of the play, “will take a master.” An orator addressed the crowd. Resist, he recommended in the spirit of an apolitical idealist, not with spears but with scorn; reason and truth would prevail without recourse to arms. A messenger, a defeatist, then warned of the strength of the approaching conqueror. A general tried to fire up the timorous crowd: “There's nothing in this world worse … than doing the Strong Man's will! The free will fight for their freedom. … You can stand on the stairs and meet him! You can hold in the dark of a hall! You can die!—or your children will crawl for it.” But overcome by fear, the citizens concluded that the city was doomed, that “Freedom's for fools: Force is the certainty! … Men must be ruled.” So the city fell to the conqueror who marched in, huge in his armor. But his visor fell open, revealing emptiness: “The helmet is hollow! … The armor is empty.” The citizens, lying silent on the pavement, saw nothing: “They wish to be free of their freedom: released of their liberty.” Their voices roared: “The city of masterless men has found a master. The city has fallen.” As a work of art the play was wanting, but as a tract for the time it was germane. In a new preface, MacLeish later wrote: “Too many nations had walked away from freedom … and accepted tyranny in its place.”

Tyranny rode to power on the destruction of the innocent, but too many decent people could not conceive of the brutality of fascism. That was the message of MacLeish's Air Raid (1938), another radio drama in verse, inspired by Picasso's Guernica. Like that painting, it described the “new and unspeakable horror of war.” The play opened on an unidentified town, “very quiet and orderly,” the men working in the surrounding fields, the women busy with laundry and gossip, scoffing at their men's talk of war. They ignored a siren that warned of an airplane circling overhead; they paid no heed to a policeman urging them to take cover. Perhaps the plane was coming, one old woman said: “But if it is / It's not for housewives in this town they're coming. / They're after the generals … the cabinet ministers … the square.” The policeman tried again: “This enemy kills women.” The women laughed, but a formation of planes banked to attack. Still incredulous, the women called: “Show it our softness! … Show it our womanhood!” Then curtain, with “the shrieking voices … the shattering noise of guns … the diminishing drone of the planes.”

MacLeish was using a powerful and popular medium, radio, to issue a warning unwelcome to his American audience. In 1938 he also used another powerful medium, photography, to respond to declining popular support for the New Deal and its ideals. The economic recession of 1937-38 shook confidence in New Deal policies. Roosevelt largely failed in his efforts to help liberal Democrats defeat their conservative opponents in party primaries in 1938, and that year the Republicans gained enough seats in Congress to form, with conservative Democrats, a coalition that blocked progressive legislation. But MacLeish spoke from the left in the sparse text he wrote for Land of the Free (1938)—his “sound track,” he called it—that accompanied photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency created to assist displaced and impoverished farm families. The book anticipated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans: both works used the previously little explored medium of photography to tell a story and not just illustrate it; both focused on the powerless and dispossessed. In his volume, MacLeish associated freedom with the unspoiled land and the spirit of westering Americans of an earlier era. He praised their individualism, contrasted their democratic condition to the indignity of the itinerant farmers and embattled labor organizers of his own time, and by implication referred to the New Deal as the vehicle for restoring the freedom and equality Lincoln had celebrated.

MacLeish returned to those themes in America Was Promises (1939): “America was promises—to whom? / Jefferson knew: / Declared it before God and before history: / … The promises were Man's: the land was his— / Man endowed by his Creator: / Earnest in love: perfectible by reason: / Just and perceiving justice.” The promises to man were land and liberty, humanity, self-respect and common decency. But “The Aristocracy of Wealth and Talents” also grabbed for the promise of America. So the people had to reach to control their own destiny, for: “unless we take them for ourselves / Others will take them. … America is promises to / Take!”

Those domestic themes are another version of the clash MacLeish described between democracy and authoritarianism in Europe. His political poetry called upon Americans to protect freedom both at home and abroad. As his critics contended, his political verse lacked the intimacy, the tenderness, the melodiousness of his lyric poetry. But early and late, as he had said in his youth, he was expressing his particular self; therefore, in the late 1930s, he wrote of his sense of urgency about the perils confronting the nation. His political poetry was action, and it needed a vocabulary and cadence different from those required by intimacy. The nature of MacLeish's preoccupations had changed, and with it, so had his techniques.

MacLeish was also changing some aspects of his life. Uncomfortable with the politics of Henry Luce's publications, he resigned from Fortune and took a part-time position at Harvard as curator of the Nieman Foundation, a program for promising young journalists. But that was a way station. While registering his usual qualms about any responsibility that would interfere with his writing, in 1939 he accepted appointment as the librarian of Congress. He had moved at last directly into Franklin Roosevelt's capacious political tent. The appointment aroused predictable opposition from professional librarians, who wanted one of their own in charge of the nation's most important library; from the Communist Party, long inimical to MacLeish; and from conservative congressmen who considered his political opinions dangerous and un-American. The librarians were wrong. MacLeish proved to be a tactful, innovative, successful administrator. But MacLeish's ideological opponents were correct in their fears. His position enhanced his public stature and provided a platform from which he could broadcast his political messages with increased effect.

Roosevelt had not talked with MacLeish about world affairs, but he put him in a place from which he could reach a larger audience just in time. With the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939, Hitler and Stalin joined in an alliance of convenience to divide Poland between them. The ensuing invasion of Poland, which Britain and France had promised to defend, marked the start of World War II and exposed the Nazis and Communists as common aggressors and common enemies of freedom. When MacLeish arrived in Washington, few of Roosevelt's political family were sufficiently articulate and foresighted to challenge the isolationist mood of the nation, to explain that the war in Europe involved American interests, to persuade their fellow citizens that Hitler could not be defeated unless Americans sided with his victims. MacLeish joined Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, and Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, in taking that message to the country. He had been doing so for several years. Now he continued particularly to address artists and scholars, many of whom still regarded World War I as a disaster, war in any cause as an ultimate horror, and the European conflict as no business of the United States.

MacLeish believed that this self-deluding position could not be sustained after the Nazis overran much of western Europe in the spring of 1940. In June France fell, and England fought alone against the Nazis. The civilization of the West, built over two millennia, stood close to a new dark age. Two months earlier, MacLeish had addressed “The Irresponsibles,” the intellectuals still committed to a deliberate neutrality. They had a responsibility, he asserted, to defend “the common inherited culture of the West” by which they had lived, a culture now “attacked in other countries with a stated … purpose to destroy.” In Germany the use of force “in the name of force alone” was destroying the “self-respect and … dignity of individual life without which the existence of art and learning is inconceivable.” The revolution of Nazism was “a revolution of negatives … of despair … created out of disorder by terror of disorder; … a revolution of gangs … against … the rule of moral law … of intellectual truth. … Caliban in the miserable and besotted swamp is the symbol of this revolution.” The beneficiaries of democracy now had the duty to fight back.

MacLeish had also indicted the Nazis for their racial theories. Hitler's crimes against Jews helped MacLeish outgrow the anti-Semitism inculcated at Hotchkiss and at Yale. In 1943 his Colloquy for the States added ethnic pluralism to his roster of democratic values. There was talk “on the east wind,” the poem said, about how Americans married: “We marry Irish girls, … Spaniards with the evening eyes, … golden Swedes, … Jews for remembrance. … We're mixed people.” Americans were unlike the “blood we left behind … the blood afraid of change … afraid of strangers” that stayed home “and married their … cousins who looked like their mother.” Race did not bother Americans, MacLeish said in a speech in 1940: “They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People … the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.”

In the great and continuing debate of 1940-41 between those who urged assistance to the British and those who advocated American isolation, MacLeish made it his task to remind Americans that the Nazis attacked not with planes or tanks alone “but with violence of belief.” The enemies of liberty, he said in one speech, confused democracy with a way of owning property or a way of doing business. That was not what Jefferson had thought democracy meant, or what John Adams thought, “or those who took it westward.” They meant “the simple man's belief in liberty of mind and spirit.” So MacLeish condemned the isolationists, particularly their organization, America First. The most ardent voices of that group included the reactionary Chicago Tribune, the aviator and popular hero Charles Lindbergh, who had accepted a Nazi decoration, and his wife, the author Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who praised fascism as an irresistible “wave of the future.” That famous woman, MacLeish said, assured us “in a beautiful and cadenced prose that democracy is dead in every country,” and she accepted instead the “alternatives of terror and despair.” She was wrong. Americans “knew which way to take to reach tomorrow”—the way of democracy and freedom.

MacLeish had become a leading propagandist for democracy before the president made his role official in the fall of 1941 by appointing him director of the newly established Office of Facts and Figures (OFF). MacLeish took that position without salary and in addition to his responsibilities at the Library of Congress. From the outset he was crippled in his task. Roosevelt, remembering the hyperbolic propaganda of World War I, had created OFF only under pressure from his wife Eleanor and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York. Even then the president defined the purpose of the agency narrowly: “to disseminate … factual information on the defense effort and to facilitate a widespread understanding of the status and progress of that effort.” He gave OFF no authority to extract information from other governmental agencies. Consequently MacLeish, committed as an individual to increasing American participation in the war against Hitler, found himself forced as a bureaucrat to operate within the restrictions of his mandate, which called for data, not passion. He said as much announcing a “strategy of truth.” “Democratic government,” he added, “is more concerned with the provision of information to the people than it is with the communication of dreams and aspirations.” On the basis of the facts, the people would judge.

But MacLeish was a man of dreams, and OFF could not produce the facts. As the United States moved closer and closer to war in the Atlantic, federal defense agencies controlled information so as not to release details about shortages or plans for military and naval deployment. Though MacLeish could not change that policy, the press blamed OFF for censorship. Uninformed himself about military matters, MacLeish was as surprised as other Americans by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the next months, as American, British, and Russian forces suffered severe defeats, the War and Navy departments refused to release the depressing facts about losses, facts that would have helped the enemy. OFF continued largely to produce pamphlets about the war effort. MacLeish's staff urged him to use the agency to dramatize the war, but the radio programs OFF then generated—one of them about FDR—struck Republicans in Congress as partisan propaganda.

Believing, as he put it, in “human liberty and … the moral order of the world,” MacLeish held that the United States was defending “not the American continent” but “the American idea and the world in which the American idea can live.” That was a difficult conception to get across to the public either by the release of information or the dramatization of FDR. At OFF MacLeish was simply playing the wrong part.

In the spring of 1942 Roosevelt abolished the agency and replaced it with the Office of War Information (OWI) under the journalist Elmer Davis with a larger, though still restricted, authority. MacLeish remained as one of several men on Davis's advisory board. But MacLeish soon became restless with OWI's policy—even though the policy was Roosevelt's—of reporting information rather than promoting a Wilsonian postwar internationalism. OWI, he wrote Davis, should “accept responsibility for the job of putting before the people … the principal issues which must be decided, in a form which will excite and encourage discussion.” Others in the agency, Davis included, decided that OWI should maintain a “policy of objectivity,” present the facts, and not “make policy.” MacLeish, who disagreed “emphatically,” soon resigned.

He was ready also to leave the Library of Congress, as he told Roosevelt; but as soon as the president accepted his resignation in November 1944 he at once appointed MacLeish assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs. In that position MacLeish, the only liberal in the group of new State Department officials FDR named, was to direct public relations on behalf of the United Nations, which was not yet officially created but anticipated by the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. As the president knew, MacLeish had been speaking in public about the nature of the postwar peace. He rejected the idea of a war for empire—what Henry Luce called the “American Century.” Instead, he associated himself with the “Century of the Common Man,” which he defined as “the long democratic revolution of which Henry Wallace has so movingly spoken.” The war, MacLeish also said, “must be a war … for the freedom of mankind, and the peace must be a peace for liberty in fact.” The nation and the world owed that debt to “The Young Dead Soldiers,” who address us from their graves: “We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. / We were young. … We have died. Remember us.”

To help to build that monument, MacLeish, assisted by Adlai Stevenson, publicized the workings of the San Francisco Conference that founded the United Nations. He participated in the drafting of the preamble of the UN charter and later in writing the charter for the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). But this activity could not obscure one very important loss: when Franklin Roosevelt died in April 1945, MacLeish, like thousands of other Americans, mourned the revered leader. MacLeish memorialized FDR quietly in one stanza of “Actfive.” It was the title poem of a short book of poetry which, MacLeish wrote, “sought to interpret the events of the war as an expression of the heroic struggle of humanity to ‘endure and live.’” He portrayed Roosevelt as he had seen him at the end of his days: “The responsible man, death's hand upon his shoulder, / Knowing well the liars may prevail / … tired tired tired to the heart,” nevertheless “Does what must be done: dies in his chair / Fagged out, worn down, sick / With the weight of his own bones, the task finished, / The war won, the victory assured, / The glory left behind him for the others.”

For MacLeish by 1948 there was nothing of glory in the failure of liberty in much of the world, in the collapse of the wartime alliance, in the inception of the Cold War. In spite of the UN, Wilsonian internationalism had yielded to rival Soviet and American imperialisms. As MacLeish saw it, the Cold War threatened freedom everywhere. No apologist either for the Soviet Union or for communism, he nevertheless argued that American policy supported governments abroad only because they opposed the Russians, and that often assistance extended in the name of freedom was being used to buttress oppressive and undemocratic regimes. Worse, fear of communism lent credibility to American demagogues who exploited that fear for personal and partisan ends, and in so doing violated the liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment. MacLeish's liberal vision of a free people under a just government—of a world of such peoples and governments—was under heavy assault.

In those unsettling times MacLeish, as always, turned to poetry—“the process of reducing to a form at once sensuous and intelligible the fragmentary, reluctant, and inarticulate experience of man … the one known process, by which men present to themselves an image of their lives and so possess them.” His wartime and early postwar poetry were tinged with melancholy, as the poems in Actfive (1948) attested. “Voyage West” offered a melodious but bittersweet commentary on a love affair that had ended, and “Brave New World” expressed anger as well as disappointment: “Freedom that was a thing to use / They've made a thing to save / And staked it in and fenced it round / Like a dead man's grave.”

“Freedom,” MacLeish wrote Henry Luce, “is not something you have: it is something you do.” Yet the Luce magazines, MacLeish continued in another letter, had been “largely silent on the great critical issues within the United States affecting the realization of this dream of responsible individual freedom—the issues of freedom of the mind and freedom of the press and freedom of education which are now not only urgent but dangerous—dangerous to speak out about: dangerous to be silent about.” Speaking out about freedom was the work of poetry. So MacLeish dedicated “That Black Day” to the memory of Laurence Duggan, a former State Department officer who had been vilified just hours after his death by two members of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Representatives Karl Mundt and Richard Nixon: “God help that country where informers thrive! / Where slander flourishes and lies contrive / To kill by whispers! Where men lie to live!”

“It is truly to testify we are here—to bear witness—those of us who are artists,” MacLeish wrote a friend. And he continued to bear witness while Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard, a position he accepted in 1949. He openly attacked Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose name came to connote the whole atmosphere of deliberate political slander that Mundt and Nixon and HUAC had contrived. In 1952 MacLeish naturally supported his good friend Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois and the Democratic presidential candidate, who had the courage to condemn McCarthy and his vile accusations. Replying to Stevenson's invitation to help draft a speech for delivery to the American Legion, MacLeish discussed the “ideal of patriotism.” That ideal, he pointed out, holds the Legion together but “it is also the mask behind which some of the most dangerous and evil influences of our day conceal themselves—in the Legion and outside it.” Patriotism was love of country but not just of the land: “No, of the people … their accomplishments, their endurance, their hopes.” Stevenson's campaign, as MacLeish knew, spoke to the “critical issue of individual freedom in a frightened world.”

When Stevenson ran again in 1956, McCarthyism had spent most of its force, but now MacLeish called for an attack on the complacency of Americans and the “flatulent fat-headedness in Washington.” “What is at stake,” he wrote Stevenson, “is our greatness as a people.” Communism was “as evil as ever” and the Soviet Union “enormously powerful” but communism had obsessed Americans too long. They should begin “to think in terms of the great world revolution which is sweeping across Asia and will inevitably reach every ‘backward’ area,” a revolution with “infinite possibilities for human good” and human hurt. “We cannot live defensively,” MacLeish continued. “In a time of enormous change, a great nation … must shape the change.” That was the counsel of a liberal who had retained his ideals and moved with the times. So had Stevenson. He again lost the election but his foresightedness and inspiration sustained MacLeish's hopes.

Shed of his melancholy, MacLeish brought his refreshed convictions to his poetry and essays. In 1955 he defined his liberalism more clearly than ever in a critique of Walter Lippmann's The Public Philosophy. Lippmann argued, in MacLeish's paraphrase, that since 1917 in western countries “there had been too much democracy and … too little government.” The alternative, so Lippmann wrote, demanded “popular assent to radical measures which will restore government strong enough to govern.” Such a government would be strong enough “to resist the encroachment of assemblies and of mass opinion and strong enough to guarantee private liberty against the pressure of the masses.” Those radical measures required democratic societies to accept the values of Natural Law, which would free government from subservience to mass opinion. MacLeish considered that proposal elitist, the antithesis of “the idea of the greatest possible individual freedom to which we have been committed … since the end of the eighteenth century.” In contrast to Lippmann, he believed it had been essential to involve the people “in the determination of the great issue of war or peace” in 1917 and again in 1941. “Men will die for peace and freedom but not for the terms of a treaty,” MacLeish wrote, “and it was the conviction of my generation in the war of its youth and the war of its middle age that the American government and the governments of the free world had made some progress toward a more effective democracy by the recognition of that fact.”

Lippmann erred especially, MacLeish continued, in his conception of freedom. In The Public Philosophy he was concerned with “modern men who find a freedom from constraints of the ancestral order an intolerable loss of guidance and support,” who find that “the burden of freedom is too great an anxiety.” True freedom for Lippmann was “founded on the postulate that there was a universal order on which all reasonable men were agreed: within that public agreement … it was safe to permit … dissent.” That argument rejected MacLeish's “basic philosophy of liberalism—the belief in the liberation of the individual human spirit to find its own way to … truth.” Liberal democracy, MacLeish held, rested on the “proposition that men may shape their own destiny and are capable of realizing their dreams of the good life.” Particular generations, dreading loneliness, might retreat “into the warmth … and protection of conformity as millions in Europe and Asia have done in our time,” but the human journey had not turned back. So the arts attested: “In all the modern arts of words, in modern painting, in modern music, a common impulse is at work.” That impulse, which MacLeish called “almost a compulsion” was “to penetrate the undiscovered country of the individual human consciousness, the human self.” Safety and security lay not in a renunciation of individual freedom but in the achievement of individuality, in “the deeper reality of the world within.” So for MacLeish the mission of the arts defined the politics of freedom. His poetry and his liberalism remained a whole.

MacLeish's art and his politics alike expressed his faith in man, a faith hardened over the years. He acknowledged the injustice of the times and affirmed the indispensability of love in J. B. (1958), his most beautiful and most successful play in verse. It was his reworking in modern terms of the Book of Job. In the prologue, two circus vendors, Nickles and Mr. Zuss, introduced the themes of the play. Job, Mr. Zuss says, challenged God, demanded justice of God. That was ridiculous, Nickles replies. God has killed Job's sons and daughters, stolen his livestock, left him “stricken on a dung heap,” all for no reason. Nickles sings: “If God is God He is not good, / If God is good he is not God.” Millions of mankind have known injustice, he says, millions were slaughtered “For walking around in the wrong skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids: / Sleeping the wrong night wrong city—London, Dresden, Hiroshima.” The play begins. J. B., who starts off as a prosperous and grateful man who believes that God is just, proceeds to lose his children in various accidents and to lose his wealth; finally his wife Sarah leaves him because he persists in believing that “God is just … the fault is mine.” His guilt is misplaced, as several comforters show him. Innocence is irrelevant; suffering, random. Sarah returns when J. B. learns, as she had, the futility of guilt, the futility of challenging God or expecting justice. “You wanted justice,” Sarah says, “and there was none— / Only love.” J. B. replies that God “does not love. He / Is.” Sarah: “But we do. That's the wonder.” And with love, they accept their place in the universe.

“J. B.'s recognition,” MacLeish wrote the director of the play, “is a recognition not only of the insignificance of his human place but of the significance of that insignificance. He is at least a man. It is his ‘integrity’ as a man (Job's word) that he has been struggling for.” J. B. must struggle “to accept life again, which means … to accept love, to risk himself again in love.” In J. B. MacLeish, as ever, dealt with human nature, and also, as ever, he saw the social and political implications of his message. “It is part of the essential naivety of the successful American business man,” he wrote the editor of the New York Times, “to believe that something in the order of things justifies his having what he has. Rich men in my father's generation were candid about this to the point of embarrassment.”

MacLeish had reached the age when the friends he loved were dying one after another. Mark Van Doren, Ernest Hemingway, Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson—his generation of artists, his generation of liberals was disappearing. He eulogized Mrs. Roosevelt in 1962: “To most of us, the world … has become an abstraction … an economic mechanism such as the Marxists still believe they have discovered; the Absurdity which contemporary literary fashion plays with; the hard-headed Reality which only Republicans can ever know; the ultimate Equation which science will someday write. To Mrs. Roosevelt the world was never an abstraction. It was human.” He could just as well have been describing himself.

MacLeish turned seventy in that same year. During the next two decades he carried on much as he had before. He accepted old age with good humor: “Your eyes change. / Your handwriting changes. / You can't read what you once wrote. / Even your own thoughts sound wrong to you, / something some old idiot has misquoted.” The Vietnam War appalled him. Three names were not to be spoken, he wrote in “National Security.” The first was Cambodia, the second Laos, and “The third is Vietnam, / a dried child / mailed to its mother / by B-52s / in a cellophane envelope.” Those names, hidden in a secret room, refuse concealment. They bleed, and their blood runs “under the secret / door and down / the classified stair.” There is so much blood that “the country is steeped in it.”

And corrupted by it, as evidenced alike by Richard Nixon and those who engaged in violent protest against both the government and the war. Like explicit sex in literature, MacLeish complained, revolution in politics had become a cause: “What was once a means—often a noble means—to attain an essential human end has become a fad, an intellectual obsession. Act first and find out later why you acted.” For the counterculture, even individual freedom had become a “cause” and “turned to irresponsibility.” “No society,” MacLeish concluded, still the liberal, “can live without intellectual and moral order, and the fact that order decays with time like everything else merely means that order must be recreated with time. But order cannot be recreated by the pursuit of causes however grandiose and whatever they call themselves. … Only justice and the love of man can produce an order humanity will accept.”

Justice, the love of man, and liberty—these were sacred to MacLeish. His critique of Lippmann and his J. B. constituted two of three late statements of his creed. Fittingly, the third late statement comes in his essay “The Venetian Grave,” a defense of the award of the Bollingen Prize for poetry, the very first award of that prize, to Ezra Pound. Pound was certainly no friend to MacLeish: he had continually criticized MacLeish's poetry and his politics; and he had never thanked MacLeish for leading the successful effort to have him released from the insane asylum in which the federal government had confined him for making radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini during World War II. But Pound had been a great poet. MacLeish agreed that Pound had apparently embraced fascism, but that fascist ranter, he argued, that “fabricated man,” was Pound's own creation. Now, with the Vietnam War, fraud had become a form of government. “Fraud and government may exist together,” MacLeish proposed, “but not fraud and art.” And Pound “was unarguably a poet.” When Pound was tried for treason, his lawyer had chosen not to contest the case on the basis of the First Amendment but instead had entered a plea of guilty by reason of insanity. Though that plea prevailed, MacLeish considered it “wrong in law.” Some twenty years later, he noted, Ramsay Clark, a former attorney general of the United States, had attacked American policy while in Hanoi, the capital of an enemy country. Yet Clark was not tried or even arrested. “And for the good and sufficient reason,” MacLeish went on, “that the right to dissent, the right to criticize, had by then been exercised in time of war by so large a majority of the American people that if wartime criticism was treason, the Republic itself would have had to be indicted.”

Pound, MacLeish continued, had admired the fascist government of Italy and had often been virulently anti-Semitic. But he thought of himself as an oldtime Jeffersonian, “and though his notions … would have astonished Mr. Jefferson, … there is no reason to doubt that he honestly held them.” As MacLeish saw him, Pound was guilty only of “that peculiar naiveté … of intellectuals: that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience.” He was widely read “but his experience of the world was thin,” and therefore he totally misread his own times. Yet he was “the principal inventor of modern poetry,” a poetry “committed to the human world, to the historical world, the moral world,” and also the author of the Cantos, “the nearest thing we have, either in prose or verse, to a moral history of our tragic age … that descent, not into Dante's hell, but into ours.” Pound was deluded but not insane; he was “neither dilettante nor traitor but … a foolish and unhappy man … who was a … master poet.” And so MacLeish stitched together freedom of speech, political dissent, the morality of art, and the significance of all three in his own tragic era.

He had had his say with courage, with compassion, with beauty. Even as death approached his liberalism was undaunted, and the metaphors of his best poetry still informed his verse: “Only the old know time. … It frightens them. / Time to the old is world, is will, / turning world, unswerving will, / interval / until.”